Enhancing Writing Through Visualization

Jerry Johns

Jerry L. Johns, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at Northern Illinois University, served as president of International Reading Association during 2002-2003. He has been recognized as a distinguished professor, writer, and outstanding teacher educator. He taught students from kindergarten through college and now serves as a consultant and speaker to schools and professional organizations.

Jerry is a past president of Illinois Reading Council, College Reading Association, and Northern Illinois Reading Council. He has received recognition for outstanding service to each of these professional organizations and is a member of the Illinois Reading Council Hall of Fame. Jerry has served on numerous committees of the International Reading Association and was a member of the Board of Directors. He has also received the Outstanding Teacher Educator in Reading award from the International Reading Association, the Champion of Children Award from the HOSTS corporation, and the Laureate Award from the College Reading Association (CRA) for significant contributions to CRA and the field of reading and reading instruction.

Jerry has been invited to consult, conduct workshops, and make presentations for teachers and professional groups throughout the United States and in seven countries. He has also prepared over twenty books and related resources that have been useful to a diverse group of educators. His Basic Reading Inventory is widely used in undergraduate and graduate classes, as well as by practicing teachers. Jerry recently coauthored the fourth edition of Improving Reading: Strategies and Resources. Other recent titles include the third edition of Fluency: Strategies & Assessments, Comprehension and Vocabulary Strategies for the Elementary Grades, Reading and Learning Strategies: Middle Grades through High School, and Strategies for Content Area Learning, and Visualization: Using Mental Images to Strengthen Comprehension.

Linda Zeigler

Linda L. Zeigler is currently an elementary principal at Quinter Elementary for Quinter Public Schools. She brings twenty-five years of teaching experience in public schools. Linda taught prereading to preschoolers and reading to kindergarten through sixth-grade students. As an adjunct faculty member for Fort Hays State University (FHSU) in Hays, Kansas, she taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in reading.

Linda has presented at state, regional, and international reading conferences. She has helped a number of schools as a reading consultant and has presented numerous reading inservices in several states. She serves on the editorial board for the Kansas Reading Journal.

Linda has teamed on state-level committees to help advance reading assessment and instruction in the state of Kansas. She has worked with Jerry Johns to develop One Reader at a Time, which rates a student's reading performance using rubrics and continuums. This management notebook and computer program uses the Basic Reading Inventory as the assessment tool to find each student's strengths and areas of concern. Research using this reading inventory and the analysis program demonstrated the need for students to be intentionally taught to use the strategy of visualization, which planted the seeds for Visualization: Using Mental Images to Strengthen Comprehension. Enhancing Writing through Visualization, is a result of discovering how visualization builds a valuable reading/writing connection to improve literacy skills.

Virginia R Beesley

Virginia R. Beesley, high school English teacher at Quinter High School and adjunct faculty member for Colby Community College, is in her thirteenth year of teaching high school English. During those thirteen years, she has also taught Advanced Placement and middle school classes, directed all-school plays, and coached forensics. This year she is teaching a high school reading class for the first time.

Virginia is second vice president of the governing board of the Kansas Association of Teachers of English (KATE), a new member of the William Allen White Award Selection Committee, and a teacher consultant for the Flint Hills Writing Project. As a presenter at the KATE Annual Conference, the Fort Hays State University Fall English Conference, and a number of school in-services throughout western Kansas, Virginia has shared her experiences with teaching poetry, Shakespeare, vocabulary, and writing. Virginia credits her interest in visualization to a number of long conversations with Linda about students' struggles with literacy, beginning when Linda was her son's second-grade teacher and spanning the years since. She started writing about visualization as a writing strategy when she was a teaching fellow with the Flint Hills Writing Project in 2003. Her article on that subject was published in 2004 in the Kansas English Journal.