Please join us for the fourth webinar in GSOLE's 2026-2027 series, led by Judy Schaffer: 

"Reading Toward Judgment: Making Professional Reasoning Visible in Online Instruction"

In online courses, we have several ways to tell whether students have completed an assigned reading. They may annotate a text, respond to a discussion question, or submit a written response. These activities give us something to see. What they do not always reveal is how students made sense of the text or how they drew on it in the thinking that followed.

This webinar explores the relationship between reading and judgment. Research on disciplinary literacy has shown that experts read texts in ways that reflect how knowledge is developed and used within their fields. That raises an important question for online instruction: How do we help learners read professional and disciplinary texts in ways that support the judgments they will eventually need to make?

Teacher education provides one example. Teacher candidates spend considerable time reading curriculum materials, standards, lesson plans, and other professional texts. They may annotate a lesson or identify an instructional move. That work is valuable, especially for novices who are learning what to notice. But identifying something in a lesson is not the same as understanding why it is there or what it suggests about instruction. Candidates also need opportunities to consider what matters in a text and how their interpretation might shape an instructional decision.

During the webinar, participants will examine examples of common online reading activities and consider what those activities actually allow instructors to see about student thinking. We will look at how a familiar reading assignment can be revised so that students are asked not only to respond to a text, but to interpret it and use it in the thinking that follows. Participants will also have an opportunity to consider one reading activity from their own teaching and identify what they need students to be able to do because they read the text.

Generative AI makes these questions even more pressing. Emerging research has begun examining what students do when they use GenAI while reading, including how they monitor understanding, evaluate information, and compare AI-generated responses with original sources. We will use GenAI as one example for thinking about what happens when a tool can produce the kind of response an assignment once asked students to produce.

If a tool can summarize a text or generate a response, what intellectual work did we intend for the student to do?

Participants Will:

• Examine how reading supports disciplinary and professional judgment.
• Distinguish between completing a reading activity and using a text to inform reasoning or decision-making.
• Consider what their current online reading activities actually ask students to do with a text.
• Revise an existing reading activity to better connect reading with subsequent thinking or decision-making.
• Consider how generative AI changes what instructors may need students to demonstrate about their reading.

Registration Information:

• Free for GSOLE members
• $15 for non-members 
• Become a member! ($30 regular; $20 students/contingent)