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Two years ago, legislators in my home state of South Carolina started to enforce mandates that required teachers to be trained to support students with various reading disabilities. Legislators provided modules to every teacher, whether they were special or general education. It was a powerful prompt to adjust our curriculum to fit the needs of all students in special education.
We were also facing parents’ concerns that students with characteristics of dyslexia weren’t getting the help they needed in school, so it was a pain point we needed to target. My district had used an intervention program by Fountas and Pinnell with great success, but when we analyzed it, we found that it didn’t provide a multisensory approach that included decoding and phonics, typical tripping points for students with dyslexia. We had students in middle school who still lacked the skills and strategies generally acquired in elementary school. Some students who never qualified for special education (but were considered at-risk) spent all or most of their time in some form of intervention. Something wasn’t working.
After two years of hard work and training, we were thrilled to see our most recent state score results: our 75 third-graders in special education ranked number one in the state of South Carolina, while our fourth- and fifth-graders in special education were all in the top 5% in the state. Here’s the work we did to achieve those results.
Adopting a multisensory approach
We started the change to our curriculum by offering teachers intensive training on the Orton-Gillingham method: an explicit, multisensory approach to teaching students with reading disabilities how to read and write.
As the assistant superintendent of instruction, I strategized with my department, aiming to provide an alternative option to students who weren’t succeeding with a traditional literacy and reading program. Our district is one of the lowest-funded districts in the state, so we had to be very careful about where we were using funds. Sometimes buying a program you think will work doesn’t turn out to be effective, and it seems like such a waste. We needed a program that our teachers would buy into willingly and that would appeal to all students in special education.
We eventually found Reading Horizons Discovery, which focuses on an explicit, multisensory approach to both decoding and phonemic awareness.
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