posted 3/23/2009

Effectively supporting students with dyslexia

Teachers need to know more about dyslexia and how to teach students

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/editorialsopinion/2008883279_edita19dyslexia.htm

Supporting students with dyslexia

 Teachers need to know more about dyslexia and how to teach students who struggle with this particular learning challenge. The Washington state Legislature is moving toward a solution.


A FOUR-YEAR-OLD pilot program training teachers to work with dyslexic children has been successful enough to be broaden statewide.

The Senate passed legislation promoting such training. The bill now moves to the House.

Twenty percent of the nation is dyslexic. Research about dyslexia is new enough to have eclipsed the training many veteran teachers received years ago. The result is large numbers of students labeled with more serious learning disabilities when they really struggle with dyslexia.

Even when students are diagnosed with dyslexia, many educators aren't sure how to teach them. Many don't know that dyslexia is not linked to low intelligence — indeed, it has nothing to do with intelligence. Instead, it affects the way a person receives, stores and retrieves information. It impacts the skills pupils need to be academically successful, including reading, writing and calculating.

The Legislature helps students and teachers by broadening the pilot and requiring educational materials on dyslexia to be distributed to teachers statewide. But the real work must be done by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. OSPI and its new leader, Randy Dorn, must improve teacher training on learning challenges, including dyslexia. They must do this cheaply. This is the year to be particularly creative, for example making the learning materials accessible online from the beginning.

According to OSPI, 40 percent of the students who participated in the dyslexia pilot passed the reading section of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning. Only 17 percent of those same students had met the WASL reading standard before the pilot.

Competing priorities in the Legislature include balancing the budget and passing education reform. Credit to the Legislature for not ignoring dyslexic students, a smaller issue but one with a tremendous impact on children,

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