Teaching Philosophy for Students with Dyslexia

By Lindsay Stoner

For my blog post I wanted to share my teaching philosophy, which focuses on how I would effectively teach children with learning disabilities, specifically dyslexia. I have chosen to share this piece of work because I believe that the methods I found in order to promote more in depth learning could be easily applied to normal classrooms, promoting more transfer within all students.

I would like to teach children with learning disabilities, specifically children with reading disabilities. I am interested in this subset of the population in particular because I myself have dyslexia and think that there are specific ways in which I could teach to children with reading disabilities that would allow them to gain the skills and confidence they need to understand language just like anyone else that they might not receive in mainstream education. I would mostly focus on children from the ages of 5-10, who are just learning how to read or have fallen behind the expectations that the state or school has in place. In order for children with reading difficulties to learn more effectively and with more ease, I would implement the techniques of the Multisensory Structured Language Teaching approach, which was created by Dr. Orton and used in the Orton-Gillingham method (http://www.ortonacademy.org/).

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00356/full

Most students struggling with dyslexia have difficultly connecting phonological and orthographic processes together in the brain together, which allows people to connect speech and print. So by having a teaching style that incorporates multiple senses including feeling, sight, hearing, a sense of movement and motion allows for more concrete transfer to happen within students. I would incorporate this by having children first learn a new letter or pattern by having them say at least five words that contain that letter or pattern. After that I would I introduce them to the visual component by writing the letters or pattern on the board, allowing the students to make the connection that each of the individual different words all contained this similar component. Once this connection between the auditory and visual has been made for the students, I would have students write out the letter(s) while saying the sound out loud. A specific example of the help of motion within learning this connection would be for children who mix up ‘b’s and ‘d’s to write ‘b’s by first writing the straight line down and then the little semicircle, but for ‘d’s having students write the little semicircle first and then the straight line down, in order to create a greater psychical movement difference between the two letters.

Using the Multisensory Structured Language Teaching approach will also give students the ability to move certain tasks like decoding, word recognition, and the alphabetic principle from high road skills and mechanisms to low road skills and mechanisms (https://eida.org/multisensory-structured-language-teaching/). This would allow the students to use the information with more ease and under many different setting and conditions, decreasing their anxiety towards reading and increasing their confidence with the material. I would make sure that the material also followed the basic principles laid out by Bloom’s Taxonomy, in which children follow a hierarchy of learning. Students would move from the basic knowledge and skills and eventually move to be able to use the skill of reading to comprehend, apply, analysis, synthesis, and eventually later in life evaluate (http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html). 

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/4719

The principle underlying this is systematic and cumulative learning, which is very helpful for dyslexic students allowing them to strengthen memory and connections between different ideas and brain functions.

Another aspect of my teaching philosophy would be access reading fluency through multiple dimensions, “including rate, phrasing, and prosody”, (Connor, Alberto, Compton, & O'Connor, 2014). In most cases reading fluency is access by just looking at rate, in which either a teacher or professional counts the number of words correct pre minute (wcpm), but it has been shown that prosody has an association with comprehension in reading of students because inflection of words can hint at understanding the larger picture of the text (https://ies.ed.gov/ncser/pubs/20143000/pdf/20143000.pdf). When assigning students books to read, it has been shown that the most effective level of difficulty should be ones in which the student would have at least 85% accuracy reading out loud (Beach & O’Connor, 2014). This strikes the perfect balance between allowing students to feel successful, but also challenging them with new and different words in which they would have to implement the techniques they have learning for decoding unfamiliar words.

Also by assessing at reading fluency for multiple different perspectives, would allow me to get a better understanding of where the student is. To do this I will use mostly informal assessment to be able to gage where the student is in particular. By using informal assessment I will make sure to give informative feedback on different activities and tasks that I will ask the student to preform. I will also have all the assessments be criterion based because that will tell me whether or not the student has acquired the skills involved in finishing the activity that I have taught.

My role as the teacher would be to teach students the basic skills they need in order to be able to success at the level of instruction they are expected to be at within school, as well as making sure students feel emotionally sound and intellectually smart. Basic skills that they would need include increasing the student’s personal abilities at reading, spelling and writing at all levels. I hope to give students the skills they need to be able to deconstruct words they don’t understand, whether that be a word they are trying to read, a word that they are trying to spell or comprehending the meaning of a text, by themselves.

The way that I will be assessed would be through having a coworker sit in to a few session with different students in to be able to give me pointers on how to improve or cater to my individual students better in a way that I had previously not considered. I will do this every quarter in order to be able to actively use the feedback and implement it into my teaching.