One of the most important distinctions we can make when educating students with dyslexia is the difference between making learning accessible and simply making it easier. Only the former does them any favors.
Students with dyslexia need support. They may need explicit reading instruction, more time to complete certain tasks or another way to access grade-level content while they develop their reading skills. But none of those things tells us what a student’s potential is.
When a student has difficulty reading, educators and parents tend to simplify the work itself. We shorten the text. We reduce the amount of material. We lower the complexity of the questions. Those choices may sometimes be appropriate, depending on the instructional goal. Still, they can also create a second problem: the reading disability begins to limit the student’s access to ideas they are perfectly capable of understanding.
Dyslexia is a specific reading disability. Absent other hurdles, students with dyslexia are capable learners, even when their reading performance doesn’t reflect their broader abilities. Because the learning difference can be difficult to see, early reading struggles are sometimes attributed instead to motivation, maturity or effort.
The challenge for educators is to give students the support they need without letting their challenge areas determine what we expect of them elsewhere.
Start with the barrier
Supporting a student with dyslexia begins with understanding what is getting in the way of learning.
“Struggling reader” may describe what we observe, but it doesn’t tell us why a student is struggling or what to do about it.
This becomes especially important as students get older. A student who has difficulty decoding may need systematic instruction at the word level, including work with syllables, morphology and multisyllabic words. Another student may read words accurately but struggle to understand or retain what they have read. A third may comprehend a short passage but have difficulty holding ideas in mind across a longer text because of attention, stamina or executive function.
Those students can receive the same low comprehension score and need very different instruction.
If we don’t identify the barrier, we risk responding to all three students in the same way. Worse, we may mistake difficulty accessing the material for an inability to understand it.
We see the importance of that distinction regularly. For example, two seventh-grade students came to us with nearly identical reading comprehension scores. After working with each of them, we understood that one of the students was guessing at longer words, and she needed systematic instruction in areas like advanced decoding skills and morphology. The other student was reading much more accurately but more slowly. He had difficulty holding ideas in mind and lost the thread of what he was reading. He needed more targeted support in text chunking and monitoring for understanding. Both students struggled with fluency, one with accuracy and the other with rate. Each needed different strategies. Neither would have benefited from “easier” texts.
Support should be precise
Once we understand why a student is struggling, instruction should address that need directly.
For students with dyslexia, that means evidence-based, explicit reading instruction delivered with enough frequency and intensity to make a difference. As students get older, instruction must also grow with them. An adolescent who still needs help with decoding should receive it, but the materials and context should reflect that the learner is now an older student.
We shouldn’t stop teaching foundational reading skills because a student has reached middle school, nor should we make a middle schooler feel as though they are back in grade school to receive them.
The same principle applies beyond reading intervention. If decoding is preventing a student from accessing a science lesson, for example, we need to think separately about the reading skill we are trying to remediate and the science content we want that student to learn.
This becomes increasingly consequential as students move through school. From roughly fourth grade on, students are expected to use reading to learn across subjects, just as texts become more complex and demand greater vocabulary, background knowledge, fluency and working memory. When word recognition requires significant effort, students expend cognitive resources on decoding that would otherwise be available for meaning.
High expectations
There is another side to this conversation. “High expectations” can become an empty phrase if we aren’t giving students the instruction and time they need to meet them.
A student who hasn’t developed a skill won’t acquire it simply because we keep asking for it.
Students who are behind need to make accelerated progress to close the gap. That requires time. Educators must identify the student’s needs, match instruction accordingly and provide enough time for that instruction to be effective.
At The Southport School, where we serve students in grades 2 through 8 with language-based learning differences and ADHD, we see what can happen when instruction is explicit and sufficiently intensive. In our most recent graduating cohort, students averaged 1.9 years of reading comprehension growth per year of enrollment. At entry, 59 percent scored in the low-average range or below in reading comprehension. By graduation, 89 percent scored in the average range or above.
Those gains come from understanding what each student needs to make progress and then providing instruction accordingly.
Students should understand the difference, too
Students know whether reading is harder for them than for their classmates. Years of difficulty can change how they see themselves. Some begin to avoid tasks that repeatedly frustrate or embarrass them, which reduces their practice and makes progress even harder. By middle school, students may conclude that they cannot learn, rather than recognizing the specific skills they haven’t yet developed.
Part of our responsibility as educators is to help students develop a more accurate understanding of themselves. They should know where they struggle. They should also understand why, recognize where they are strong and learn to advocate for the support they need.
October is Dyslexia and Learning Differences Awareness Month, a time for administrators and educators to reflect on what support means for the students we serve. Awareness is important, but our instructional choices are where that understanding becomes consequential.
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