|
Dear Sunset Ridge Families,
On the PD Days, we have been digging into LETRS training, which is what I would call the "gold standard" of foundational literacy skills training. If you heard the "Sold a Story" podcast or any other concerns about early literacy teaching, this training, which might well take us years to complete, is rigorous, in-depth, and is helping all of us learn how to be better educators.
In an early section, the training addresses reading difficulties. They, along with the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity, say that dyslexia affects about 20% of people on a spectrum of severity (about 5% will be most severely affected). One of the aims for us of this training is to do better on behalf of that 20% who will benefit from more explicit, systematic instruction in the foundational literacy skills of English (and, it should be noted, there is no reason to think it would harm any other student to learn about "blends," "digraphs," rules for the "hard r," etc.).
When it comes to defining dyslexia, I prefer the definition from Yale, which is "an unexpected difficulty in reading for an individual who has the intelligence to be a much better reader." Other definitions, like the language used in LETRS training, includes "disorder" and "disability," which sound to me to be unnecessarily negative descriptors of natural human neurodiversity.
In this article from the American Medical Association, the authors write about the typical strengths of people, like those diagnosed with autism (the full name is "autism spectrum disorder"), and the evolutionary advantages afforded by those strengths, and write about dyslexia like this;
"The three-dimensional thinking seen in some people with dyslexia may have been highly adaptive in preliterate cultures for designing tools, plotting out hunting routes, and constructing shelters, and would not have been regarded as a barrier for learning." They go on to argue for the evolutionary benefits of ADHD and more.
I guess my point is this; while we are going to do everything we can to learn how to best teach all children essential literacy skills (and other skills), we need to realize that it is natural for some to have a harder time learning to read, just as it is natural for some children to have a harder time making friends, or accurately "reading a room," or singing in key, or playing a sport, and that we should be mindful of our language and thinking, like making kids' identities focused on "disorders" and "disabilities" or ignoring their strengths, to make sure it reflects what we believe, and what we know, about our kids and neurodiversity.
Brett Wilfrid
| 
