You're Not Alone: Help for Teachers of Struggling Readers from Multisensory Teaching Experts
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Not all kids are going to learn to read implicitly. That’s just a fact.
Some children, especially those with dyslexia and other learning difficulties, are “not going to get it” without being taught the elements of reading explicitly and directly, according to Judith Birsh, editor of Multisensory Teaching of Basic Language Skills, Third Edition, and founder of the program of the same name at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Teacher Robin Moore learned that truth in two very different educational settings. In the first, she taught third grade in California public schools to a class with a high concentration of children who spoke English as a second language. The curriculum, Moore says, was a “pretty standard literature-based curriculum.” She found that her students didn’t have the reading or phonics skills they needed to succeed academically.
In the second, she experienced the flipside of that equation, teaching Spanish to high-schoolers at a private boarding school. To learn a foreign language, Moore points out, “you need to be literate in your own language.” She found that the older students, many of whom had learning disabilities, did not have sufficient background in grammar and reading to sustain their foreign language studies.
Moore’s challenge with the third graders was to find a way to convey the information in the base text because, regardless of their difficulties, she was required to teach that text. With little teaching experience under her belt, Moore says, “It was really frustrating to me because I felt like I didn’t know enough about teaching [reading] at that time.”
With her older students, she ran into trouble because high school programs do not focus much on basic skills; they’ve moved on to higher-level tasks such as literature analysis and expository writing. Moore found herself having to backtrack and give background in English grammar and writing style.
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The challenge for Moore was to find out how to make sure the students learned the base text, because she was required to teach that text |
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In each case, when her own training left her lacking, she looked for other resources and teachers who might be able to provide assistance, but she found very few others who had any more training than she did.
Discovering explicit, multisensory approaches
Moore’s frustration eventually led her to enter the Reading Specialist program at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York. There she discovered the concepts captured in Birsh’s Multisensory Teaching of Basic Language Skills and illustrated in the accompanying activity book for teachers by veteran teacher-trainer Suzanne Carreker and Birsh.
The Multisensory Teaching course at Columbia opened Moore’s eyes to the science of reading. She speaks with relief about how it gave her the framework for understanding how students, whether typically developing or struggling, learn how to read. The multisensory, systematic, structured language approach, on which the course is based, is a ”very specific instructional approach based on scientific research,” according to Birsh.
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The Multisensory Approach |
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Reading research in recent years has made great strides toward pinning down what components turn children into readers. Moore was buoyed to learn “some really tried-and-true tactics” that studies have shown to be effective and that can be tailored to students at different levels. She took away concrete activities and ideas, and “very practical advice” for how to apply reading theory.
What Moore found particularly amazing was how straightforward the techniques were, once teachers had a good grasp of the elements of reading instruction. “I was shocked by its simplicity. It really is no frills,” she says.
Both general ed and special education teachers in training were in Moore’s class at Columbia. Initially, she notes, the general education teachers “get turned off by bigger programs. They think they’re going to take all day and be really boring.”
But, she observed that once they start to see that they can introduce the multisensory approaches bit by bit—and how logically structured the program is—they begin to warm up and then really become excited when they realize they are starting to see changes in their struggling readers.
Voices of experience
Suzanne Carreker and Judith Birsh have worked with children with dyslexia and other learning disabilities for decades. Here are some words of wisdom they’d like to share, for teachers who are learning these concepts for the first time.
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Q: What concepts do teachers in training most struggle to grasp when learning multisensory teaching approaches?
Q: What has been most helpful in helping them understand those concepts?
Q: If a general ed teacher is about to go into a classroom that may well include students with undiagnosed learning disabilities, what key concepts should he or she remember?
Q: To anyone who may be teaching these principles for the first time, do you have any final thoughts?
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Judith Birsh offers these tips for teachers of children having trouble learning to read:
- Be extremely patient
- Do a lot of practice and review
- Understand it’s not that they don’t want to learn, but that they can’t
- They will have some good days (where they will remember a lot) and some bad days
- Recognize their other strengths (many are artistic, articulate, athletic, visual, musical, people-oriented)
- Pair them up with students who are strong in what they’re having difficulties in (peer tutoring)
- Ensure that they get extra help from teachers aides, special educators
- Don’t assume they know something that you haven’t taught them
- Don’t assume they will learn implicitly or can be taught only on occasion, as questions arise
- Children with dyslexia and learning disabilities need to be taught a structured, planned program
- They’re not going to get it without explicit, direct instruction
- Final, key point: These children thrive when they have the right kind of instruction.
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To further explore the concepts introduced in Multisensory Teaching, see these other Brookes’s titles:
* Contributors to Multisensory Teaching |
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