In the 1920s, physician Samuel Orton and educator and psychologist Mary Gillingham created the Orton-Gillingham method to teach reading and writing skills to students with dyslexia. These students were intelligent. However, they had an unexpected difficulty learning how to read and write. Others at the time thought that visual challenges were responsible for this. Orton felt there was a neurological basis. Neural mapping techniques now support many of Orton’s original ideas about dyslexia and how to best instruct students with dyslexia. The four key reasons we believe the Orton-Gillingham Approach is different from others:
It is diagnostic
Instructors determine student’s strengths and weaknesses, then teach in a way that fills essential knowledge and skill gaps. They do this by setting a baseline for the student using informal assessments. Subsequently, they continually measure student progress to determine when to advance to new concepts and skill challenges. There is no hard set sequence in instruction. For this reason, instructors customize, tailor and determine what makes the most sense for each student’s strengths, weaknesses, and mastered concepts. As Anna Gillingham once said, “Go as fast as you can, but as slow as you must” to ensure a student’s mastery.
It is explicit
Instructors give direct instruction clearly explaining models and interactively providing practice with the taught concepts. Orton-Gillingham trained instructors provide direct instruction in seven key areas
- Reading (decoding/fluency/comprehension) strategies
- Spelling rules/patterns
- Letter formation
- Phonemic awareness skills
- Grammar
- Morphological analysis
- Written expression.
It is structured
An Orton-Gillingham instructor at the Certified level has completed hundreds of hours of coursework and years of mentoring to understand how English language concepts build upon themselves and are intertwined in reading and writing skills. Instructors build upon previously taught concepts. They explicitly teach connections between past concepts and the new concept via direct instruction or student self-discovery activities.
It is multi-sensory
Instructors use visual, auditory, tactile-kinesthetic activities during each lesson. Students master skills quicker and more permanently with multi-sensory activities because they create stronger neural connections in the brain. Students train with processes that help them see, hear and touch/move manipulatives supporting the explicit instruction of each concept they learn.
To learn more about how our online or in-person based direct instruction can help your student, please reach out to us !