Sayeski on dyslexia, reading, and reading instruction
Is this a great chance to learn a lot of fundamentals about reading problems?
No doubt, many readers of Special Education Today are familiar with the term “dyslexia” (the medical designation for severe reading problems) and with the name Kristin Sayeski (the professor at the University of Georgia and the former editor of Teaching Exceptional Children). In this post, I show an important connection between the two that I hope will prove helpful to readers.
Kristin, in collaboration with the Georgia Department of Education and her university, created an informative series of video modules about dyslexia. They are available for free on the Internet and, because they are damn good, I encourage teachers, parents, professors, and others to review them.
They are on YouTube. Here is a list of the videos.
Watching them all in one sitting (binging?) would require about an hour, but I’d recommend taking them one at a time and reflecting as one goes.
I’m angling to convince Kristin to participate in an interview-discussion about these products. Please let me know if you like that idea and, especially, what questions you’d like to ask her.
I would love to hear more from Kristin and I am excited to check out her modules. They could be something that we could use in one of my classes to do a deeper dive into dyslexia and how we can support students with dyslexia in the classroom.
I’m troubled by the relatively recent and comparatively sudden adoption by states of similar laws requiring identification of dyslexia. Professional development requirements for training provided by with information like Sayeski’s duly note but, in my opinion, obscure the existing policy framework for identifying and treating with instruction specific learning disabilities, a category that explicitly includes dyslexia. Something is going on here that while seeming to help dyslexia seems too to be undermining IDEA.