Teaching strategies that work for dyslexia

The five principles behind everything else

Strategies that help dyslexic students are not a grab bag of classroom tricks. They all descend from the same five principles, and knowing the principles lets you evaluate any new idea you are handed.

1. Explicit. Every concept is taught directly. Nothing important is left to be inferred from exposure.
2. Systematic and cumulative. Skills are sequenced from simple to complex, and each new one rests on what came before.
3. Multisensory. Seeing, hearing, saying and writing are combined so that more than one pathway supports the same learning.
4. Diagnostic. The teacher continuously checks what the student has actually mastered and adjusts, rather than moving on with the calendar.
5. Sufficient practice. New skills are practiced to automatic accuracy, not to first correct answer.

If a proposed strategy does not connect to at least one of these, it is decoration. The Orton-Gillingham approach covers where these principles came from.

Reading and decoding

The through line is that accuracy comes before speed, and that a student should never be asked to guess at something they have not been taught to decode.

Writing and spelling

Writing puts spelling, handwriting, organization and idea generation on the same page at the same time. For a dyslexic student, that combination can bring everything to a halt, and the fix is usually to separate the layers.

• Separate ideas from mechanics. Let the student dictate or outline first, then handle spelling and punctuation as a second pass.
• Do not grade spelling on a first draft. Grade it where spelling is the actual objective, and say clearly which drafts those are.
• Teach spelling by pattern and morphology. Why the word is spelled that way is learnable. The list itself is not.
• Allow speech to text. A student who can compose a strong paragraph out loud should be allowed to show that they can.
• Reduce copying. Provide notes or a partial outline. Copying from a board is a decoding and visual tracking task, not a learning one.
• Give sentence frames. Structure lowers the cost of starting, which is often where the whole task stalls.

What helps at home

• Read aloud to them, well above their reading level. Vocabulary, syntax and knowledge keep growing even while decoding is still being built.
• Use audiobooks alongside print. Following text while listening supports both comprehension and word recognition, and it keeps a student in age appropriate books.
• Keep practice short and daily. Fifteen focused minutes most days beats an hour on Sunday.
• Cap homework time. Agree a stopping point with the teacher and write a note when it is reached. Two hours of struggle teaches only that reading is punishment.
• Protect what they are good at. Do not cut the sport, the art or the robotics club to make room for more reading practice.
• Name it accurately. Children build a story about themselves either way. A clear explanation of dyslexia is a better story than the one they will otherwise invent.

What to stop doing

• Calling on a student to read aloud cold in front of the class.
• Grading work down for spelling when the assignment is about something else.
• Timed copying from a board or a screen.
• Weekly spelling lists memorized without any pattern taught.
• Reducing how much a student reads instead of changing how the reading is delivered.
• Telling a student to try harder, which they almost certainly already are.