This course was so informative – I feel like I will be a whole new literacy teacher

Wow! I feel like this class has transformed my teaching. Every pre-service teacher should have this class before they start teaching children to read.

I wish this course came sooner in my career, especially as part of my undergraduate work, when I was training to become an elementary educator.

After 15 years in education, I have received a lot of training, but [this was] the highest quality and most impactful training of my career.

In all my years as a teacher, I never fully understood the rules and patterns of the English language. Thanks to this class and the phenomenal training, now I do!

This course was terrific. I enjoyed the open discussion time, the opportunities to practice strategies, and the sharing of resources. I use it in my classroom whenever I can! It is amazing!

I loved the abundance of materials, resources, and time to create and practice lesson plans. I now have the tools and an approach to support my students as they learn how to read.

This course was amazing! The instructor discussed so much that we don’t even think about and we should. I now have a clear understanding of teaching reading and writing with clear connections to brain science and research.

I now feel like I am part of the inside track of teaching reading at my school. There is a growing group of educators who are trained and I felt myself grinning broadly as I spoke with some of them this week, sharing how excited I was to begin.

My training has allowed me to spread the wealth to colleagues, community, friends, and family members. I now know how to execute a group lesson and diagnose students and am able to teach them in their area of weakness.

It wasn’t until I learned how to teach reading using multisensory structured language instruction that I had the ‘aha’ moment of, ‘Wow! I never learned that. I now know how to truly teach reading!

The instructor is so incredibly knowledgeable, thorough, and organized, she makes being in class for seven hours enjoyable! I learned a tremendous amount that I can immediately implement.

This class was a truly great experience. Although it was an introductory-level class, I really feel that I gained mastery of the core concepts along with practical strategies for lesson planning.

[This course] was one of the most useful and impactful classes I have taken, and I love that I can immediately bring what I learned into my classroom. I’m rethinking the structure of my entire literacy block next year so I can include these elements. Thank you!

The most powerful part of the course was watching videos of my principal fellow putting the content of the class into practice. Every student in every clip was both engaged and confident. Their feelings about school, reading and themselves shifted as a result of this instruction.

This was the first time that I heard language can be taught as a science. I think if we thought of reading and spelling more as a science, more students would be successful in schools.

Before gaining these resources, I felt hesitant about teaching students with dyslexia, but now that I am confident in what l am teaching, it is my favorite part of the day. I feel extremely fortunate to have receive this experience so early in my teaching career.

I am grateful for the opportunity to have received training, and to continue to receive training, in this approach to teaching literacy. I am excited for the benefits it brings my students – particularly the strong foundation in phonemic awareness that will affect all future learning. Thank you for this opportunity.

The success of the systematic, explicit and multi-sensory approach is evident in my classroom every day. I hear it when students are writing together and remind each other of the spelling patterns they’ve learned in lessons, or when they practice the definition of a syllable at snack time, “just for fun”, because they like the sayings and the hand movements that go along with it.

My colleague and I chose to take this course because we wanted to learn how we could more effectively teach reading to our struggling students. This course was exactly what we had hoped for. Since implementing these strategies with two students, I saw significant growth and they’ve even become more excited about reading!

The supervised guided practicum portion of this training is by far the best professional development and training I have ever had. The ability to practice the lesson planning and delivery of those lessons under the guidance of such knowledgeable instructors has enabled me to perfect my teaching technique and improve my knowledge of the content that I am teaching.

As a teacher, you’re constantly grappling with doubt, fear, or even shame when working with our most academically vulnerable students. Am I doing enough to support them? Are my lesson plans good enough to reverse their course, or am I another teacher who isn’t going to be able to help them catch up? Structured literacy courses have been truly helpful in this regard. It’s challenging to learn the methodology at first, but now I feel genuine peace of mind knowing that I am doing something backed up by research and shown to actually make a change for our kids.

This training works because it is very direct, explicit, systematic instruction. Our teachers learn how to do formative assessments that target exactly what their students need. As far as the students, it’s just life-saving for them. They become in tune with their own needs and are able to develop strategies to carry with them in other classes. And, parents see a huge change in their kids. It’s pretty exciting when parents come in and tell us their child is teaching them about word structure. It is so exciting and powerful.

I began the training in the summer of 2015, and my teaching has not been the same since. As an educator I encourage my students to be as inquisitive as possible. I want them to ask me why? Why does this happen? Why do we learn this? Why does this make sense? Before this training I’m not sure I could answer every question that my students asked, specifically regarding spelling and decoding. It has opened my eyes to the origins of our language, how and why syllables and words fit together, which patterns worked most of the time and why, which syllable types were most common and why. This knowledge has absolutely changed my teaching in a positive way.