Science of Reading: The Podcast

Science of Reading Essentials: Dyslexia

• Amplify Education

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In this special dyslexia-focused Essentials episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert pulls from past episodes to summarize everything you need to know about dyslexia, from experts Emily Lutrick, Ed.D.; Nadine Gaab, Ph.D.; Tim Odegard, Ph.D.; Sally Shaywitz, M.D.; and Francisco Usero-González, Ph.D. You'll also hear first-hand accounts from young people about their personal experiences with dyslexia, reading, and the education system. Even if you have little prior knowledge of dyslexia, you’ll walk away from this episode with a foundational understanding of the condition, including what it is, what causes it, how to identify it, the importance of early screening, how it is a continuum, methods for intervention, and more.

Show notes:

Episode Timestamps
00:27 Introduction to SoR: Essentials
01:02 Susan’s personal connection with dyslexia
02:53 Accounts from young people on their experience of dyslexia
05:09 Defining dyslexia with Dr. Emily Lutrick
06:53 Dyslexia as a reading disability with Dr. Nadine Gaab
07:39 Three key characteristics of people with dyslexia with Dr. Tim Odegard
09:42 Longitudinal study with Dr. Sally Shaywitz
11:54 The causes of dyslexia
13:09 Early identification and effective intervention
15:22 Discrepancy model/Waiting to fail model
16:35 How early is too early to screen for dyslexia
18:37 How to know when a student is at risk for dyslexia
21:54 Identifying risk factors in older students
22:54 Decoding nonsense words
24:27 The power of naming a struggle
25:28 The importance of having a cohesive system in place
26:43 Screening students in their home language with Dr. Franci

[00:00:00] Margaret “Margo” Malaika Weaver: School's not easy, period. And it's even harder when you have dyslexia, but I think you've just got to keep pushing really. And you are no less important than somebody who doesn't have it.

[00:00:16] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert and welcome to the latest edition of Science of Reading Essentials, a special series of Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify.

[00:00:27] Susan Lambert: So the idea behind these Essentials episodes is to bring all the great information we've heard from past guests and put it in one place. So that you can see why this is a critical topic for the Science of Reading.

[00:00:44] Susan Lambert: You don't need to have any knowledge of the topic. They are designed to help usher you into that topic in a pretty broad way. You know, really, we want to make a connection to what you need to know to help your students develop even more. This one is really near and dear to my heart. The topic is all about dyslexia, and I honestly wouldn't be the Science of Reading podcast host or even probably in the world of education had dyslexia not been a part of my family. And I know I've talked about it a lot on this podcast about, it was my second son who struggled with dyslexia, and it took us a really long time to figure out what it was.

[00:01:36] Susan Lambert: Dyslexia is, it's the weirdest thing because many teachers, early educators, they've probably heard the word dyslexia. They maybe know what it is, but they're not always sure how they can support students that are exhibiting signs of dyslexia or have dyslexia. Maybe they don't even feel comfortable knowing what the signs of dyslexia are. And we've known about dyslexia for years. Even all the way back to the early 1900s, we already had people studying, what is dyslexia and how is it that we can help those kids that are experiencing dyslexia actually access the print?. And so it's just amazing to me that the knowledge has been out there for decades and still we have so many students in classrooms that are not identified and not supported. And that's just a shame. And it's a shame because the impact of living with dyslexia, especially when it's not identified, can be profound.

[00:02:45] Susan Lambert: Before we go further, I want to share the words of a few young people that actually experienced dyslexia. 

[00:02:52] Hayden: She, under her breath, was like, "God, you're so stupid." , [00:03:00] That's when I kind of realized like if a teacher is saying that, something has to be wrong with me. 

[00:03:05] Elijah Valencia: I was embarrassed to ask for help, but then like when, you know, they pulled us to the side and we like take our tests and things like that, it still was hard even when they were trying to like help me because it's like they were expecting me to like be learning at everybody else's pace.

[00:03:21] Margaret “Margo” Malaika Weaver: I just wish somebody really kind of sat with me and told me that I wasn't stupid and that I was okay. 

[00:03:28] Susan Lambert: That was Hayden, Elijah, and Margo. Three young people with dyslexia who joined us on past episodes. And I think it's really important to hear from them about the impact because it's not just a reading or writing issue. It's an issue that hits kids' self-esteem, their confidence, their motivation to participate in school. This is a whole person issue.

[00:04:02] Susan Lambert: So the impacts of dyslexia can be profound. Thankfully, when it comes to dyslexia and understanding what it is we can do to support these students in accessing print, we know a lot.

[00:04:15] Susan Lambert: I would say on a scale of one to 10 when it comes to knowing and understanding how to teach kids to make that connection between sounds and letters and make that connection very automatic, we're up in the eights and the nines. And so there is really a series of instructional moves we can take.

[00:04:38] Susan Lambert: And on this episode we're going to talk about what educators can do to really support students who might have dyslexia. But first we need to have a really good understanding of what dyslexia is. So to kick things off, I want to turn to Dr. Emily Lutrick, former executive director of curriculum and instruction at Allen Independent School District in Texas. She joined us on our very first season, and here's how she described what dyslexia is.

[00:05:08] Emily Lutrick: Dyslexia is primarily, it deals with phonological processing. That's a really fancy word for the ability for a child or an adult or a learner in general, their ability to match up and analyze how our speech is broken up and how it relates to letters on the page. So, for instance, a really simplistic example of this is a dyslexic thinker might many times, they don't process the letters the way that we do if you don't have this issue.

[00:05:38] Emily Lutrick: So for instance, the word "he". I see H-E and I understand the sounds that each of those letters make. And I read the word he, and then in my mind, I know what that vocabulary word, what it means, right? And I make meaning of the word and I read connected text and it causes great joy, because I can read and understand what he is doing in the text that I'm, I'm working with.

[00:06:01] Emily Lutrick: But a dyslexic thinker and that brain of that child or the adult that's struggling with dyslexia, they likely could be associating that E, the letter E, with the wrong sound. For instance, they might, instead of that letter making the E sound, it might to that child, make an |a:| sound. And so when they see the word he, they actually are reading the word ha.

[00:06:21] Emily Lutrick: That's a pretty simplistic example of how distorted reading becomes whenever you have a disconnect between what you're processing and what you're seeing and how you're spinning it back out. 

[00:06:34] Susan Lambert: To build on that, let's turn to Dr. Nadine Gaab, associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She joined us on Season 4 and explained that dyslexia falls under the larger umbrella of a reading disability. 

[00:06:50] Nadine Gaab: So it's a deficit in single word reading and the original primary deficit in single word reading. It can eventually lead to problems with reading fluency and reading comprehension. But the poor deficit initially is an ability to decode a single word, especially a nonword or you know, this mapping of sounds onto the letters and blending those together, decoding the word. So dyslexia is this inability to become automatic in the mechanics of reading. 

[00:07:26] Susan Lambert: When he joined us on Season 7, middle Tennessee State University's Dr. Tim Odegard, explained that there are three key characteristics of people like himself with dyslexia. 

[00:07:37] Tim Odegard: I think that we struggle to read words. I think that we struggle to spell words. In the English language in particular, the spelling is going to be an issue. Those deficits are going to be seen in the English language and other languages that are very deep. Or the relationships between the letters and the sounds that we use to write our words in the language, you know, like "A" can have at least five different sounds associated with it, which makes it very, scary to think when I see an A, is it, "ah," is it "a," is it "all," is it, "uh?" I mean, what is it? That's just, it's a challenge. So, the third characteristic is we're really hard to teach. And so when we pop out is, is that we're in classrooms and other kids are learning how to do these things, but we're not, or at least we're not at the rate that's going to allow us to keep up and be able to do grade level work with, any kind of efficiency or success.

[00:08:26] Susan Lambert: Dr. Odegard, who is a professor of psychology and the chair-holder of the Murphy Chair of Excellence in Dyslexic Studies added this: 

[00:08:36] Tim Odegard: It's very common. And it's on a continuum of severity, which makes it very difficult to operationalize. 

[00:08:44] Susan Lambert: I think that's really important. 

[00:08:45] Tim Odegard: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what that means is, is that some of us are going to have less severe presentations of our reading and spelling difficulties and difficulties with learning those constructs and how well we respond to the interventions that are very direct and systematic that will benefit us.

[00:09:04] Tim Odegard: And you also have differences as far as severity that I'd like to point out with what else might be going on. What I mean by that is that like I don't have a ADHD, my sister has dyslexia, but she also has a ADHD. So that meant that her ability to respond to, and kind of accommodate and like persevere into Sally Forth and conquer was a lot more challenging for her.

[00:09:31] Susan Lambert: To fill out this picture of what dyslexia is, there's one more researcher I want to bring into the fold. Dr. Sally Shaywitz. She and her husband began the Connecticut Longitudinal Study with children entering kindergarten back in 1983. 

[00:09:47] Sally Shaywitz: We were able to enroll—you ready for this?—445 boys and girls. And we have now been following them closely since 1983. Every year. Every year. 

[00:10:06] Guest: Mm-hmm. 

[00:10:07] Sally Shaywitz: We would evaluate them and test them. 

[00:10:10] Susan Lambert: And when she joined us back on Season 7, here's what Dr. Shaywitz shared about some key findings from that seminal longitudinal study. 

[00:10:18] Sally Shaywitz: So what we learned is that dyslexia is universal. It crosses racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, boundaries, barriers. And what we found is that dyslexia is common. How common? One in five children. That means every class has children who are struggling readers. 

[00:10:46] Susan Lambert: The study also showed that dyslexia affects both boys and girls. 

[00:10:50] Sally Shaywitz: And that it's persistent, that it's lifelong, and very importantly that it's not related to intelligence.

[00:11:00] Sally Shaywitz: That you can be highly intelligent and still struggle to read. And because we have longitudinal data, we were able to determine when the achievement gap between typical and dyslexic readers occurs. 

[00:11:18] Susan Lambert: Hmm. 

[00:11:18] Sally Shaywitz: And you know what we found? 

[00:11:20] Susan Lambert: What? What did you find? 

[00:11:21] Sally Shaywitz: It occurs as early as first grade. And persists.

[00:11:29] Sally Shaywitz: That's really important because what that means is that we have to get to these children and identify them as dyslexic early on. Because if it's there already at first grade. 

[00:11:44] Susan Lambert: Because it's so key, we're going to talk a lot more about early identification. But first, what causes dyslexia? Dr. Gaab explained that it's multifactorial.

[00:11:56] Nadine Gaab: So what I mean by this is that, you know, for the longest time people thought there may be one cause, right, of atypical reading development or one cause of dyslexia. And so there have been like all these, you know, studies looking at this one thing in the brain or this one, you know, skill, but it's a combination of a variety of things that are interacting with each other. So there's genetics, right? There's the brain, there's perception, cognition, and there's the environment. And there's these complex interactions between these that can lead to atypical reading development or, you know, can lead to developmental dyslexia.

[00:12:35] Nadine Gaab: And so when we talk about these factors, we also have to think about the protective factors. So things can be risk factors, but they can also be protective factors. And so it's a very complex ideology of these different factors, both risk factors as well as protective factors. 

[00:12:55] Susan Lambert: One of the biggest opportunities to support children is this concept of early identification. A big reason that identification is so key, has to do with something Dr. Gaab shared about the window for most effective intervention. 

[00:13:12] Nadine Gaab: The earlier you identify children at risk, the better, you know, the early interventions work. So, there's much larger effect sizes in kindergarten and first grade, and then, you know, second and third grade.

[00:13:26] Nadine Gaab: And we know that identifying children at risk early and providing them what they need, you know, ideally within general education or Tier 1, will lead to better outcomes, in these children. It's often the question, why is the window for most effective intervention so much earlier? And at least it has, you know, two reasons.

[00:13:48] Nadine Gaab: One is the brain is a lot more plastic for language, the younger it is. And the gap between the good reader and the poor reader in terms of vocabulary and background knowledge and et cetera, widens day after day. And so it's really important to think more about a preventive approach, so like almost like preventive education, which you can compare with preventive medicine. 

[00:14:14] Susan Lambert: We even have ideas about students that might struggle learning to read before they come to us in kindergarten. And so when we understand that this is a critical moment in kids' reading development—pre-K, kindergarten, first grade—we can intervene super early, like even right away in kindergarten if we need to, to make sure that they get the very explicit instruction they need and the amount of practice that they need to have. You know, we can help them actually access the print and learn alongside their peers. But it is so important that we do that early because the later it gets in their schooling career, the harder it is, the more impact it has on their self-esteem, socially, their educational progress. And so early is always better. Here's Dr. Gaab again. 

[00:15:14] Nadine Gaab: When it comes to learning differences, we are largely focused, still focused on the reactive, deficit-driven, wait-to-fail model instead of the development of preventive approaches or proactive approaches where we are proactively finding the kids who will most likely struggle with learning to read and help them so that they will never struggle with learning to read.

[00:15:42] Susan Lambert: Too often what has happened is in schooling, we wait for kids to fail, so by the time they get to third grade, it's like, "Oh, they're not reading. We better do something now." And we've lost that critical window of opportunity. Back when my son was in school, this was called the discrepancy model. The waiting-to-fail model.

[00:16:05] Susan Lambert: The discrepancy model is flawed for a number of reasons, especially when it involves measuring a student's IQ to make instructional decisions. We don't have time to go into all the reasons those approaches are flawed and problematic, but I encourage you to listen to our full interview with Dr. Odegard to go deeper.

[00:16:24] Susan Lambert: Meanwhile, Dr. Lurik also emphasized the importance of early intervention. She says there's a couple questions she runs into a lot. 

[00:16:32] Emily Lutrick: How early is too early to be screening for risk of dyslexia? How early is too early to identify risk of dyslexia in students? And so some people, the myth is still out there that we're not able to screen early for a risk of dyslexia, which is false.

[00:16:49] Emily Lutrick: You can screen effectively for risk of dyslexia very early on, as early as kindergarten, and some people will even stretch that to say even before kiddos start to learn to read. And just at a basic level, pre-K level, of understanding that you can even identify some level of risk there and intervene appropriately to help close those gaps.

[00:17:08] Susan Lambert: What we know is prevention is always the best, and you can't prevent somebody from being dyslexic. But what you can do is you can sort of prevent them from having compounding struggles in learning how to read. Right? And what do we do with that? Like, what's that prevention look like? The prevention looks like screening, early identification, and then delivering really strong science-based reading instruction.

[00:17:35] Susan Lambert: So we're talking about phonological awareness, explicit and systematic phonics, extended time in practice, and for those that are struggling to learn how to read, that means more time in practice. Dr. Gaab agreed that this early intervention will have big impacts. 

[00:17:55] Nadine Gaab: You want to identify children at risk so that you can then  intervene, ideally, again within general education, but some kids need more than this. But the ultimate goal that you have lower rates of dyslexia in the higher grades, or if someone still gets a diagnosis that this is, you know, less severe because of the start of early intervention. 

[00:18:19] Susan Lambert: But how do you know when a student might be at risk? Dr. Lutrick offered some excellent guidance on that topic.

[00:18:25] Emily Lutrick: Let's think about if you have a student that's struggling, which we all do in every classroom across the nation, what are some things you can look for that are easy to kind of earmark as, that could be a risk indicator, right? Or that could be a risk indicator because if you have a child that's already been identified with a specific learning disability of dyslexia, then you're going to have some supports in place.

[00:18:46] Emily Lutrick: You're going to have case managers and different people that, dyslexia therapists, different people that will be able to help provide intervention. But it's really where I find a big piece of my work is to help support educators in knowing what risk factors to look for. If you're a kindergarten teacher or a first grade teacher, and you have been providing your students with opportunities to understand the way that our language works through systemic and systematic explicit instruction around letters and sounds and how words are formed and how those words make up sentences, and exposing them to text and how they connect these things that you're learning to read in connected text, yet you still have some students that are struggling with some basic skills like rhyming or struggling still to really master every letter and the associated sounds with those letters. And they're possibly even struggling to identify numbers correctly. Those are kiddos I would be looking at and saying, you know, is there something that I want to dig into there?

[00:19:53] Emily Lutrick: Those are things that we do every day in kindergarten or first grade classrooms. We rhyme. We work with words. We identify letters and  sounds. We manipulate those sounds in words. And if you have a child that just continues to struggle with those skills after being provided the opportunity to at least learn them through the curriculum, those would be students that I would want to look at. And, some kids, it takes longer and they might not start to develop some of those skills until later in first grade, but they can get it. And then we have students that no matter what we're trying, for some reason there's still a barrier and they're just not able to learn all of those letters and sounds, much less put them together to read words.

[00:20:30] Susan Lambert: That's sort of built on the assumption that they're getting that kind of instruction in kindergarten and first grade. In other words, if you're not doing systematic and explicit phonics in kindergarten and first grade, there is a possibility that we wouldn't identify those kids in those grades.

[00:20:49] Emily Lutrick: Right. We definitely want to figure out, it needs to be a part of your curriculum, for sure. And we want to figure out if you have a child that is struggling to read and you're not sure what is causing that issue, back down and start to see. If the child has not been exposed to explicit systematic instruction around these basic foundational literacy skills—phonemic awareness, alphabet principle, phonics, then back up and see, are they having difficulty rhyming?

[00:21:18] Emily Lutrick: Let's go all the way down to the very bottom, right? Can the student rhyme? If not, let's close that gap. 

[00:21:26] Susan Lambert: And what about identifying risk factors in older students? Lutrick had some great advice for educators on that. 

[00:21:34] Emily Lutrick: So later elementary and by later elementary, I mean, for many of us that means fourth, fifth, sixth, but I'm talking even starting second grade.

[00:21:43] Emily Lutrick: One of the things I look for—at that point when you're thinking about risk of dyslexia in particular, I think many times we do see some students that are reading. They're reading, they're maybe not reading for pleasure, they might have some avoidance there, but sure they're reading.

[00:22:00] Emily Lutrick: And a lot of times these kiddos in second, third grade, they can decode single words. They might have some trouble, sometimes I see difficulty recognizing sight words, but one of the things that I find to be really powerful to look for is, if you have a child in second grade or third grade or fourth grade even that is struggling, I love to check and see can they decode nonsense words.

[00:22:29] Emily Lutrick: Susan Lambert 

[00:22:30] Emily Lutrick: Oh, okay.

[00:22:30] Emily Lutrick: Emily Lutrick 

[00:22:31] Emily Lutrick: Because if I give the child a nonsense word, do they have the skills to figure out what that nonsense word is? So you can pull up online, you can type in nonsense words and pull up lists of nonsense words that are age appropriate. And see, does a child struggle to make sense of those words? Do they have the skills necessary to break the word down and decode it? Because if not, then that would be a kid that I would want to go back, just like with the early elementary, and really figure  out, hmm, do they know their letters and sounds? Can they rhyme? Can they blend? Can they segment, even when I take the letters away, can they do that auditorily?

[00:23:07] Emily Lutrick: Do they have phonemic awareness? You know? And if not, I want to fill those gaps as quickly as I can. And then also be looking at possibly, do they demonstrate some other common risk factors for risk of dyslexia? Because that would be a child I would want to look at. 

[00:23:23] Susan Lambert: We don't have room in this Essentials episode to dive into it, but Dr. Lutrick also shared some advice on the risk factors to look for in students at the secondary level. So if that's of interest, please check out our full Season 1 conversation with her.

[00:23:40] Susan Lambert: But to quickly recap, our experts have emphasized the importance of early identification of students who might be at risk and the critical need to fill any gaps in their foundational skills. And when appropriate, looking more closely at whether a student might have dyslexia, Dr. Sally Shaywitz made this point about the power of identification. 

[00:24:04] Sally Shaywitz: I think it's so important to screen to learn early that you may be at risk, and then to follow up with more testing that may confirm your dyslexic. When you have something, but it doesn't have a name, it leads to anxiety.

[00:24:22] Sally Shaywitz: Susan Lambert 

[00:24:24] Sally Shaywitz: Oh gosh, that's so important.

[00:24:25] Sally Shaywitz: Sally Shaywitz 

[00:24:26] Sally Shaywitz: So when you know that you have something. And it has a name. And many people have it who are intelligent. That makes such a difference. 

[00:24:38] Susan Lambert: For my own son, this was a critical moment. When we sort of unlocked this idea and named the fact that he was actually struggling with dyslexia, then we could then help overcome. I could help him overcome it. I now want to spend a little bit of time on effective screening practices. Dr. Nadine Gaab emphasized the importance of having a cohesive system. 

[00:25:04] Nadine Gaab: You also want to think about the whole approach, right? So you don't want to just screen the whole world and then, or your whole district, and then don't do anything about it. So you need to really keep in mind like, good screening needs to be followed by good evidence-response to screening. And so that's important to keep in mind as well. We also want to make sure that the screener matches the student population and, you know, involves all stakeholders in the screening process.

[00:25:33] Nadine Gaab: So, administrators, special educators, general educators, caregivers, need to be on one page and need to understand what is the screening process and how screening different from, you know, diagnosis. And there's, you know, a whole bunch of other things related to how you should screen. But a good approach is to find a good screener, a good evidence-based response to screening, and most importantly, have really good Tier 1 instruction, really good curriculum implementation that addresses in the classroom already some of the important components that these kids are struggling with. 

[00:26:14] Susan Lambert: One thing that's important is screening students in their home language when possible. Dr. Francisco Paco Usro-Gonzalez joined us for our special miniseries on serving multilingual and English language learners, and he talked about this important idea. 

[00:26:31] Francisco Usero-González: If we have a student who shows the symptoms of dyslexia, we need to start focusing on their first language, you know? And once we know that the student is not going through only second language issues or challenges, we need to look for these potential symptoms of dyslexia.

[00:26:56] Susan Lambert: For much more on the topic of dyslexia and multilingual and English language learners, I highly recommend checking out that full episode.

[00:27:06] Susan Lambert: The big hope as we're thinking about identification for me is that we take that identification very seriously. Whether it's through universal screening, whether that's through the day-to-day instructional process where teachers can see that students aren't making the kind of gains that they should be, that we actually look at that and do something about it earlier rather than later so that kids don't lose time in instruction and intervention.

[00:27:37] Susan Lambert: And when we're thinking about intervention, first of all, intervene as quickly as possible. That could look like, this child needs to have smaller group instruction, more time and instruction. It might mean that this child needs one-to-one instruction with lots of time and reinforcement and practice. And when we think about that, you know, in the elementary world, K, one, and two, typically there's school structures that support that. What gets more challenging is when we have identified a student, they need more intervention, but they're moving into grades four or grades five. Or even more of a struggle, middle school or high school. Because typically school structures are not in place to be able to support that kind of intervention in those grades. And any listener out there that's involved with middle school or high school, we have to take that responsibility, right? We don't want to pass them on to the next grade and pass them on to the next grade.

[00:28:40] Susan Lambert: We have to find ways to carve out time so that kids can get the support that they need because the reality is that for many of our students, they leave school and their families don't have the resources to be able to support them in getting that kind of tutoring or intervention outside of school time.

[00:29:02] Susan Lambert: In this world of intervention, we need to take responsibility for getting students the intervention that they need to have so they are not leaving us in this next grade and the next grade, and the next grade still being nonreaders.

[00:29:19] Susan Lambert: As we start to wrap up here, I actually want to return to one of the first ideas that came up. That dyslexia is a continuum. Because in a way, it highlights a theme that's been running through this entire Essentials episode about dyslexia. That the bigger solution goes beyond the question of who does or doesn't have dyslexia. Listen to this exchange I had with Dr. Gaab on Season 4. 

[00:29:44] Susan Lambert: When it comes to dyslexia, I think there is, well, there's quite a few myths, but one of them is that you either have it or don't. Right? So it's a little more complex than just a yes-no proposition. Isn't that right? 

[00:29:58] Nadine Gaab: Yeah. it's more like a continuum. So it's not like, you know, a genetic test or brain scan that you can do, and you can see like, "Oh, this child has dyslexia and this other child doesn't." And I think it's also an the wrong question, right?

[00:30:13] Nadine Gaab: So we want to find everyone who's struggling with learning to read because reading is such a fundamental skill in our society or in most societies, that we want to make sure that we find everyone who is struggling with learning to read and make sure that everyone has a joy of learning to read or experience the joy of learning to read.

[00:30:34] Susan Lambert: Here's a related point from Dr. Odegard.

[00:30:37] Tim Odegard: That old mindset of having a disease state or not having a disease state, having something or not having something, black or white, is a real hindrance to our service delivery and actually making sure that we actually have protections for all students, regardless if they fit this black or white, up or down, you have dyslexia or not. We have a structural and systems challenge now. We don't have the right Petri dish to grow our kids in. Our kids are in dirty, mucky swamps, and we don't have the clean environment they need to thrive when it comes to the literacy development, and that is the fundamental challenge that we have to address, and that's why dyslexia parents are so up in arms.

[00:31:22] Tim Odegard: And what we need to do as parents right now is we need to change the dialogue and say, "This is about what's right for all kids. And this isn't about just dyslexia." The byproduct of doing what's right for all children will be that we can find those of us with dyslexia and we won't have to use a bloody IQ model to do it.

[00:31:40] Susan Lambert: And here's Dr. Lutrick. 

[00:31:42] Emily Lutrick: In the past we might have been much more inclined to say, "Okay, here is this particular therapy and it works, and that's what these students need." But we know that not every learner is the same. And so I do go back to the idea of structured literacy instruction and just the basics of that effective systematic teaching of foundational skills. So if you're doing those things, no matter what tool you're using, you can meet the students where they are. And some kids can go fast and some kids have to go much slower. And that's not something we've always understood about dyslexia either. 

[00:32:21] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah. 

[00:32:22] Emily Lutrick: But no matter what, structured literacy is the binding piece there.

[00:32:29] Susan Lambert: So as we come to the end of this episode, there's part of me that feels really optimistic about this, that there is a lot of knowledge that we can leverage to really help support kids and make them feel successful. And help them be engaged and feel part of the education and academic community. I think I also am optimistic that we're starting to talk more and more about dyslexia in ways that are relevant. And what do I mean by relevant? Ways that are sort of addressing the idea that we can teach dyslexic kids how to read. We can help them be successful reading and writing.

[00:33:10] Susan Lambert: And to have the last word for this Essentials episode, I'd like to go back to some of our young people with dyslexia to hear some final thoughts from them. Here's Margo. 

[00:33:20] Margaret “Margo” Malaika Weaver: School's not easy, period. And it's even harder when you have dyslexia or if you have an attention problem or behavior issue. It's going to be even harder, but I think you've just got to keep pushing really. And, and you are no less important than somebody who doesn't have it. If anything, you might be a little more special when it comes to certain situations, but you're not dumb, you're not slow. You just, you just learn differently and that's okay. And so you've just got to work just a little harder. Just a little harder. 

[00:33:55] Susan Lambert: Her cousin Elijah had this message for parents and caregivers.

[00:34:00] Elijah Valencia: It's okay not to know what to do, but just ask a bunch of questions to like other facilitators or like teachers or look into a program outside of school to help with school. Because sometimes parents, they don't know what to do because you know, they're not used to it or that's not how they were brought up, you know? So I can say sometimes they get frustrated with the child or with their self or both, you know what I'm saying? So just try to like take a deep breath and ask questions. 

[00:34:32] Susan Lambert: And here's Hayden. 

[00:34:33] Hayden: Give us the opportunities to be great and we will not disappoint you.

[00:34:38] Hayden: If you can help us, we can help you.

[00:34:45] Susan Lambert: Thank you for listening to the latest edition of Science of Reading Essentials. You can find all of our special Essentials episodes on our new resource site amplify.com/soressentials. That's where you'll also be able to access free high-quality resources, specially curated to compliment this episode.

[00:35:07] Susan Lambert: Again, you can find all of those resources as well as our previous Essentials episodes on writing and comprehension at amplify.com/soressentials. To hear more from today's guests, please check out our complete interviews. We'll have links right in the show notes. We'd really appreciate it if you shared this episode with a couple of friends or colleagues.

[00:35:32] Susan Lambert: We'll be back with more of these special episodes in the coming months, diving into other key literacy topics. And a special preview, on an upcoming episode we're going to dive deeper into the history of dyslexia research by sharing the story of pioneering dyslexia researcher Margaret Byrd Rawson, whose work dates back to the 1930s.

[00:35:57] Guest: Her study followed 56 boys, and she did it at a time where there wasn't any technology, right? She's following these kids by writing letters or going to see them. 

[00:36:08] Susan Lambert: More information on that very special episode to come. Next time we're getting back to our Season 10 topic of comprehension. I'll be joined by Doug Lemov

[00:36:19] Susan Lambert: for a deep dive into fluency and how critical fluency is for comprehension.

[00:36:25] Doug Lemov: Because it's such a simple task, we don't realize its consequences and its consequences are very far reaching. 

[00:36:30] Susan Lambert: That's next time. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.