A patriotic gnome statue stands tall on a teacher’s desk at Fort Worth’s Key School and Training Center. Instead of students, teachers are seated at desks shouting adjectives that describe the gnome. Together, they will construct a descriptive paragraph.
Apart, they will return to their respective campuses across North Texas to take the skills they learned at the Key School’s training center to help dyslexic students learn how to better read and write.
The Key School trains local teachers to become Certified Academic Language Therapiststo help schools better serve dyslexic students. A cohort of 13 teachers completed its second year of training this summer.
The program is more than just teaching dyslexic students how letters sound, said Melanie Royal, director of the training center. The students will have a textured surface to draw the letter so they can feel it, too, which helps students with dyslexia learn the letters.
“That’s a critical piece of when you work with kids with language-based disabilities,” Royal said. “They need that. They need the brain to come in at all the pathways.”
What is a language-based disability?
A language-based disability occurs when someone has difficulty processing language, Key School Training Center Director Melanie Royal said. It could extend to reading, writing, spelling or speech.
To qualify for the training, teachers must have at least a bachelor’s degree in education or a related field. The Key Center prefers applicants have a master’s degree, though, Royal said. To get a certification in academic language therapy, a teacher must have a master’s.
Teachers spend two weeks at the training center in the summer and they have to send videos of themselves demonstrating lessons to trainers throughout the school year for feedback, Royal said. Throughout the training program, they also receive curriculum and can meet with trainers.
Breaking down language
During the training academy in July, teachers didn’t just learn how to administer lessons. They practiced them as students.
Instructor Kay Peterson walked through ways to help students with language-based disabilities learn about descriptive writing. First, the class looked at the gnome statue on her desk and shouted out words to describe it.
“Shiny stars! Tall patriotic hat! Long, white, shaggy beard,” various teachers exclaimed.
As teachers shouted words, they wrote them down in a brainstorm box on a worksheet. Once they had all their descriptive words down, they moved words from the brainstorm box to top, middle and bottom boxes. The boxes will help them outline their paragraph.
Next, the instructor pulled out a red colored pencil and underlined all the nouns. Then the class did the same with a blue pencil and adjectives. Together, the class wrote introductory and concluding sentences.
Finally, as a team, everyone thought of action verbs for each box and created sentences to form a descriptive paragraph.
A patriotic gnome
A patriotic gnome stands tall.
He’s wearing a pointy, tall patriotic hat with shiny stars.
In a red romper, his crazy, long, white, shaggy beard is flowing freely.
He’s sporting red, white and blue leggings above his bulky feet.
He stands tall for freedom.
The lesson is about teaching the students how to bridge the gap between oral language and written expression, Royal said. Building the paragraph helps teach grammar skills and starts transitioning the students into writing on their own.
Teaching students with language-based disabilities isn’t about teaching words and memorizing what they look like. Rather, Royal said, it’s about breaking down language itself.
“We start introducing each letter and sound very systematically,” she said. From there, teachers can add letters to learn new words. Once students can break down the word “it,” for example, they can learn “pit” and “tip.”
From there, Royal said teachers work on what syllables are, why vowels after consonants are “short vowels” and other building blocks to understand language.
“All of this is very, very layered and systematic,” Royal said. “Lots and lots of repetition. Every day they go through every letter they’ve had. Our kids, the copier in their brain is not as efficient as we’d like it to be.”
Skyrocketing growth
Reading is one of the hardest skills students learn, and it’s used in every subject, Samantha Bryant, reading specialist at Anna May Daulton Elementary School in Mansfield ISD, said.
“It’s not just reading — it’s also phonics, grammar, spelling, writing — it’s all combined into one subject and you’ve got 90 minutes in your day to teach it,” Bryant said. “It’s such a skill that you need, no matter what you do in life. I couldn’t tell you the last time I used pi to figure out something but I am always trying to read something, write something, spell a word.”
Early in her teaching career, Bryant saw students struggling to read and knew they needed more time to improve their skills. She wanted to be the person to give them more time.
Once she became a reading specialist, Bryant said she tried to make her time with students a bright part in their days because any other part of the day that involved reading wasn’t.
She joined the cohort because her master’s degree didn’t prepare her for working with students with dyslexia, Bryant said.
Bryant is in her second year of training, which she said is harder than the first year.
“We’re all finding ourselves extremely exhausted because we’re learning so much more than we knew before,” she said. “We learn a little bit of something each day, a little bit of review each day, a little bit of something new each day. They call it drops instead of fire-hosing a student. Over time it’s going to stick with them because they have to hear things so many more times than a non-dyslexic student.”
Even after just one year in the program, Bryant said she’s already seen her students’ skyrocketing growth. She’s excited to see how much they’ll improve in the next year with the tools she learned this summer.
“(The training program) is what is best for the child. That’s our thing as educators, we do what is best for the kids,” she said. “I’ve seen the data in my own classrooms to support that.”
Kristen Barton is an education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at kristen.barton@fortworthreport.org.
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