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Last week I gave a brief overview of Orton-Gillingham. This week I want to bring attention to the connection between Orton-Gillingham (OG) training and Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) training. LETRS is NOT a prerequisite for OG, but it is highly useful if you’ve already taken the training. And if you do OG first, LETRS will build up knowledge in areas where OG goes into less detail. In this post, I will elaborate on the overlap between Orton-Gillingham and LETRS.
The Brain
A huge overlap of both trainings is learning about how the brain learns to read. It is very fascinating, and attaining this new knowledge was a game-changer for me. When you learn more about how the brain develops over time as a child learns to read, it informs your teaching practices. It helps you understand better why some students have more difficulty learning to read and why others catch on so quickly.
Volume 1 of LETRS is an excellent deep dive into how the brain learns to read! I took LETRS training first and, if given the choice, I’d do it that way again. This laid the foundation for the beginning of OG training. In fact, I think our instructors didn’t go into quite as much detail because they already knew we had that background knowledge.
OG uses the knowledge of how the brain learns to read and takes it a step further by delving into what happens in a dyslexic brain compared to a non-dyslexic brain. That research leads to why the OG Approach to teaching reading works so well for people with dyslexia.
As teachers of reading, we are literally growing connections in our students’ brains! That is a heady thought! Excuse my pun, ha, ha.
Approaches to Teaching Reading
OG has a very specific approach to teaching reading. It follows 9 principles that you can read about in last week’s post Orton-Gillingham: A Brief Overview. What’s so great about OG is that it can be used with any curriculum. Once you are trained and certified, you can use the approach to individualize your lessons to make them more diagnostic and prescriptive. Another great thing is you have support from your Fellow and Fellow-in-Training, FIT, (if you have one) that will continue past your training. In fact, my FIT will be supporting me this year as I begin a new curriculum with my reading intervention students.
LETRS, also, discusses best practices for teaching reading. Much of what is taught overlaps with the OG Approach. Although OG goes more in depth, even what’s measured in the assessments are the same. As you complete the training for one or the other first, you will see the similarities.
Should I Take Both?
At this point you may be wondering if you should take both trainings. My recommendation is that if you are a teacher who works with struggling readers, yes, absolutely! As I mention above, LETRS lays the groundwork and OG paves the way. I do recommend not taking them simultaneously. Both are intensive trainings that you will need to have time to commit to them.
LETRS is supposed to be a two year commitment. One volume per year. For more information about LETRS, check out my post LETRS: What is it? And what does it entail?
OG is even more intense than LETRS at the Associate level that I took. It takes at least a full year to complete. I can’t speak for the intensiveness of the Classroom Educator level. I did not take that training.
Conclusion
This post was written with the intention to inform, not overwhelm. If you are a new teacher, reading this is probably overwhelming. It is a lot of information to take in at one time. My advice to you is to pin this for later and forget about it for awhile. You have more than enough to think about. But know that while the teacher workload is always heavy, it does get easier to manage and you will learn how to prioritize what is most important. Stay tuned for next week, when I will be sharing about my experience as an Associate level trainee.