Stefanie Weisbach, a special education teacher for 15 years, has seen firsthand the positive impact Structured Literacy can have on her students who are struggling to read. One of her students at The Wheatley School, a New York public high school serving 1,571 students, who will be advancing to an AP English class next year, is a case in point.
The school uses the Wilson Reading System® (WRS), a Structured Literacy program, to help its struggling readers master foundational literacy skills. WRS teaches skills in sequential order, includes lesson plans that meet the unique needs of each student, is data driven, and gives students immediate feedback when they make an error. Stefanie finds the timely student feedback to be particularly effective. “When a student makes an error while reading, the teacher jots it down in the lesson and incorporates words with that same sound or pattern in the next lesson to ensure automaticity and mastery in that trouble spot,” she explained.
Student engagement and performance have increased meaningfully with WRS. Stefanie’s students are less afraid to try reading more challenging words since they have a secret—to look for word parts inside the word they know or just try to break up the word into syllables. She shows them how she thinks through reading challenging words metacognitively so her students can do the same thing as they are reading. As a result, her students are more persistent and often try multiple strategies while reading, demonstrating their increased confidence.
Stefanie knows WRS works because she’s seen measurable and consistent growth in her students’ literacy skills. “My students are accurately decoding rather than guessing,” she said. “When one of my students is not certain of a word, they use their strategies of breaking up each sound into syllables and known parts. And their progress is seen, not just in my class, but in all my students’ classes. They are attaining reading mastery across all their core classes.”
Stefanie was excited to see her rising AP student, Reagan, transfer the skills she learned from WRS to a recent English class assignment. Stefanie used one of the 10th grade English class texts, Night by Elie Wiesel, during Part 10 of the Wilson lesson. Reagan began applying decoding and word analysis strategies independently while reading a passage. What made this moment especially meaningful was her comment that using Wilson strategies makes reading feel easier, like she is “flowing through words.”
Stefanie’s experience teaching WRS has been gratifying. “The Wilson Reading System’s research-based, structured, and intentional design helps support struggling and dyslexic readers and writers,” she shared. “It helps reduce the students’ anxiety when reading difficult texts by giving them strategies to use while they read. And when the program is taught correctly, students have the capacity to move from struggling readers to successful and confident readers.”