Manitoba Teachers for Students with Learning Disabilities

What happens inside the brain when a child learns to read?

Dr. Maryanne Wolf — Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA and a member of TDF's Scientific Advisory Board — has spent decades answering that question.

Her work in cognitive neuroscience has produced landmark insights into how the reading brain develops, why some children struggle, and what that means for how we teach. Her research formed the basis for the RAVE-O intervention program for struggling readers, and she co-developed the RAN-RAS test, now one of the best predictors of dyslexia across languages.

She is also the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain — one of the most widely read accounts of what the brain does when we read, and what goes wrong in dyslexia.

TDF is proud to count Dr. Wolf among the scientists whose work we help disseminate.

🧠 dyslexiafoundation.org

Teachers are not held to the high level of standards seen in other similar professions says Dr. Moats and Dr. Snow.

Society needs to look at the accountability standards to make sure educators know how to teach the children. Blind trust did not work out. Other licensed professions have a much higher standard of professionalism.

The USA, Australia and New Zealand are working to improve the job standards for teachers.

After all , the tax payers are funding the salary and benefits so they expect the teachers to know how to teach literacy/numeracy and keep up with their own learning beyond work training ( says New Zealand and Australia).

Society should be able to trust that the teachers license includes standards which prove they are up-to-date and have expertise to teach literacy and numeracy.

Society is counting on the people who are hired as teachers to have the skill and will to know how to learn beyond college and work training.

Meaningful and Consistent Professional
Standards Are Absent.

“ Other complex and demanding professions insist on much more stringent training and preparation than that required of teachers.

Pilots, engineers, optometrists, SLPs, and therapists, for example, must learn concepts, facts, and skills to a prescribed level, must conduct their practice under supervision, and must pass rigorous entry examinations that are standardized across the profession.

Continuing education to stay abreast of the most effective practices is mandated, not optional.

The public interest is protected by professional governing boards that monitor the knowledge base and oversee the competence of these licensed professionals.

We, the consumers of these
professional services, should be able to trust that any person holding a license has demonstrated competence and is accountable to their professional board of governance.

Dr. Moats

https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/moats.pdf

The school staff are getting step pay increases, cost of living allowances , health care work benefits and some lifetime benefits paid for by taxpayers.

Go here to see what your state is doing to increase accountability and create positive changes :

https://www.stateofdyslexia.org/

https://solar.blogs.latrobe.edu.au/

The children deserve to be taught literacy and numeracy so they can get jobs with benefits too.

https://www.ed.gov/about/ed-overview/federal-role-in-education

https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/bold-state-move-improve-reading

Many agencies and advocacy groups are working to improve teacher prep, teacher licensure and standards of accountability which society counts on for the well-being of the children.

DecodingDyslexia.Net

The Reading League
Cox Campus
International Dyslexia Association
WPS - Western Psychological Services
Parents for Reading Justice
Landmark School
MissPurcell
Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, Inc.
Wrightslaw
Sold a Story
Federation for Children with Special Needs
John Corcoran Foundation
Margaret Byrd Rawson Institute
Decoding Dyslexia TN

https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2017R1/Downloads/CommitteeMeetingDocument/113712

This substack from Dr. Doug Carnine, What Education Can Learn from Trusted Professions, is certain to be a seminal text that every educator and school leader should return to as a guiding force in moving education toward a trusted profession.

Read the substack here: https://douglascarnine.substack.com/p/what-education-can-learn-from-trusted

Key resource. Accountability. Licensure standards. Expertise. Tax payers are funding salary and benefits with these expectations.

Circa 1996, a teenage Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden sat in a classroom at Enskilda Gymnasium in Stockholm, arriving before her classmates every single morning, not because she was eager or energetic, but because she had to. She had dyslexia. Reading aloud in class was not something she dreaded quietly and privately. Her classmates laughed. They made fun of her stumbling over words, and she internalized it the way most kids do, deciding the problem was her, deciding she was slow, deciding she was stupid. She has said so herself, in her own words, at a bullying conference at the University of Orebro in 2002, where she stood before an audience and spoke openly and without a prepared script about what those years had felt like. The spontaneity of that speech struck people. She had not planned to share those details. She just did, because she thought it might help someone in the room. Her father, King Carl XVI Gustaf, has dyslexia too, and so does her brother Prince Carl Philip, so the condition was not unfamiliar inside the palace walls. Her mother, Queen Silvia, recognized the signs early and hired a specialist teacher to help her daughter work through the particular way her brain processed written language. Victoria arrived at school an hour before her peers, worked harder than anyone could see from the outside, and graduated in June 1996 with top grades. That outcome was not a gift. It was a result. She earned it, one early morning at a time, in a school building that did not always feel like a safe place. Years later, after the anorexia recovery, after Yale, after everything, she continued to speak publicly about dyslexia because she understood that her platform came with a responsibility to use it honestly. She said once that many people had not received the support she had, and she was right, and she seemed to carry that awareness without vanity. The girl who thought she was stupid became the woman who used her voice to tell other kids they were not. That is a kind of transformation that does not show up in official royal biographies, but it is the most human one.

From Dr. Timothy Shanahan….

“….I have written that it is possible to learn to read without phonics instruction. I draw that conclusion from the fact that various times in American history, instruction did not include anything like what we would consider to be phonics instruction and yet children learned to read. One reason phonics has value is because our spelling system, though complicated, is systematic. That means it can be taught. But it also means it can be learned — readers can deduce patterns from words without pedagogical support.

However, taking that statement out of context is misleading. Any time I have acknowledged the possibility of learning without phonics instruction, I have also stated two other facts. (1) Whether or not students receive explicit phonics instruction, they must learn to decode. That is an essential in reading English or other alphabetic languages. (2) Research makes it clear that while it's possible to learn to decode without explicit teaching, the provision of explicit phonics, morphology, and spelling instruction increases the numbers of kids who learn to read successfully and the average levels of performance that are attained. Studies show that explicit phonics instruction can play a causal role in improving reading achievement. For me, phonics/spelling/morphology instruction is not an option. “

Wow. Go Canada ! Honoring the remarkable Dr. Valdine Bjornson for her enormous dedication, compassion, wisdom , teacher training skills and exemplary lifelong learning.

She founded The Reading and Learning Clinic of Manitoba in order to provide evidence-based professional development to Manitoba educators and beyond as well as advocacy and intervention to students with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia.

She is accredited with the International Dyslexia Association ( Structured Literacy/Dyslexia Specialist), listed with International Dyslexia Association Ontario as well as accredited with the Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators (Fellow-in-Training - FIT/AOGPE).

She is a permanently certified Reading Clinician through Manitoba Professional Certification with Manitoba Education and Training.

She is grateful to be part of Teachers for Reading Canada - TFRC as Director of Teacher Training) which offers FREE Accredited OGA courses to educators across Canada.

1. Learn more here :

https://sites.google.com/site/valdinebjornsonreadingpower/home?mibextid=Zxz2cZ

2. https://sites.google.com/view/mtsld2021/home?mibextid=Zxz2cZ

3. Manitoba Teachers for Students with Learning Disabilities

4. https://readinglearningclinicmanitoba.com/resources/

Please join us for a 2 Day Event for MTS PD Day about Structured Literacy and Structured Math

Day 1 - Oct 22 - Structured Literacy
Manitoba Human Rights Commission - follow-up report from Right to Read
Dr Amy Desroches - U of Winnipeg - Dyslexia
Dr. Kim Hewlett and Dr Valdine Bjornson - LD and EAL students - Differentiating Support - Language and Literacy Unite
School Division - Structured Literacy

Day 2 - Oct 23 - Structured Numeracy
Dr Anna Stokke - U of Winnipeg - Structured Numeracy
Dr Benjamin Solomon. - U of Albany - Getting Math Right
Dr Amanda van der Heyden - Education Research and Consulting
Dr Stephanie Bugden - U of Winnipeg Dyscalculia
Marilyn Zecher - Multisensory Math

Follow-Up Sessions 26-27
After School online
Dr Solomon - Structured Math Series
Dr Desroches - Structured Literacy
Dr Bjornson - Grammar Infused Into Content

Beyond the Basics: Why Manitoba’s Shift to Structured Learning Signals a New Era for Education
For decades, the instruction of students with learning disabilities has been a fragmented landscape. Educators were often left to navigate a sea of competing pedagogical theories, attempting to bridge the gap between "balanced" approaches and the stark reality of student underperformance.

Hosted by Manitoba Teachers for Students with Learning Disabilities (LD), the event titled "The Time Has Arrived" serves as a manifesto for a new provincial standard.
The 2 Day conference signals the end of the siloed approach to foundational skills, marking the convergence of Structured Literacy and Structured Math. This is not merely a change in curriculum; it is a fundamental evolution in how we view the "science of learning." By moving beyond instructional fads, Manitoba educators are establishing a new evidentiary floor— a site for evidence-aligned instruction grounded in cognitive science.

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/the-time-has-arrived-structured-math-structured-literacy-2-day-event-tickets-1732687848999

Dyslexia doesn’t look the same for everyone — and science is beginning to explain why. This piece shares a deep-ish dive into one of the frameworks in dyslexia research: the Double-Deficit Hypothesis. The writer looks at what brain imaging reveals about each of the unique challenges that are hallmarks of dyslexia.

https://www.mnneuropsychology.com/articles/inside-the-reading-brain/