What does effective instruction look like for students with dyslexia?

A recent conversation with an alumnus brought this question into sharp focus. When I asked what he remembered about fourth grade, he said, “I remember coming to Carroll and all the noise went away.” In a place where teachers knew how to teach him, he no longer spent his energy worrying about how others were learning — or why he wasn’t keeping up.

The conversation got me thinking about how we design instructional approaches where the noise fades, progress accelerates, and the learning sticks.

Most conversations about dyslexia education begin, and end, with intervention. But intervention is only the starting point. The goal is to design learning that achieves real growth and lasts: where skills transfer, confidence holds, and students carry their capabilities with them long after they leave school.

Why Intervention Alone Falls Short

Traditional models of reading intervention are often time-bound, isolated, and narrowly focused. 

They live on an Individualized Education Program (IEP) service delivery grid or in a tutoring block, separate from the core of a student’s day. While students may make progress, those gains don’t always sustain or transfer because they are experienced in isolation.

What distinguishes transformative learning environments is how intentionally the intervention is integrated, reinforced, and applied over time — like a path through the woods that becomes clearer and more defined the more it’s traveled.

What Does Transformative Education Look Like?

If we take a long view, the questions we should ask are: What skills did a student learn? and What stays with them?

Students need strong, explicit academic skills. And, just as importantly, they must develop the capacity to think critically, consider multiple perspectives, and take intellectual risks. Equally essential is agency — understanding how they learn — paired with the confidence to trust their abilities and the skills to advocate for what they need.

When I speak with alumni, they rarely point to a specific lesson or skill as the defining outcome of their experiences at Carroll — though many share fervently about their graphic organizers. Instead, they describe how they learned, how their teachers taught them to advocate, and the confidence they carried forward.

While skills and knowledge are essential for growth, transformative education is about who you become intrinsically.

Designing Instruction for Progress, Transfer, and Longevity

Of course, it’s important to probe what transformative learning looks like in practice. Meaningful progress is the result of purposeful, methodical design. When learning is intentionally integrated and reinforced, growth takes off. It accelerates. And for that growth to last, it has to transfer: when students apply skills across subjects, across contexts, and over time. This is what deliberate instructional design makes possible.

• Integrated and Reinforced Learning
  Students with language-based learning differences need learning environments that are both intensive and integrated. Skill development cannot be confined to a single block of the day. In a school like Carroll, intervention is reinforced across subjects and contexts, through language, content, and experience. When learning is embedded throughout the day, repeatedly, skills become more automatic, more flexible, and lasts. The results we see: students outpacing their previous benchmarks year over year. (Watch: Mapping Success: How Carroll School Monitors and Supports Individual Growth)
   
• Explicit Instruction with Purposeful Support
  Academic independence grows not from less support, but from well-designed support that evolves with the student. The Orton-Gillingham (OG) approach — the gold standard for teaching students with dyslexia — explicitly teaches skills, from part to whole, and then are applied and reinforced repeatedly. Students require opportunities to practice, receive feedback, and refine their understanding. Over time, supports are scaled back as students internalize both the skills and the process behind them.
   
• Intervention that Strengthen Cognitive Abilities
  Reading is more than decoding words; it also relies on underlying cognitive processes such as working memory, processing speed, and attention. What we have learned through our research at Carroll is that when these systems are strengthened alongside academic instruction, students are better able to access, apply, and retain what they learn. By broadening the scope of our intervention, we unlock the full scale of student potential.
   
• Executive Function as the Engine
  In addition to academic content and strategies, students need to master the process of learning. Executive function skills — initiating, sustaining, inhibiting, and shifting — serve as a navigational system that drives independence. These are the skills that allow students to begin a task, persist through difficulty, manage distractions, and adapt when expectations change. These are the skills that carry beyond school into every aspect of life.
   
• Multimodal Instruction
  For learning to last, it has to be meaningful. Multimodal instruction — engaging multiple senses and ways of thinking — plays a critical role. When students engage fully and actively, learning sticks. They are far more likely to remember building a living history experience or conducting an experiment than completing a worksheet. Deep learning happens and endures when it is experienced, applied, and owned.
   
• Culture and Relationship
  Students thrive in settings where educators hold both deep compassion for how they learn and high expectations for what they can achieve. This combination builds trust, fosters effort, and reinforces a powerful belief: you are capable, and we will help you get there. As this belief is internalized over time, students develop the confidence and fortitude they need to nourish a lifelong growth mindset.
   

The Outcomes Lens: What Lasting Learning Looks Like

When learning is designed to endure, the outcomes extend beyond traditional measures.

We see:

• Growth in functional benchmarks, such as reading fluency, where cognitive load shifts from decoding to comprehension (Graph: Reading Outcomes at Carroll)
• Students who initiate work, persist through challenges, and apply strategies independently
• Greater flexibility in applying skills across subjects and settings
• Increased confidence, self-advocacy, and understanding of how they learn

The most meaningful measure often emerges years later, in the former student who approaches new challenges with confidence. The one who knows how to learn, adapt, and advocate for what they need. Often, we hear from secondary schools about how they love teaching Carroll alumni who know themselves as learners and can advocate with confidence.

Reaching Potential: The Ultimate Goal

When learning is designed to build lasting capability, rather than remediating deficits, something profound shifts. The “noise” as described by our alum is replaced by fortitude, confidence, and possibility.