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A classroom educator doing great work in a classroom is doing something really valuable. It's about the fit. A child who's been struggling for years, who needs intensive, individualized instruction, needs someone with the depth to match.
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I'm Jenny Sherson, ex-special educator turned dyslexia interventionist. It wasn't so long ago that I too was overwhelmed by balanced literacy versus structured literacy, education speed, and everything in between. Fast forward after many, many hours of self-driven education, and you'll see I've built a thriving dyslexia practice helping students from age 6 to 18.
My specialties? Working with a quote-unquote difficult, almost always to read, student, and breaking down the complexities of dyslexia into everyday language strategies and action steps. Your child has an IEP, and it has reading services in it. And months later, your child still isn't making progress.
So you ask why, and the school says, don't worry, the teacher is OG trained. And you exhale. Finally, someone said the magic words.
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But here's what nobody tells you in that meeting. Those six words can mean very different things. And sometimes the reason a child isn't making progress is that the person who's working with them isn't as knowledgeable or as qualified as the plan assumes they are.
So let's start with why this matters. If you've been in this world for even a little while, you've heard it. We have an OG trained teacher.
Our interventionist is OG trained. Your child would get OG instruction. And honestly, it sounds like the box is checked.
You walk out of that meeting feeling like you finally got somewhere, but OG trained is a phrase. It's not a measurement. And the gap between the lowest and the highest version of it is huge.
Same words on paper, not the same instruction in the room. And I'm not saying this to scare you. And I'm definitely not saying the school is lying to you.
Most of the time, the person saying it believes it wholeheartedly. They were handed a title and nobody ever showed them what's underneath it. So let's pull back the curtain.
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Now here's a quick refresher. Orton-Gillingham or OG is an approach, not a program. It's a way of teaching built on a set of principles.
And a lot of the skill is in the decisions the instructor makes in the moment, which means the person doing the teaching matters a lot. So how do you know how much training is behind the person? That's where certification comes in. Trained can mean almost anything.
A weekend workshop, a single course, a few days of professional development, certification is different. Certification means someone outside the school looked at the teacher's work and said, yep, this person meets the standard. Now there are a few organizations that certify OG practitioners.
And I'm going to walk you through the Orton-Gillingham Academy because that's the one I know best. And it lays things out really clearly. Other organizations have their own certification paths, similar levels, but different names for them.
So if your school mentions a different organization, don't panic. The ideas are the same. The labels just change.
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And a few you might hear about are the Academy Language Therapy Association or ALTA. And that's where you'll see the letters C-A-L-P and C-A-L-T, CALP and CALT. And those two also get asked for a lot right now.
And they are recognized right alongside the OGA certifications. You'll also see Wilson Language Training, the Slingerland Institute and the Institute for Multisensory Education or IMSE. There are also groups like the International Dyslexia Association and IMSLEC, which review and accredit the training programs themselves.
Different names, different titles, same big question underneath. How much training and how much supervised practice is behind this person? The Academy has four levels. So let's do one at a time.
Level one is the classroom educator. This one is built for teachers working with a whole class or a small group. At a minimum, that's 30 hours of coursework and 50 hours of supervised teaching over at least eight months.
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And during that practicum, a fellow or someone they've approved watches five full lessons. So it's a real foundation in the approach, but it does not qualify someone for one-to-one instruction. And that's an important difference because the child with dyslexia who needs intensive help is often exactly the child who needs that one-on-one level of training.
So level two is associate. And this is where one-on-one teaching comes in. At a minimum, there's 60 hours of coursework and a hundred hours of supervised teaching over at least eight months.
And during that practicum, a fellow watches 10 full sessions, not a summary, not a form the teacher fills out, the entire lesson. And the associate is still working under the guidance of a fellow. Level three is certified.
This is an associate that just kept going. Another hundred hours of coursework, so 160 hours total, another 200 hours of supervised teaching, so 300 hours total spread over at least two school years. And it's with two different students, one who needs the earlier, more basic work and one who's working at a higher level or has more needs.
At this level, the teacher is certified to work as an independent practitioner. This is someone who has seen a lot of different kids. Now level four is fellow.
Fellows are the people who train everyone else. They teach the courses. They supervise the practicums.
They watch the lessons and give feedback. To get there, we're talking at least 600 hours of supervised practicum over a minimum of six years. That's not a certificate.
That is a career. One more thing that applies to every level. Certification isn't one and done.
A certified practitioner has to keep learning every year to keep that certification. With the Orton Gillingham Academy, it's usually 10 continuing education units a year. So a current certification tells you something else too.
That person is still actively learning. So now let's think back to that meeting. Our teacher is OG trained.
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Could it be a fellow? Technically sure. Could it be someone who took a short course last summer? Also yes. Both of them can be described the same way and that's the problem.
The phrase doesn't tell you which one is standing in front of your child. Now I want to be really clear about something. None of these levels are bad, right? A classroom educator doing great work in a classroom is doing something really valuable.
It's about the fit. A child who's been struggling for years, who needs intensive, individualized instruction, needs someone with the depth to match. And the only way to know whether that match exists is to know what's underneath the label, what's underneath that certification.
So here's what I want you to take from today. OG trained is the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it. And you're allowed to want to know more.
Next time we're going to talk about exactly how to find this out. There's one question that gets you the real answer and it's simpler than you'd think. I'll see you then.
Now here's what you need to know. Every parent who gets their kid the right help goes through the same five steps and I call it the shift method. See the real problem, harness the evidence, interpret the data, and this episode falls under F&T, formulate the plan and track the progress.
That's the whole path start to finish. What we just talked about today is part of building the plan and tracking whether it's working because a plan is only as strong as the person delivering it. And if your isn't making progress, who is doing the teaching is one of the first things worth looking at.
If you want to know more, you can reach out to me by email or DM me on Instagram or Facebook. Until next time, bye-bye. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Literacy Untangled.
If you loved this episode as much as I did, head on over and rate and subscribe so you never miss an episode. If you want to continue the conversation or share your takeaways, head on over to our Instagram at Literacy Untangled and comment on your favorite part. I can't wait to hang out with you again soon.
Bye!
