Under the leadership of Dr Jean Rattigan-Rohr, Elon Univeristy in North Carolina has initiated an innovative programme that supports public school students in the local community and at the same time strengthens the skills of its pre-service teachers by improving their understanding of why students struggle in reading.
If you walk into the public library in Burlington, North Carolina on a Wednesday afternoon, you will now see small groups of three or four people clustered around tables, on the floor - in any space available. In each of these groups will be an Elon University student from the teacher preparation programme and a struggling fourth-grade reader with his or her parents or guardians.
Following an analysis of the child's reading difficulties, the Elon students design intervention strategies mapped to the child’s specific learning issues. Parents or guardians are involved in the weekly instruction, so that they can continue the work at home.
Preliminary research has shown remarkable achievement gains for the children participating in the programme. An exciting, unintended outcome is how much the Elon students are valuing this approach. Several graduating students have already set up similar programmes in the communities in which they have now taken up their first teaching positions.
Over the next five years, in the Learning Differences Programme, we hope to fund organisations that aspire to advance the field of learning differences so that: students with a wider range of learning profiles will achieve success within public schools from K-12 and transition to college and other post-secondary opportunities.
We seek to work with organisations that address public school children whose learning profiles are not being adequately addressed in academic areas (reading, math, science and other content areas). We would also like to identify interventions and techniques that could be widely used in public schools.
To date, in the Learning Differences Programme, we have funded projects in the United States, and have supported a limited number of European projects. We will expand to include more international work in 2012.
We will continue to focus on projects and organisations that can identify, confirm and verify success, or help define and share best practices across a variety of interventions and approaches. We are mainly interested in funding initiatives that focus on Response to Intervention (RTI), mentoring and transition to college.
In addition, we hope to support grantees that can help fill gaps in the K-12 toolkit by:
We also feel that students would benefit from approaches that create a learning culture that expects and is prepared to address variation in learning. This would mean classrooms with teachers prepared to:
| Organisation | Project |
|---|---|
| Dyslexia International | International ECampus Expansion |
| Innovation Research & Training Inc. | Mentoring Projects Cross-Site Evaluation |
| Student U | Enhancing the Student U Experience |
| University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Supporting Transition, Access and Retention: A UNC-System Project Supporting Students with Learning Differences - Phase 2 |
| Abilities! | PROSPER |