Changing the landscape of reading in Puerto Rico

Multisensory Reading Centers in the last trimester has been focusing on increasing awareness and knowledge especially in professional development for educators. Disseminating research base knowledge is what will help in continuing increasing capacity in the educators in Puerto Rico and for them to better identify and address the needs of struggling readers and students with dyslexia.

Orton-Gillingham Teacher Training: It has been joyful to see a new group of teachers embark on getting certified as OG Specialist Interventionists. The last year was intense and even so, these teachers took the challenge to engage in a full year of learning. They will certainly make an impact on the students they engage with. We have a combination of teachers from the public and private sectors which is very exciting. We also have a group getting certified as Instructor of Teachers. It is great to see the OG Specialist community broadening. We look forward to seeing them all graduate in May 2022.

Professional Development at Vimenti Bilingual Charter School: During the summer MRC started at Vimenti a series of professional development. In the month of June 3 intensive ones were provided on the science of reading, structured literacy, and how to teach reading for all students. During this semester, as follow up one workshop a month has been given on one topic to go more in-depth on vocabulary development, reading comprehension, and writing. It has been a great experience seeing the interest of the teachers in gaining knowledge to bring to their classrooms.

Dyslexia Awareness Week: The first week of October is Dyslexia Awareness Week. It was an exciting week packed with several events to bring information to a variety of groups; teachers, parents, psychologists, and the general public. Some of these were an interview at local news, a podcast dedicated to non-for-profit organizations, and several public service videos on the importance of reading and how the brain learns to read.

Webinar: As a closing to Dyslexia Awareness Week a webinar was given on Knowing and Comprehending Dyslexia. The webinar focused on not only the importance of knowing what is dyslexia and the biological factors but also on the need to understand and have empathy in the process of educating and engaging with the students. The seminar was provided by Gabriel Azcurra a pediatrician from Argentina that has a specialist in the dyslexic population.

Our goal is to continue providing more knowledge with the aim that this transforms into awareness and service to students.

 As we all have faced difficultites during the pandemic, we look into ways to create collaborations and relationships with organizations and schools that have the same passion for the education in Puerto Rico. For such, we bridged out to create alliances with the vision that this could serve and impact students in the island. 

With such in mind we started a series of 6 workshops on literacy, how the brain reads, phonological awareness, and structured approach to reading, among other topics. The teachers received knowledge, practice, and materials for them  to put the learning into practice when the students come back to their classrooms in August, 2021. 

To continue building those bridges, teachers from other communities with educational disadvantages were also invited and donation of materials and books was made for their tutoring centers. 

We also continue to provide services throught our reading clinic, at this time still virtual throughout the intensive summer camp and very hopeful that we could start face to face starting August. 

As we embark into new initiatives, we've set the goal of serving and providing more professionals the much needed awareness of structured literacy in Spanish. Our fundraising goal for the next academic year will be with such aim. We know that this will be the way to create a further impact in Puerto Rico.