Teaching the six components of structured literacy to the science, history, and biology teachers who can see a student drowning — but cannot name what broke.
I spent four years running dyslexia intervention with secondary students — teenagers who had been failing at reading for eight years and had built an entire personality around not caring. What I kept running into was not the students. It was the gap in the building around them.
A biology teacher knows a student is drowning in the lab handout. They cannot tell whether the breakdown is phonology, morphology, or syntax — so they cannot help, and they hand the student to a specialist who sees them twice a week. Meanwhile the student sits in that biology class every single day.
The design problem, stated honestly: content-area teachers do not need to become reading specialists. They need to be able to name the breakdown — accurately enough to act, in a class period, without a referral.
Front-end analysis produced three distinct entry points. Designing a single path for all three would have failed all three.
Has never been taught how reading works. Needs the vocabulary before he needs the framework. Shuts down when a session opens with jargon.
Knows the terms, cannot organize them. Needs a structure that connects what she already half-knows into something she can use on Monday.
Already running intervention. Needs depth and precision, and will disengage instantly if the course is remedial.
Six measurable outcomes and the evidence for each, built backward from what a teacher must actually be able to do. This does not move. A syllable rule is either correct or it is not — and a shaky version gets carried into a classroom the next morning.
Everything else was built in short evaluate–design–develop cycles, with rough versions put in front of real teachers early. Version one is meant to be thrown away — it is the cheapest possible way to find out you were wrong.
The failure I designed against: scope drift by prototype. An activity is fun, everyone likes it, and it quietly starts assessing something easier than the outcome required. Nobody decides to do this — it happens one reasonable cycle at a time. So every cycle closed with one question: does this still produce the evidence the outcome requires? If not, the activity is wrong — not the outcome.
The centerpiece activity. Teachers read real student evidence — a misread word, a garbled glossary entry, a sentence that stalls — and name which component of reading broke down. Six locks, six components.
A wrong answer does not return a score. It returns a guided hint, and the teacher tries again. That is a deliberate UDL choice: lower the threat, keep the challenge. An adult learner who feels tested on something they were never taught will simply close the tab.
| Signal | What it tells me to do |
|---|---|
| First-try rate under 50% | My teaching was thin. Rewrite that component's instruction — the learner did not fail. |
| One wrong answer dominates | Teachers cannot discriminate two components. Add a contrast slide, not more content. |
| Abandons above 20% | That lock is a wall. Cut the difficulty or resequence it. |
| Fewer than 3 teachers reached it | No decision. One bad morning is not a signal. |
Every wrong lock, hint, and abandoned run is logged and read against those rules. The activity is the instrument. It tells me what to rebuild without waiting for anyone to finish the course.
Six locks. Real student evidence. See whether you can name the breakdown.
Play Escape the 6 →