Roberts Academy

Our core instructional programming is individualized to each student. Upon admission, our educational team develops a customized program for your child. We set instructional goals and revisit them frequently throughout the year. We closely monitor each student’s performance across time and use these data to guide placement within a program’s scope and sequence, instructional decision making, and adaptations to programming. The student-specific nature of our work ensures that we are working toward an eventual and successful transition to other school settings once your child’s time at Roberts Academy is complete.

Our core instructional programming begins with scientifically validated intervention programs. Rigorous research shows that such programs accelerate the learning of students with or at risk for dyslexia.

Dosage refers to the intensity of a program. We maximize dosage by scheduling multiple intervention times each day and by conducting interventions in groups of no more than four students. Small group sizes maximize opportunities for individualized questioning, practice, and feedback to students.

We select and adapt our core instructional programming for each student based on their strengths and needs. Grouping is flexible. That is, students may change groups so that instruction is always addressing specific their strengths and needs.

Our goal is to provide students with a strong foundation for future academic success in other school settings. Successful transitions to subsequent educational settings require us to base our work in grade-level standards to the greatest extent possible, and to provide students with access to the general curriculum, appropriate assistive technology, and aligned accommodations.

Our core programming promotes transfer of learning within and across instructional encounters—on a given day and across days. By emphasizing self-regulation and goal setting, we provide students with strategies to use and apply beyond intervention time. We embed cumulative review across instructional contexts and explicitly teach students ways to apply the skills and strategies they are learning in other parts of the day and, eventually, to other schools.

Our academic programming uses explicit and direct instruction that is systematic and structured. Teachers communicate through clear language, model skills and efficient strategies, build background knowledge, gradually fade (remove) support to build students’ generalization and maintenance of new skills and strategies, provide repeated opportunities to practice together and independently, and incorporate cumulative review interspersed within and across lessons. This approach highlights distinguishing features of the Orton-Gillingham approach to intervention: direct and systematic teaching; multisensory components across activities (e.g., auditory, visual and connecting sounds to the respective oral-motor movements); cognitive explanations; and linguistic-based instruction that integrates reading, writing, and spelling within lessons.

Core instructional programs are only as strong as the systems within which they are implemented. Preparing students for success is pivotal and requires attention to positive behavior support principles. Our core programming incorporates principles and methods known to increase attention and engagement, to support students in their growing self-regulation and executive functioning, and to minimize the likelihood of disruptions to learning. Our programming also involves teaching strategies to encourage students’ perseverance when learning gets challenging.

All of our instructional programming decisions hinge on collecting high-quality data. We begin during the initial screening process, which informs us about students’ strengths and needs to consider when designing instructional learning plans. We include assessment throughout the academic year for different purposes, including benchmark assessments, progress monitoring, diagnostic measures that inform instructional adaptations to ensure we support each child in reaching their instructional goals, and evaluative data to guide programmatic decision-making. Additionally, teachers collect daily intervention data that allows us to center data-informed instruction day-to-day, through diagnostic and prescriptive methods of teaching (a distinguishing feature of the Orton-Gillingham approach).

We all know the phrase “two heads are better than one.” Nothing can be truer for our data-driven conversations. Together, our educational teams examine data deeply to bring together an entire team of experts to inform our understanding of the whole child within an academic area and across their entire school day. These team-based discussions drive our instructional programming, instructional adaptations, and flexible groupings of students across the year. We also partner with Vanderbilt’s Department of Special Education to ensure our programming represents an innovative alignment to the most current groundbreaking, validated interventions from their teams of researchers.