Originally published in the Moultrie News.
My son’s first-grade class is using a new reading method called OG. Should I be worried?
You should be ecstatic.
OG stands for Orton-Gillingham. It isn’t new. It was developed in the early 20th century by Samuel Torrey Orton, a physician at Columbia University, and Anna Gillingham, an educator. Together, they developed techniques to teach reading to children with language-processing disorders, such as dyslexia. The process has evolved into a systemic approach for all readers.
OG gets good reviews from educators because it incorporates phonics and other crucial elements of what’s called the Science of Reading.
That means it’s sequential, teaching rules, sounds, letters and the like in a logical order, from basic to complex. Thus, kids master foundational elements (like letter-sound relationships) before progressing to more difficult skills (like learning prefixes, suffixes and roots — important skills for developing readers that have been abandoned by many of today’s reading teachers).
It’s also structured and explicit. There’s no imaginary or abstract learning favored by “whole language” methods. Everything is taught clearly and directly, which helps kids understand the “why” and “how” of what they’re learning.
Whereas many phonics approaches focus solely on the visual and auditory, OG simultaneously engages sight, hearing, touch and movement. Students don’t just see a letter and say its sound; they also trace its shape with their finger and write it down. This multisensory approach makes it easier for students to process and store what they’re taught.
What can you expect your child to do in an OG classroom? Activities like breaking words into syllables, using letter tiles, dictation and reading aloud all help reinforce the link between the written and spoken word.
There are drawbacks. The most serious is funding. OG requires teachers to undergo specialized training, which costs thousands of dollars. It’s a comprehensive method, so training one teacher to train others isn’t effective. And OG materials aren’t cheap, either.
More money problems: Due to its individualized approach, OG kids benefit from smaller class sizes, and that’s not where education’s at right now. Today’s schools are bloated with personnel who don’t teach anybody. If principals get their hands on extra funding, they’re hiring administrators, coaches and others of that species, not more teachers to reduce class sizes.
Does OG have a history of proven scientific success? Well, no. It has broad support from its practitioners, students and parents, but detractors argue that OG hasn’t been thoroughly tested in large-scale, randomized controlled studies. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, of course, just that it hasn’t yet sustained rigorous scientific scrutiny.
That’s not a problem for me. I prefer to rely on my own reason and trusted educators anyway, and teachers with OG experience sing its praises. One teacher whom I would implicitly trust with my own children’s education noted that it was a game-changer for her emerging readers.
Data from her school backs it up. Under an OG pilot program in grades K–2 last year, students taught by OG-trained teachers showed 72 percent more classroom growth than their peers in non-OG classrooms. The most significant gains were made by students who traditionally face greater challenges in reading, including English language learners, students with disabilities, as well as Black and Hispanic students. A narrowing of the achievement gap on this scale would indeed be a game-changer.
I recently saw a student from my first year of teaching. She struggled with reading, likely due to dyslexia. When her own daughter started school, she noticed similar struggles and wrestled with feelings of guilt. “I felt I had passed this on to her,” she said through tears. She heard about OG and arranged for her daughter to be tutored in the method. The result was a complete turnaround of achievement and attitude.
Will OG be the approach that brings us out of the damaging “whole-language” and “balanced literacy” experiments, wipes away the achievement gap, and puts reading instruction on a positive track? Only time will tell, but many teachers believe it’s worth a shot.
Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.