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Hey, folks. [00:01:00] Welcome back to The Testing Psychologist podcast. Today, I’ve got Stephanie Tsapakis, who is the CEO and founder of LD Expert, a company that specializes in online reading intervention and academic tutoring for students with learning disabilities. LD Expert partners with neuropsychologists nationwide to build referrals and help students.
We haven’t done an episode on dyslexia in a long time, and this is a pretty fun and informative conversation for me to dig in and get the updates on where we’re at with dyslexia and intervention, and how Stephanie and her team go about supporting these students. We talk about lots of different things. We talk about Stephanie’s journey, starting the company, and some personal experience; having a daughter with dyslexia.
We talk about the way that they deliver this intervention online; which I was very curious about, how they do progress [00:02:00] monitoring in a way that is accurate and not subject to practice effects. We talk about length and duration of intervention. We talk about types of intervention, and what’s supported by research. So lots of information here in the episode for you to check out.
Before we get to the conversation with Stephanie, I’ll invite you to check out consulting options through The Testing Psychologist. At this point, the small group masterminds are full and running for the first half of the year cohort. The next cohorts will start in midsummer, but there is the option to do a strategy session if you just want to get some one-time one-off support in building your testing practice. Happy to chat with you. You can go to thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting to get more information and schedule a pre-consulting call to see if it’s a good fit.
[00:03:00] All right, let’s get to this conversation with Stephanie Tsapakis on LD Expert and reading intervention for kids.Stephanie, hey, welcome to the podcast.
Stephanie: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Dr. Sharp: I’m excited to chat with you as well. I think there’s a lot of overlap in the work that we do. So I’m very grateful that you are here.
Stephanie: Yes. Me too.
Dr. Sharp: I will start with this question that I always start with, and that is, why do you spend your life doing what you do?
Stephanie: It’s a great question and such a complicated answer, I’m sure, for everybody. I’ve always been passionate about education in general. When I was 7 years old, I [00:04:00] asked for a pointer for Christmas so I could play teacher. It was the only thing that I wanted.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, that’s great.
Stephanie: I knew very early that I wanted to be a teacher. And that evolved over my lifetime, through my career in education into helping students that learn differently, making sure that they could also reach their full academic potential, and just exploring the ways that we can reach these kids that maybe need some accommodations or content delivery modifications and things like that so that they feel successful too.
Dr. Sharp: That’s meaningful. I can’t believe you asked for a pointer as a kid. Did your parents get you the pointer?
Stephanie: My dad made one for me. I still have it in my office. It’s in a very prized place. I kept it in my classroom when I was in the classroom. My kids will try to play with it sometimes and I’m always like, no, that’s really special. You can’t touch that.
[00:05:00] Dr. Sharp: That’s a special pointer. Yes. That’s fantastic. Nice. Tell me a little bit about the origin story here; how did you come to build LD Expert?Stephanie: I was teaching in the classroom. My classroom career was primarily in private schools for students with learning differences. So every day on the way to school, I would call my best friend. She worked in an online company that provided speech therapy, occupational therapy, and counseling services to students in online schools. So we would often talk about how there was a need for dyslexia intervention in online schools, and it was a need that was not being met. And so it was something that we knew was there, but never really had time to do anything about.
[00:06:00] So then came COVID. When COVID hit and the world closed, we had all this time on our hands because everybody was home all day and everything was now moving online. So that forced me to convert my dyslexia therapy materials into an online format and gave me the opportunity to take a step back and look at my teaching career then decide, I don’t know if this is going the direction where I’m reaching as many people as I want to.So I decided to just tutor online for two years to see where that went. And that is what exploded into our wonderful company, LD EXpert now. I had so many parents looking for that specialized instruction that they didn’t feel like they were getting enough of or a good enough quality in their schools. [00:07:00] So I kept having to hire teachers. And so now we’ve made it our mission to serve students nationwide for dyslexia intervention, general academic tutoring needs and focus on those students with learning disabilities specifically.
Dr. Sharp: I wanted to chat with you because I feel like this is a question that comes up a lot among the neuropsychologist community or psychologist community. Certainly here locally, I feel like we have a really hard time finding good tutors who are following research-supported intervention and know what to do or have availability. There’s both of those problems.
Stephanie: Yes.
Dr. Sharp: Were you finding that as well? Was that a part of this?
Stephanie: Definitely. I think that is what initially was bringing a lot of families to us, is that [00:08:00] they were finding those struggles as well. It’s also partly what makes us unique for the company that we are.
When a neuropsychologist is looking for someone to refer to, I would imagine the majority of the providers out there are individuals, so you run into that availability issue a lot where they’re either full and you have to keep checking back in to see when they have availability, or you have to keep checking back in to make sure that they still have availability if you have been referring to them because that’s really frustrating for families when there’s a waitlist and they have to wait even longer to get their kid the help that they need.
So I think one of the things that anyone who’s looking to build that referral relationship should look for in a provider is, like you said, that they’re providing [00:09:00] research-based interventions, that they’re certified in that intervention, and that they’re able to provide that intervention with fidelity.
Because that’s one thing that those of us in the field get really frustrated about is we’ll have miss whoever, a retired elementary school teacher who happens to have the materials for an intervention program but never went through the certification process to be able to provide that program to fidelity and they’re advertising themselves as, hey, I’m using X, Y, and Z program, but they’re not always using it correctly. Not that they’re not still helping children, they likely very much are but possibly, the families maybe getting less bang for their buck in that instance.
I think definitely looking for someone that’s certified in the programs that they’re using is extremely important [00:10:00] as well as those programs being good programs to begin with.
Dr. Sharp: I’m so glad you brought that up. This is not something that I necessarily look for or ask about when I’m looking for folks to provide these interventions. Tell me a little bit about the certification process for some of these intervention programs and why that’s different than being trained into the program.
Stephanie: I’ll talk about the Wilson Reading Program specifically. That’s the program that all of our dyslexia therapists use. And so that’s the one that I know the most about here.
There’s a lot of teachers who will say that they’re trained in the Wilson program, which basically means that they have done the initial three-day overview workshop of that program. It’s a great introduction to everything. It explains all the materials. It explains the methodology behind all of the parts to the [00:11:00] lesson, but that’s basically it.
So from there you can go on to become officially certified, which requires Master’s level coursework to go through each of the steps of the program and that’s all online through the Wilson Academy in their company, and also a supervised practicum. So this has to be one-on-one with a student. The student that you choose has to be approved by the program specifically.
So we have to collect either a recent neuropsychological evaluation or maybe administer the WIAT or something that our qualifications allow us to administer, collect that baseline data and have the student approved before they are allowed to be our practicum student. That’s to make sure that we have the right profile that fits what’s appropriate to implement this program to [00:12:00] fidelity so that way we’re not wasting our time or the student’s time and that they’re going to do well on the program.
The practicum length is 12 months. There are some people that end up needing to extend that, so anywhere from maybe 12 months to 15 months, where you are supervised five different times and given an evaluation of your lesson to make sure that you’re delivering all of the parts of the lesson to fidelity before you are allowed to be supervised.
I will tell you that Wilson Language Training specifically is very strict on these evaluations. They do not hold back. They give very constructive feedback to teachers and they will not pass you in this practicum unless you are doing things the way you should be.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. That’s way more extensive than I imagined. I’ll be honest, I had no idea what to expect, but I thought you would maybe [00:13:00] say you had to do 50 hours of training or something, but this is like a full-on almost postgraduate degree or something.
Stephanie: It feels like it at times. There’s a lot of documentation with it and progress monitoring. You submit your lesson plans and the progress monitoring. And then at the end of the practicum, you administer assessments again to show the growth that the student made to make sure that the program was actually effective for them. So it is very involved. Obviously, well worth it because it’s a great program, but there’s a difference between someone who has been certified and someone who has not for sure.
Dr. Sharp: That’s good to know. So how would we know that? If we’re screening referral sources, do people put this on their website or do we have to ask? How does that work?
Stephanie: You could always ask. Gosh, those of us that do it, I have in my email signature, my Wilson, a dyslexia therapist badge. We get a little logo that we can use for [00:14:00] things because I know I’m super proud of it. I’m sure all the teachers who’ve gone through the program are very proud of it. It’s a lot of work.
They should definitely advertise it. I would imagine that they’re certified in the program, but for sure asking. If you say, are you certified and they’re not sure how to answer, you can always simplify it by saying, did you complete a supervised practicum with this program? The answer to that will let you know if they’re certified or not.
Dr. Sharp: Sure. That’s good to know. I want to talk about intervention programs. Big picture, I think a lot of us have heard of Orton-Gillingham and then there are variations under that. I think Wilson is one of those. I’m curious, right now, early 2025, what is the state of the research on intervention?
Let’s stick with [00:15:00] dyslexia. What’s the state of intervention? Is it still Orton-Gillingham? Are there other approaches that are effective? How do we look at this?
Stephanie: The International Dyslexia Association is the gold standard for setting the bar for those types of interventions when we’re talking about dyslexia. It gets a little bit complicated when we look at it at a state level because every state department of education is going to have their own approved programs for dyslexia intervention in their schools.
There are some states that don’t call dyslexia, dyslexia in the school. So it’s just an SLD in reading, for example, what interventions fall under that, but still Orton-Gillingham-based intervention programs are the gold standard. So they would need to be multisensory. They would need to have [00:16:00] the explicit instruction as a piece of them. They would need to be structured, sequential and follow that specific program. All of those things that an Orton-Gillingham program requires.
So that could be another thing that you ask about is how do you make sure that you’re meeting all of those standards of delivering a program. Especially because all of our services are online, we often get asked, how do you make your sessions multisensory if you’re delivering them online?
Dr. Sharp: Great question.
Stephanie: Fair question. Wilson builds a lot of that into their program with tapping sounds on your fingers, tapping syllables on your arm or on the table, and skywriting. There’s specific student materials for the Wilson program that every student should have a magnetic letter tile when they’re doing their session, and that’s for the spelling portion, the encoding piece of the session. [00:17:00] We purchase those for all of our students and mail them directly to their houses. So that way we do keep that multisensory piece in the lesson.
That’s another important thing to talk about when you’re interviewing a provider, when you’re asking about the fidelity of the program if they’re using all of the parts the way that they’re supposed to be used, and the materials for the session as well.
Dr. Sharp: Got you. How did you pick Wilson out of all the variations?
Stephanie: Good question. I stumbled into Wilson, lucky for me, because now, if I didn’t know everything I knew back then and I know it now, I would still choose Wilson. The high school in Ohio where I was teaching offered five or seven of us to be trained in Wilson if we wanted to. I was a 22-year-old.
Dr. Sharp: Bright-eyed in [00:18:00] search for things.
Stephanie: Bright-eyed, super energetic teacher.
Dr. Sharp: Ready to conquer the world.
Stephanie: I was like, I’ll do it. I’ll do more school. I just started my Master’s program. I was lucky that I did it early on in my career and then it was offered to me. I know now the reason why I would always choose Wilson is because in my opinion and in my experience with a lot of other programs, it is the most comprehensive in terms of decoding explicit instruction and the scope and sequence making sense for the decoding piece that directly ties into the encoding.
They have a lot of spelling practice and a lot of other multisensory activities for encoding specifically in the program that some other programs very much fall short of. They’ll focus on their reading [00:19:00] piece, the decoding and maybe even reading comprehension, but that encoding piece tends to fall off a little bit.
And then there’s also very explicit and detailed interventions for reading comprehension in Wilson as well. So in every lesson, if you’re doing all the parts of the lesson correctly, you should be hitting decoding, encoding and reading comprehension in every single lesson
Dr. Sharp: That is fantastic. I have run into a few folks who do Wilson. Barton seems to be pretty popular as well. I have a colleague here who does Barton. Those seem to be the main ones that I run into. I’m just curious how you pick.
Stephanie: Those are big ones. Here in Texas, where also Take Flight is a popular program, both in our schools and certified academic language therapists here can go through the Scottish Rite Testing Center to get their certification to become a cult, because Take Flight was a Scottish Rite [00:20:00] program, that’s typically what they trade in.
I think that’s a great program as well. My daughter was just found eligible with dyslexia at school, and she’s doing Take Flight in her school. I’m a Wilson dyslexia therapist, and I still have her doing Take Flight. I’m not doing any additional Wilson with her because I do trust the program. I think more importantly in the program though, is the practitioner.
Dr. Sharp: Okay, say more.
Stephanie: I feel like a lot of the Orton-Gillingham programs all have the Orton-Gillingham pieces to them. It’s not that one is so significantly better than another one. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still some pretty terrible ones out there.
In terms of the popular ones, I think that they all have positive things to offer, but the practitioner is so much more important because the child has to feel [00:21:00] safe with them, first of all. They have to be able to build a relationship with them so that way they’re engaged in the learning and none of these programs are scripted to the point where you’re not having to constantly use your professional judgment to make changes to the lesson to meet an individual need.
So I think that’s where the certification piece is very important but also just having an experienced professional practitioner who knows the importance of also having a relationship with the student is so important.
Dr. Sharp: That makes sense intuitively. I think that’s probably what a lot of folks say about the work that we do. We’re administering a lot of the same tests and it’s a similar process, but the connection with the client and the family is the most important thing.
Stephanie: It’s not fun to sit through hours of [00:22:00] testing. Phonics isn’t super fun in terms of all the subjects in school but if you have a relationship, then you can make it more fun. You can make it more engaging. You can make it more pleasant for the person involved.
Dr. Sharp: Absolutely. That totally makes sense. And that makes me think too about something that you said when we talked before we set the recording was that y’all try to focus on intervention that’s neurodivergent affirming. I wanted to spend a little bit of time on that. I’m fascinated by this idea of neurodivergent-affirming or just affirming work. This is something that a lot of us are thinking about these days. And so I’m trying to get everyone’s perspective on what that means. So when you’re providing neurodivergent-affirming, especially online intervention, I’m curious what that means.
Stephanie: So this is two-pronged for us. [00:23:00] There’s the piece that we do with the student during our actual sessions and then there are our business practices in our companies that we use. So to address what we do with this student first, no surprise to the community that probably listens to your podcast is that we oftentimes have comorbidity with learning differences. We have a lot of students that not only have dyslexia, they may have attention difficulties, dysgraphia, autism spectrum disorders, or you name it. All of these other things that are going to impact their educational profile.
So one of the biggest things that we need to make sure that we’re doing in all of our sessions with our kids is making sure their emotional, physical and sensory needs are met. That relationship piece, again. We always default to [00:24:00] prioritizing our relationship with our student above everything else.
Even if that means the first 10 minutes of our session we’re not doing any Wilson, we’re talking about what happened on the school bus, why your feelings got hurt, and how you can handle it the next day, whatever we need to do to make sure that the student’s emotional needs are met first is what we’re always going to prioritize.
That could also mean that sometimes we end the session 10 minutes early because they’re just squirrely that day. Maybe there’s a full moon and the attention is gone and I say, alright, I know you worked hard, let’s play a game today where we’re going to do this online game instead with our phonics role, we’re not going to worry about doing this piece of the session today. That’s one thing.
Movement needs is the other biggest thing that comes up for us. We have these students that have attention [00:25:00] issues, and we know that our brains work better when our bodies are able to move. So we have students spinning around in their chairs at their computer while they’re doing their session, maybe they’re standing up, sitting on a ball, or literally doing cartwheels in their bedroom on the screen. For us, it’s not distracting. We don’t think too much of that.
Some parents initially are horrified if they walk in on a lesson and they’re like, what are you doing hanging upside down on your gymnastics bar and reading? We’re usually quick to respond and say, it’s fine. They’re engaged. They’re doing the activity I asked them to do. If they want to hang upside down and read, it’s fine. As long as they can, we’re fine with it.
So just making sure that we know that when a student is moving around, it’s not to be disrespectful. It’s [00:26:00] not because they aren’t engaged. It’s just them expressing a need in order to stay engaged. We are experienced with it, understand it, and don’t take it personally is important.
Dr. Sharp: It is important. I’m glad to hear you say that. I feel like schools would be so much better off if kids could stand up or just move up and down a little bit while they are doing their work. It helps so much.
Stephanie: It’s why I bought a treadmill underneath my desk two weeks ago, so that I can stand up and walk a little bit. When I’m stuck at my desk all day, I need to move in order to stay productive. I’m allowed to do that. Why? Because I’m an adult. We should allow kids to do that and tell us those needs as well, for sure.
Dr. Sharp: It’s super important. I don’t think a lot of people watch the YouTube videos of these podcasts, but you can see I’m always moving [00:27:00] around at my standing desk. I’m stretching, moving back and forth, going on my tiptoes and whatever.
Stephanie: We’re both standing in this.
Dr. Sharp: Oh yeah.
Stephanie: Clearly we’re both meeting our own sensory needs.
Dr. Sharp: Totally. That’s great. I could see though, parents are like, what are we doing here? Is this actually working?
Stephanie: It’s something that I’m strangely passionate about this seemingly small thing because I think that somewhere along the line that became communicated as disrespect and it’s not. I wish that wasn’t so conditioned inside of us that you have to be sitting down, not wiggling around a lot, paying attention, yes sir, yes ma’am, in order to show that you’re respecting a teacher or engaged in something, and it’s just not the case. These are kids, man. They got to move.
[00:28:00] Dr. Sharp: Absolutely. I like this. So that’s one side of the neurodiversity-affirming approach. I’m intrigued by this component of the business practices as well. What do you mean by that?Stephanie: I have the saying that the families that we work with are the trees from which our apples fall. And this is very much the case in my household.
So speaking of myself here as well, I think a lot of parents probably when all of you psychologists are sending the questionnaires home, they’re filling them out and thinking, I did that when I was in school. I remember feeling like that and all of a sudden it’s like, wait a second, maybe I’m ADHD, and that’s why my kid has it, and this light bulb goes off.
We know that learning differences are oftentimes hereditary, and executive function skills [00:29:00] are oftentimes a little bit more lacking in those of us of the LD community. What does that mean? Things like scheduling appointments, paying bills, communicating, setting up consultations, and following through with checking your schedule and finding a teacher and all those things, those are skills that might be difficult for the population of parents who need to find a tutor for their child.
So having that in mind, we try to make the scheduling of an initial consultation very user-friendly and simplified with one button on our web page in multiple places. When we do meet with parents, we have the same ideas of how I would explain this to a child of what we’re going to do in the program. I’m going to explain it the same way because you don’t know the acronyms. You’re not a dyslexia [00:30:00] therapist. You don’t know all of the reasoning behind what we do. So really taking our time and not rushing that piece where we’re explaining the programs to our families.
And then from there, just a very simplified process of getting things rolling. So once we have a family decide they would like to contract with us which is another thing that we do in terms of our contracts, we don’t have any long-term commitments; not a friendly thing for neurodivergent families. We just ask for two weeks’ notice if you ever want to terminate a contract with us. And that’s more a protection for our teacher’s income more than anything else.
We basically just say, give me your best times according to your schedule and your child’s needs. Do they need a snack after school and some decompression time? Do they need to start right after school? Because at seven at night, they’re done. There’s nothing [00:31:00] else happening.
And from there, we do everything else. We schedule it, we reach out to the teachers, we send an email to the parent with the links from the teacher, the contact information from the teacher. We input them into our online software that does our scheduling, our automatic billing, and our automated reminders.
We try to set up our reminders so that it complements our cancellation policy. For example, we require 8 hours’ notice for a session to be cancelled. And so we send a reminder 9 hours before your lesson. Sometimes we tweak those; if there’s an early morning lesson, we’ll set those to a different reminder time. But we have those and then we have a two-hour reminder that comes through email as well and just trying really hard to build in as many accommodations as we can specifically for executive function skills.
[00:32:00] Dr. Sharp: I like all of those things. These are ideas a lot of us can put into effect in our businesses because that applies to us too; the kids that we’re assessing typically have adult parents who are similar in some regards.Stephanie: Yes.
Dr. Sharp: These are great ideas. I’m going to ask you a detailed question because I’m curious in this, and that is, what software do you use for billing, scheduling reminders? What’s the tech stack here?
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All right, let’s get back to the podcast.
Stephanie: Good question. So right now we’re using something called TutorBird, which is great for us. It’s amazing. All of our teachers have their own login with their own schedule. They can put their availability in there, although we have a separate document where they keep all of their availability and they can tell us, green means I want to work here. Pink means I do it if I have to. Gray means I’m definitely not available.
That works really well because it does our invoices automatically and that’s [00:35:00] directly related to the schedule on there. So if a teacher deletes a session, immediately the account gets updated and all of that stuff is connected, which is really nice. We would love eventually to have our own platform that’s a pipe dream, especially if my business partner would really like to have that one day.
I’m more of the cautious one in that I think, oh my gosh, that would be such a headache to have to change everything over to our own system if we ever want to do that but she’s really passionate about it. It goes back to that ease of use idea where if we don’t have to have a bunch of platforms, if we don’t have to have Gmail, TutorBird, Zoom, this, that and all these other logins, if it can all just be in one place, that would be great, but we don’t quite have that yet.
Dr. Sharp: We’re in the same boat. [00:36:00] I’m always trying to figure out how we can streamline our software and it is tough.
Stephanie: You can make your own for a bajillion-dollar, but we don’t have that either.
Dr. Sharp: I know that’s always out there but like you said, tons of money, tons of time. It is. That sounds good. Software is important. I like these neurodiversity-affirming practices on both sides.
Can you break this down just a little bit more for me? I am very interested to hear what this actually looks like practically. Let’s say, my kid is getting tutoring through LD Expert. What does it look like when we sit down to log in and then what am I seeing on the session if I were to watch?
Stephanie: You would get an initial email from the teacher that’s assigned to your student, and they’re going to have their personal contact information and their Zoom link in there. So that would be what you would click [00:37:00] on to start the lesson. That first lesson is going to be primarily relationship-building. We’re not looking to do a full Wilson lesson the first time we meet your student. It’s also going to be focused on collecting baseline data.
Part of the Wilson program is they have an initial placement assessment where it goes into detail of the scope and sequence of the program and having students read through lists of words in order of how the program progresses. So if I do this part with a student and the wheels start falling off the bus at list four, that tells me, okay, in step 4 of the program, we’re likely going to need to slow things down, dig in and focus on that part. So we would collect the baseline data and then we would share that with [00:38:00] you.
Another great thing that TutorBird does is when our teachers go in and they write up the lesson summary for the day, they’re going to include in that, which is another really important thing to look for in a provider if you are interviewing providers for referral sources, is that they’re sharing data with their families every single time they meet with the student.
Dr. Sharp: Yes. I want to ask about that. Can I jump in there?
Stephanie: Do it.
Dr. Sharp: I wasn’t sure. I definitely wanted to ask about the feedback in the ongoing measurement process. So whether now’s the right time to talk about it or if we want to pin it and come back to it in a few minutes, you let me know.
Stephanie: I’ll throw it in here because it’s part of what to expect from your lesson. So I think this is a perfect place to talk about it. Our teacher would go in, they would put in their session notes, they’re going to include the data in there. Wilson specifically has a charting piece where we’re looking for students to [00:39:00] read 15 out of 15 real words correctly or 13 out of 15 nonsense words correctly before we’re moving on. They’re going to have that data tracking in that session note, and all they have to do is click the checkbox that automatically emails it to the parent.
The parent also has their own login where they can go in and look at all of the session notes, the history of them if they wanted to, but they’re definitely getting that immediate feedback after every single session. And then from there, the kids get pretty comfortable and they are always usually pretty comfortable with technology to where parents don’t actually have to be anywhere near them for the lessons typically.
Even my 7-year-old who had her working with one of our teachers for a little while before she was officially qualified with dyslexia when she was going through the testing process with the school, she did not need me there and she had never worked on a laptop before ever. She has [00:40:00] iPads and things in school where she’s worked on tablets before, but I was thinking, I don’t know if she’ll be really great at using the mouse or knowing what to do here. She figured it out pretty easily.
Dr. Sharp: It’s amazing.
Stephanie: It’s really nice. In terms of what to expect from a parent, there’s not a whole lot you have to do other than that initial getting them on the lesson and then you can monitor that data tracking piece and reach out anytime. Like I said, we give our personal information out to our parents. If you want to text me and ask questions, go for it anytime.
The lesson content itself; all of our teachers being certified in the Wilson program, they have copyrights to the material that they’re using because they’ve purchased all the materials. So that’s an important piece that we know that when they’re using the actual materials, they are the correct Wilson materials with the program. We’ve put it into an online [00:41:00] format.
Wilson, in particular, recently developed online materials that align with their lesson. So instead of using a document camera to show the page, you can get on through the Wilson Academy and use their projected materials, which are really nice.
We allow autonomy to our teachers in terms of what materials are the easiest for you to use and what you feel like your student responds the best to. So maybe some students have a hard time with the tile board and they want to use one online, or maybe we have a student with severe dysgraphia and writing out this encoding spelling part of the lesson every time is super difficult, we’ll type it. We have a copy of the same page that we can project on the computer and you can use the annotate tools to type. In general, it’s basically the same materials we would use in person, but in an online [00:42:00] format to go through all the parts of the lesson.
Dr. Sharp: That sounds great. Nice. And so they jump on, they do the computer work, you’re working over Zoom. You mentioned you did typical words and nonsense words as two metrics that you’re looking at each time. Are there other metrics that you are checking on each session or periodically?
Stephanie: Yeah. We’re going to look at obviously that turning piece for the real words of the nonsense words every lesson. We’re also going to look at the encoding, both in terms of error patterns in the encoding, so that way we can individualize the lesson next time. We have a huge bank of words that we can choose from that align with the session.
If I have a student that’s really having trouble with digraphs, I’m going to pick a bunch of words with digraphs in them so that we can practice that. And then the reading comprehension piece as [00:43:00] well. Starting with the visualization skills primarily with comprehension and then from there using professional judgment to decide, do we need to draw this out? Should we draw this on the screen? Should we make something on Canva with clip art that has characters acting out the story?
It’s so important that you have that provider because the Wilson program is great, but sometimes we need to bring other things in that the student finds engaging and meets their individual need as well. That’s all part of the whole package.
Dr. Sharp: What’s the typical length of treatment?
Stephanie: Oh, that’s a tough one. I would say it’s typically 2.5 to 3 years to complete the Wilson program, [00:44:00] specifically. I think that a lot of dyslexia programs are the same length. I know the Take Flight Scottish Rite program is 2 years, for example. Barton, also going through all of her steps, if you’re going to do the whole program, it should take around that long.
All of our sessions are an hour in length. We need that whole hour to get through all of the pieces of the lesson. If we have a younger student, we’ll modify it to where we’re doing half of a lesson one day and then the other half another day just for their age-appropriate needs. It’s important.
I think that the biggest piece with getting through the program is that you have to be committed to doing it year-round if you want to begin that biggest bang for your buck. The consistency is so important and that you’re not just doing it once a week. If it’s once a week only, it’s going to [00:45:00] take a way longer to get through.
Dr. Sharp: I was going to ask, is this two, three times a week for an hour?
Stephanie: Based on fidelity of the program, we would recommend three times a week, four times a week is ideal. The more, the better.
Dr. Sharp: Okay.
Stephanie: Primarily, our families stick to two and three days per week. We’ve started recommending very strongly that two days is the minimum. I’m certainly never going to turn a family away that needs help. For whatever reason, they can only make one time a week work, we’re not going to say, no, sorry, we won’t help you. You’ll definitely get more progress, see things moving along at a steadier pace if you can keep to that consistency.
Dr. Sharp: That makes sense. Can it be too much? Let’s say, schedule and emotional energy notwithstanding, just from a reading intervention standpoint, if a kid wanted to come [00:46:00] 7 days a week, could that happen? Is that realistic?
Stephanie: I have never personally experienced a child wanting to come 7 days a week, but if they did, no, there really couldn’t be too much. It’s like saying, can we read aloud too much to our kids? No. Do we all want to sit in front of the bookshelf all day, reading aloud all day, every day? No, we want to do other things, too. You can’t do it too much. There isn’t so much intervention where it would be detrimental.
Dr. Sharp: Got you. I would have to imagine, you tell me though, are most of the students coming after school? It seems like the availability would be limited because you have to squeeze them in between three and seven o’clock or whatever.
Stephanie: That’s part of the reason why we have 30 teachers and whenever our teachers are getting full, we just hire more. Going back to that piece when you’re looking for a provider, if they’re [00:47:00] full, they’re full. And so that might be one benefit to going with a company like ourselves that has multiple providers is that way we have more availability.
A lot of times so many parents get frustrated because their tutor can simply no longer help them. Maybe they’re having a baby, they just over-committed themselves, they’re moving or whatever the reason may be, but that happens a lot that individuals just for one reason or another end up having to stop services and recommend that families find someone else for their child.
In the rare event that something happens with one of our teachers, we have had two teachers have babies, for example, we have this large team that can come in right where that person left off, using the same exact materials, and just continue with the child, which is a really great benefit. I don’t even remember what you [00:48:00] asked me, I went on a tangent there.
Dr. Sharp: I was just talking about the availability and the hours that people, so you just go into it. You just know, hey, my staff is going to be working three to seven o’clock most nights. That’s just how it works. That’s just the kind of business.
Stephanie: It is. We hire almost two schedules of staff. We have people that have daytime availability that serve homeschool students. We do also contract with school districts that maybe it’s a rural district that cannot find dyslexia therapists to come to campus, we can provide services online for those schools. Sometimes schools get sued, and parents have the right to choose their own provider to provide services to students during the school day, we have people that are available during those hours to provide those services, but primarily, most of our students are at those [00:49:00] after school times.
When we’re hiring, we put that in the job posting that these are the hours you would be working, and a lot of times it’s actually good for teachers, even young mothers that want to be home with their kids during the day and they know that they can have a spouse or other childcare in the evenings and work for maybe two or three hours a few times a week and generate a nice income for themselves.
Dr. Sharp: Good perspective, certainly. I have to ask how much it costs. If we’re talking about going two, three, four, five times a week, what can people expect?
Stephanie: This is another thing I think is important for the referral piece; to make sure that you’re not referring to someone who’s super expensive. So nationally speaking, in terms of Wilson-specific lessons, people who are certified tend to be anywhere from $60 to $120 an hour. There’s a very wide range.
[00:50:00] For us personally, we charge $70 per hour for dyslexia intervention services and $55 an hour for tutoring. That’s another value of our company where we want to be able to pay our teachers as much of that hourly piece as we can so that way we can keep teachers, but also have enough to run the business as well.They’re supporting our teachers in making sure that they don’t have to do extra things. As much as we can prepare materials and have outlines for lessons, we do all of that for our teachers so they’re not spending an hour prepping for a session and then an hour teaching and only get paid for one of those hours.
We try to keep it affordable for families because like you said, it’s two times a week. Private intervention is simply expensive. In this day and age, life is very expensive and we understand that. So that’s another reason [00:51:00] why we would never say if you can only afford once per week, we’re not going to help you.
Dr. Sharp: Right. This strikes me as any number of other things where if it’s important, a lot of families hopefully can find a way to do it. Many of us pay a lot of money for our kids to do sports, activities, or whatever it may be and this is another line item in the family budget then. It feels important.
Stephanie: It’s true. It should be temporary too, like I said, two to three years, which is not a short amount of time. Once you finish a program like this, if it’s done to fidelity, if it’s done correctly, this isn’t the type of tutoring that you continue on for your whole life. It’s not like I have trouble with math calculation, and I’m always going to have trouble with math calculation. These types of [00:52:00] interventions specific to dyslexia, once you finish the program, we should see your standard scores go up, 1,2,3 standard deviations to where you’re able to read in the average range, if not much closer to grade level content.
I think that’s one thing when you look at your investment from a parent standpoint, you want to find someone who’s going to give the best quality instructions. That way, you just pay for it once. You don’t start off with a person who’s $20 an hour because they’re super cheap to realize they don’t know what they’re doing. And now you’ve dumped all this money and a year’s worth of time into this person who wasn’t really doing what they should have been doing, or maybe what you thought they were supposed to be doing, and your student didn’t progress enough.
Dr. Sharp: I got you. You break up a good point that I wanted to ask about, which is expectations, and what kind of expectations parents can have. I [00:53:00] typically, when I’m sending folks for this kind of intervention, I try to be almost overly conservative and tell them, hey, reading’s never going to be a strong point and we can get them hopefully into the average range. Is that an appropriate expectation setting or not?
Stephanie: I love that you said that. I love your and in there instead of but. We don’t want to disqualify the previous statement. No, I think that’s totally reasonable. We always tell families too, dyslexia specifically, it’s not something that’s going to go away. We can’t cure dyslexia, but there’s very effective treatments for dyslexia.
I wish even in our schools, if we had better Tier 1 instruction, the general education classroom, the instruction that everybody is getting, if we could get [00:54:00] that to align with the science of reading, we would have a lot less kids needing this very explicit, intensive intervention. That’s a conversation for another day with our educational system.
Dr. Sharp: That’s another podcast.
Stephanie: I don’t think that’s an unrealistic expectation to set for parents. It falls on the intervention specialist, where if you are working along through the program and you get to a point where you think, we have hit a wall, I don’t know what else to do, I don’t know why we’re not making progress or whatever it may be, that you should communicate that to the family and be honest about that. That’s something else that’s really important.
And also that means that you have to find a provider that understands psychoeducational data. I need to be able to look at the [00:55:00] report that you have compiled on this child and say, oh wow, our processing speed is 79. Okay, we’re going to need to accommodate for that and communicate to parents, I’m looking at their learning profile. Some of these scores would tell me that they may be more likely to move through the program at a lot slower pace. So that might be more towards the three-year spectrum or even longer than that depending on the child’s certain profile.
Just another reason why the provider is so important, because they have to be well educated on all of those pieces so they can also help set appropriate expectations for the family.
Dr. Sharp: That makes sense. I have maybe one last question just to tie it up a little bit. Is there a point where kids age out of effectiveness for this program? Let’s say, we see a fair number of 12, 13, 14, [00:56:00] maybe even high school students where we are diagnosing a learning disorder for the first time somehow, I don’t know how that happens, but it happens sometimes. So is there a point where the intervention is not as helpful as it would be when they are younger?
Stephanie: Definitely not. Early intervention is always recommended because the expectation when a child is younger is more reasonable in terms of closing the gap. So if we’re not diagnosing a child until 13 or 14, and they’re reading on a 2nd-grade level, our gap is huge at this point. It’s going to take a longer time to notice that gap closing as opposed to a 2nd-grade student reading on a kindergarten level, it’s a smaller gap. You’re going to notice progress likely more quickly, [00:57:00] both in their confidence and in their academic skills.
It can certainly be just as effective for 13, 14, even adults. We’ve worked with adults to read in the Wilson program. There’s no age limit on it. It’s just a matter of see that immediate result where you’re are like, I’m noticing this making a difference for me. When you have a wider gap to close, it’s going to feel like that takes a little bit longer.
Dr. Sharp: That makes sense. That’s wild. I didn’t even think about adults benefiting. That’s good to know.
Stephanie: We have a lot of adults that are illiterate in our country, unfortunately, and some of them are very motivated to get help because they just never got it in school. So yeah, we can use it with adults.
Dr. Sharp: It makes me think about this idea of accessible reports, which is a whole other discussion as well. We write these evaluation reports often way over the head of our [00:58:00] audience if the average reading level in the U.S. is something around 7th or 8th grade. We’re not doing our audience many favors by writing at such a …
Stephanie: It’s true. I have parents that seek us out for special education advocacy type services. They come with this FIE from the school and they’re like, I don’t know what any of this means. Can you interpret this for me and help me understand this and then what I need to do with it?
Okay, so you’ve told me my kid is an X percentile, what do I do with that? How do I help them accommodate for that or still achieve in spite of that or whatever it may be? It’s definitely a difficult hurdle. I think that all of us have to remember that we have to come out of our educational lingo in some of our super technical language for [00:59:00] for parents and kids too.
Dr. Sharp: Certainly. This has been fantastic. I have learned a lot during our conversation and I’m excited to maybe send some kids your way. This is super cool.
Stephanie: Please do.
Dr. Sharp: I’d love to. Good segue; how would we refer people if we wanted to?
Stephanie: The easiest way to refer to us is to just send parents to our website. On our homepage and all over the website, there’s a button to schedule a consultation with us. And that’ll take you to Calendly where it shows all of my availability. I’m the one who does our family consultations. They could schedule that at a time that works for them to meet with me and talk about our programs.
We have a resource too, that I’ve shared with you, that if you want to build a referral network and have multiple providers that you can refer to and you’re not really sure how to interview these [01:00:00] providers or what to ask, and what to look for, we’ve laid that all out for you in a handy-dandy handout with checkboxes and graphic organizers where you can compare different providers and the things that they offer, and then make the call that’s specific to your business of what’s the best fit for the clients that you’re evaluating, referring or whatever it may be.
Dr. Sharp: Nice. Yes. We’ll put that in the show notes as always. We love free things that help us make decisions. Great.
Stephanie: We do too. We like free things in graphic organizers over here, all of our teachers. So we’re happy to make those whenever we can.
Dr. Sharp: That’s right. That’s where y’all shine; those graphics. This is great. I appreciate you jumping on. I’m glad that we connected down at NAN and were able to put this together. It’s been great conversation. Thank you.
Stephanie: Yes. Me too. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Thanks so much for having us. Hopefully, we have helped a lot of people chatting today.
Dr. Sharp: All right, y’all. Thank you so [01:01:00] much for tuning into this episode. Always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and in your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes so make sure to check those out.
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