What 21 Student Reports Taught Me About Dyslexia, Neurodiversity, and Effective Literacy Instruction
An end-of-semester reflection from a structured literacy intervention teacher.
Yesterday morning, I had a conversation with a classroom teacher that has stayed with me.
She said,
"Sometimes I wonder if I'm just not a very good teacher because I have students I just can't seem to teach."
I don't think she's alone. Many teachers enter the profession with excellent intentions, yet receive very little training in recognising what dyslexia, ADHD, autism, executive function differences, or developmental language difficulties actually look like in the classroom. When a student doesn't respond to typical instruction, it is easy to internalise that as a teaching failure.
This week, I completed reports for approximately 21 of my current 27 intervention students, ranging from Years 3–10. I wrote individual comments, and then I decided to step back and analyse the patterns across the entire cohort. I was really interested to see what observations I could make.
Disclaimer - this isn't a research study or a controlled trial, it is simply my reflections from one term of observations from one structured literacy intervention teacher working with neurodiverse learners. I’m a bit of a nerd, however, and I do love to see the patterns that emerge.
The Cohort
The students in this analysis ranged from Years 3–10.
Approximately:
Student Profile Approximate Number
Diagnosed dyslexia 9
Diagnosed ADHD 5
Diagnosed autism 4
Hearing impairment 1
Multiple diagnoses Several
Suspected but awaiting assessment Several
The majority of students presented with more than one area of need, highlighting something I see frequently in intervention: neurodiversity rarely exists in neat categories.
Observation One: Reading Growth Was Strong, but Not Always in the Way You Might Expect
Several students made remarkable gains in oral reading fluency during the semester.
Examples included:
13 → 39 words per minute
26 → 54 words per minute
69 → 96 words per minute
84 → 116 words per minute
One student progressed from being unable to read independently to approximately 59 words per minute.
These are substantial gains and reflect the impact of explicit, systematic instruction. However, there were another group of students whom I have been teaching for a while who appeared to plateau, or even show a slight decline in reading rate. Most of the data above comes from students who have just started with me and show strong gains with the right type of teaching.
Initially, this looked concerning, and I always wonder if there is a problem with my teaching, I needed to make sure that I looked more closely.
Many had moved from reading Year 5 texts to Year 6 texts, or from Year 8 to Year 9 passages. Therefore, we can deduce that this increased complexity explained the apparent "plateau." This was an important reminder that oral reading fluency should never be interpreted in isolation, and I made a point of letting my parents know.
Reading rate, reading accuracy, text complexity, and comprehension all need to be considered together.
Observation Two: Accuracy Told a More Powerful Story Than Speed
One statistic stood out more than any other and this term it was particularly pleasing to note. Across the cohort, the vast majority of students were now reading with 97–100% accuracy. This tells me something important: that students were no longer relying on guessing.
Instead, they were applying morpho-phonemic knowledge accurately and consistently. For many dyslexic students, reading speed still remained below age expectations, yet they demonstrated:
excellent decoding
strong comprehension
increasingly natural expression
thoughtful reading.
This aligns closely with what we know from the literature. Many individuals with dyslexia continue to read more slowly than their peers throughout life, yet become highly accurate and highly capable readers. Fluency matters. But it is not the whole story.
Observation Three: Dyslexia Rarely Looks Like Poor Thinking
This was perhaps the strongest pattern across the reports and reconfirmed what we know about dyslexia not being correlated with intelligence. Dyslexia is a language-based learning difficulty. Not one of my dyslexic learners lacked ideas.
Instead, I would tend to frequently describe them as:
insightful
curious
humorous
articulate
capable of making sophisticated connections
possessing excellent oral language.
For example, one student independently compared a trophic cascade to a Jenga tower, and another consistently drew connections between thematic units weeks apart. I am starting to see this more and more as I vary the different units, but bring similar underlying ideas together.
Others could verbally explain sophisticated concepts long before they could comfortably write them. So we know that the challenge is never intelligence; however, the challenge is being able to competently express that intelligence efficiently through reading and writing. I believe that this distinction matters enormously.
Observation Four: Writing Challenges Were Usually About Organisation, Not Ideas
When I looked at my notes and data, across almost every report, the recurring challenge wasn't generating ideas, it was the organisation of them. Most of my students benefit from:
planning frameworks
sentence starters
talking through ideas before writing
explicit paragraph structures
reduced cognitive load.
Once ideas were organised, many produced thoughtful, well-developed pieces of writing, and it’s important to note that when we are working with learners who have executive functioning differences, the preplanning that goes into the writing makes a big difference.
Just remember, what can sometimes appear to be "poor writing" is often difficulty organising language, sequencing thoughts, or managing the cognitive load of writing, not a lack of understanding.
Observation Five: Spelling Followed Predictable Patterns
The spelling profiles were remarkably consistent, and I see this year in, year out. The most common areas requiring ongoing support included:
vowel teams
r-controlled vowels
diphthongs
suffixing rules
affixing
multisyllabic words
morphology.
As per usual, most students could hear the sounds correctly; however, the challenge was remembering which spelling pattern represented the sound. Again, this reflects what we understand about dyslexia. The difficulty is often not hearing language, as it is a language-based learning difficulty; the challenge lies in efficiently mapping sounds to the many possible spellings available within English.
Observation Six: Teaching Shifted from Phonics to Language
Perhaps the biggest change this year wasn't within the students, it was within my teaching. For many students, phonics became secure, and research told me that there had to be more.
At that point, the focus naturally shifted towards:
morphology
vocabulary
sentence structure
writing genres
high-impact academic verbs
concept words
background knowledge
analytical thinking.
One student in particular reminded me that decoding is only one part of literacy, as her phonics had become largely secure, yet learning remained effortful.
The breakthrough came not through additional phonics instruction but through reducing cognitive load, explicitly teaching vocabulary, strengthening semantic connections, and allowing more time for language processing.
That experience reinforced an important lesson: Sometimes we don't need to teach more. We need to teach differently.
Observation Seven: Neurodiversity Changes How We Teach
Looking across all 21 reports, one message became clear.
The most successful lessons were rarely those that contained the most content. They were the lessons that best matched the learner.
Some students needed:
repetition.
Others needed:
explicit vocabulary.
Others needed:
visual scaffolds.
Others simply needed more processing time. The instruction changed. The expectations did not. Every student remained capable of making meaningful progress.
Final Reflection
When I began analysing these reports, I expected to find improvements in reading rates and spelling scores, and yes, the improvements were certainly there, however, the biggest changes were often invisible to standardised assessments.
Students who could now sustain attention for an entire lesson.
Students who finally believed they were capable writers.
Students who confidently proofread their own work.
Students who began making sophisticated connections between ideas.
Students who saw themselves as learners.
If there is one message I hope teachers take from this reflection, it is this:
If a child is not responding to your teaching, it does not automatically mean you are a poor teacher.
Sometimes it simply means the instruction does not yet match the learner's cognitive profile.
The more we understand dyslexia, ADHD, autism, executive functioning, and language differences, the more we shift our thinking from:
"Why won't this child learn?"
to:
"What does this child need?"
In my experience, that question changes everything.
