Course Reflection

Connectivism was the theory I wrestled with most. Structured literacy training conditions you to sequence instruction explicitly, you do not leave decoding skills to a network of loosely connected nodes and hope a student stumbles onto the pattern. Sitting with Siemens's (2005) argument that knowledge now lives in the connections between people and information rather than inside any one person's head felt at odds with everything I know about how a student with dyslexia actually acquires reading skill. What resolved it for me was realizing connectivism describes how I, as a practitioner, find and update my own practice, through Region 4 networks, IDA communities, and professional exchange, even while the students in front of me still need the direct, cumulative sequence Orton-Gillingham requires.

Andragogy was the most enlightening because it named something I had already lived. My Region 4 Dyslexia Certificate training worked precisely because it treated me as a self-directed adult with years of classroom experience to draw on, not a blank slate (Merriam, 2001). That distinction, between how a nine-year-old learns to decode and how the working teacher in my minicourse learns to teach decoding, is the hinge this whole course turned on for me.

Andragogy is the theory I am carrying directly into Decoding the Code, my capstone minicourse for content-area teachers on structured literacy and dyslexia support. The idea that adults need to understand why before they invest in how, that they learn best when new content connects to experience they already hold, and that they want ownership over their own learning path, is the actual design brief for that course. A ninth-grade biology teacher taking this course is not starting from zero. She already has a felt sense of which students are struggling to read complex text; my job is to give her the why behind what she is already noticing and let her build outward from there instead of lecturing at her. Every adult-facing course I design from here forward will start with an assessment of what the learner already knows and needs to solve, not a scope and sequence built around what I assume they should learn.

I am genuinely excited, and a little nervous, about moving into full development. The content is not the hard part. I have been teaching this material in classrooms and Region 4 sessions for years. The gap is production. I want Decoding the Code to feel like an interactive, self-paced experience rather than a slide deck with a quiz attached, and that requires more fluency with authoring tools, interaction design, and rapid prototyping than my classroom career ever asked of me. I am treating that gap as the next stage of my own development, not a reason to hold back.