Minicourse Idea, Knowledge Gap, and UDL Reflection
Presented by Tenneh C. Freeman
Minicourse Idea
Decoding the Code: A Foundational Structured Literacy Minicourse for Secondary Educators is a self-paced professional development course built for middle and high school content-area teachers who serve struggling readers and students with dyslexia. The minicourse pulls the Science of Reading and Orton-Gillingham principles out of the elementary classroom — where almost all current training in this country lives — and translates them into the secondary settings where reading still breaks down for roughly one in five students.
Across four short modules, learners move from understanding the reading brain to embedding daily structured literacy routines into their own subject-area instruction, finishing with a teacher-ready toolkit they can use in their next class period.
Knowledge (Learning) Gap
Secondary teachers across the United States are routinely asked to teach reading-heavy disciplines — English language arts, social studies, science — without ever having been trained in how reading actually works at the cognitive level. The overwhelming majority of dyslexia and structured literacy professional development is built for PK–3 teachers, even though the International Dyslexia Association (2020) estimates that 15–20% of the population has a language-based learning difference, and many of those students were never identified or remediated in elementary school.
The Texas Education Agency's most recent Dyslexia Handbook (2024) requires educators serving struggling readers to demonstrate proficiency in structured literacy, yet secondary content teachers in the very same districts receive almost none of that preparation through their certification programs or campus-level professional development. The result is a documented downstream problem: middle and high school teachers inherit students reading multiple grade levels below expectation and have no protocol, no shared vocabulary, and no instructional toolkit for what to do about it. This gap is not a knowledge deficit by accident; it is a systemic training gap created by the assumption that reading instruction ends by fourth grade.
Knowledge (Learning) Gap — Part 2
Decoding the Code addresses that gap directly by giving secondary educators the foundational knowledge of the reading brain and the age-respectful instructional moves required to support adolescent readers — without handing them materials designed for second graders.
The intended audience is practicing 6–12 teachers in general education, special education, and content-area classrooms, and the outcome is measurable: at the end of the course, learners will be able to identify a struggling secondary reader's likely profile, select an evidence-aligned instructional move, and apply it inside their own subject-area lesson the following week.
UDL Reflection — Part 1
The Universal Design for Learning framework, developed by CAST (2018), provides the architectural backbone for this minicourse so that it works for every educator who enrolls — not only the one who happens to share my background. Because the audience is busy secondary teachers with widely varying schedules, reading rates, comfort with technology, and prior exposure to structured literacy, all three UDL principles are designed in from the start rather than retrofitted on at the end.
To support multiple means of engagement, each module opens with an authentic classroom dilemma drawn from real secondary intervention cases (for example, an eighth grader who has plateaued at a third-grade decoding level), learners choose between a 90-minute fast-track path and a four-week deeper-pacing path, and brief reflective prompts connect new content back to the learner's own students.
UDL Reflection — Part 2
To support multiple means of representation, every concept is delivered in at least two modalities — captioned video, downloadable transcript, and a visual organizer — and key structured literacy vocabulary (phoneme, grapheme, orthographic mapping, syllable type) is defined inline with both written and audio glossary entries so the course does not inadvertently exclude the very neurodivergent adult learners it is teaching educators to serve.
To support multiple means of action and expression, the culminating performance task offers three submission formats: a written lesson plan, an annotated lesson video, or a recorded think-aloud. Teachers demonstrate mastery through the medium that best matches their professional voice and time constraints, while the rubric criteria remain identical across formats so rigor is preserved. Designing this way is not an act of accommodation tacked on at the end — it is the operating system the course is built on, and it is the same flexibility I want my own students to one day experience inside a classroom.
References
CAST. (2018). Universal design for learning guidelines version 2.2. https://udlguidelines.cast.org
International Dyslexia Association. (2020). Dyslexia basics. https://dyslexiaida.org/dyslexia-basics/
Texas Education Agency. (2024). The dyslexia handbook: Procedures concerning dyslexia and related disorders. Texas Education Agency.