One cause of our national (and international) literacy crisis is that most colleges and universities have failed to adequately instruct our future instructors on proven, researched methods and materials.

In the Sold a Story podcasts released last year, an entire episode featured testimonials by dozens of teachers who said they had never been taught how to effectively teach reading to their students.

To help remedy this, NIFDI has partnered with The Reading Science Academy and Mount Saint Joseph University to offer a course designed for university and college professors who want to learn more about how to develop high-quality literacy courses based on evidence from the Science of Reading. Beginning May 15 through July 10, the online course The Science of Reading and Direct Instruction will meet. Taught by Drs. Marcy Stein and Dianne Kinder, this course will focus on the Direct Instruction (DI) approach, using Direct Instruction Reading (Carnine et al., 2017) as the primary text. Further, the course will address how to develop literacy courses according to the International Dyslexia Association Knowledge and Practice Standards. The course will be taught in two parts. The focus of Part I will be on beginning reading instruction (grades K-2) and reading interventions while the focus of Part II will be on intermediate reading instruction (grades 3-5) and content area literacy.

Click here to register or read more information about this important course.