Ravinia Reading Center & Orton Gillingham

The instructional methods conceptualized by neurologist Samuel Orton and the educator Anna Gillingham who turned Orton’s ideas into a curriculum, have made a tremendous impact on the lives of struggling readers worldwide. Orton laid much of the groundwork that connected the neurosciences to reading and teaching practices. Ravinia Reading Center Director Holly Shapiro, Ph.D., CCC-SLP is privileged to have studied Orton-Gillingham under some of its best, most notable practitioners including Jean Osman and also the late Paula Dozier Rome who actually knew Orton.

In 1999 Dr. Shapiro achieved the highest certification available from the Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators. Dr. Shapiro was the only Orton-Gillingham Fellow in the state of Illinois at the time, and one of fewer than 150 in the entire world. Shortly thereafter, Ravinia Reading Center became an accredited site in accordance with the Academy's standards for both a clinic providing appropriate reading instruction and for Orton-Gillingham training.

Orton-Gillingham’s systematic approach has been both helpful to struggling readers and accessible for most practitioners. Many commercially available packaged materials are based on Orton’s principles and are beneficial to practitioners who lack formal study of language pathologies and reading disabilities in a university or research environment. Some of those programs are better than others, but they’re all dependent on the knowledge and skill level of their practitioners.

In recent years, Ravinia Reading Center has invested considerably in the knowledge and talent of its staff, employing only speech-language pathologists certified by the ASHA, with graduate degrees and beyond. The academic and clinical qualifications of our teaching staff allow Ravinia Reading Center to offer customized instruction tailored specifically to each student.

As a growing reading center, the methods developed by Orton-Gillingham offered an instructional platform on which to build. As the years went on new discoveries about the brain and the linguistic underpinnings of dyslexia emerged and Dr. Shapiro’s ongoing work with students revealed areas of their reading difficulties demanding more thoughtful interventions. Orton-Gillingham certification is a specific template that doesn’t allow for some of the tweaks that Dr. Shapiro and her colleagues noted were essential to improve student outcomes. In order to continue to implement her evolving ideas, in 2009 Dr. Shapiro made the decision to disaffiliate from the Academy.

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