Building Readers’ Brains: A Structured Literacy Intervention, K-5

Evelyn Blalock is a teacher and academic coach with a doctorate in Special Education and endorsements in Reading, ESOL, and TSC. She has a Structured Literacy Program Certificate from Cox Campus and has been working with the Rollins project in her district for 2 years. She returned to the public schools after 5 years as faculty at Columbus State University to implement the research-based interventions she was teaching to her university students. She wanted to see what really worked with real children in real schools and to find the barriers to explain why teachers were not using strategies we know work. After over a decade intervening with struggling students in Muscogee County Public Schools, she has developed a structured literacy intervention that changes students from meeting the criteria for at-risk for characteristics of dyslexia to At Benchmark on STAR CBM probes. She was her school's lead for the Georgia DOE’s Dyslexia Pilot Project and Co-Chair on the MTSS Committee, and is now a Structured Literacy Coach under Georgia’s new reading legislation, Georgia Early Literacy Act (2023). When in higher education, she presented at CEC and AERA about her research on reading interventions. She was an invited presenter on RTI at the DIBELS Summit. She worked with the Oregon Research Institute’s scale-up research project for First Step to Success as a Research Assistant and as partners for her dissertation research. She worked with the New Mexico DOE providing professional development and support for rural and urban schools in their implementation of RTI and SWPBS.