Hello World! A Message From Our Director

Hello World! This is the first post of the Structured Literacy Associates blog. It is a pleasure to be launching our new Lexercise Therapy Group. My name is Robert Belden and I am the founder and director of Structured Literacy Associates.

In this post, I would like to share a little bit of information about myself and how I came to be involved in structured literacy.

I began my career in education shortly after finishing my undergraduate degree. I studied international relations in school, but wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after graduation, so I decided to spend some time as a substitute teacher in my home town of Brookfield, Connecticut while I figured out my plans.

It turned out, that I really enjoyed substitute teaching, and after some consideration, I decided to become a teacher. I went back to school for my teaching degree and began working in Connecticut public schools.

In 2010, I heard of a job fair for International Schools at the University of Northern Iowa. I attended the fair and was hired as a teacher at The American School Foundation of Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico.

I taught at the American School for thirteen years. During this time, I found that exceptional students often looked to me for help and guidance.

In 2021 I decided to enroll in a graduate certificate program in dyslexia at the University of Florida. It was here that I first learned of the science of reading. In the science of reading I found a new passion. I was impressed by the huge body of research that exists about how we learn to read, and which practices can help young people learn to read, particularly those who struggle. At the end of the graduate certificate program, I was assigned a student, so that I could put the techniques I was learning into practice. I worked with this student online, over Zoom for forty hours over the course of two months.

I was so impressed by the gains my student made in reading in only a few short months, so much so that I decided to leave my job to pursue this work full time.

I very much enjoyed working online, so I was beyond excited when I discovered that Lexercise had created a structured literacy program that was purpose built to leverage the advantages of technology to provide structured literacy therapy online. I see Lexercise as a way to connect people anywhere in the world with high quality structured literacy therapy, unbounded by geography.

I enrolled in Lexercise’s training program right away so that I could become a certified provider for their program, and after completing their program I created this therapy group, Structured Literacy Associates.

If you are someone, or the parent of someone who is experiencing difficulties in reading, writing, language, or spelling, I hope that you will reach out and contact us.

Thank you for reading my story. If you’d like to know more about me, you can visit my personal home page.