Professional Bio
Lisa Barnett specializes in teaching literacy skills to people of all ages. She has been a public school teacher for over 30 years, with the majority in special education. She also tutors privately, presents nationally and internationally, and trains people world-wide in English Orthography through Structured Word Inquiry literacy practices through her business, Empower Learning Center since 2016. She has served on committees and organizations such as: the Michigan Department of Education Standards Revision Committee and as a Founding Member of Decoding Dyslexia MI, serving as a State Leader for five years. She is a published author of pamphlets, blogs, and articles, and will be publishing a new book soon. Her passions are helping people discover how capable they are as learners and helping educators bring an understanding to the English spelling system, fostering greatly improved literacy and critical thinking skills in their students.
Personal Biography
What started as yet another quick internet search for a better way to teach spelling, turned into a decade of learning, researching, teaching, and changing lives all over the world. As a general and special education teacher, I had always been frustrated with the way spelling was taught — mostly by memorization of patterns and “irregular” words. I saw some kids ace the weekly test but misspell those same words all the time in their writing assignments. I saw others baffled by even simple spelling patterns and being unable to apply them to other words. I saw multitudes of “irregular” words and wondered how in the world the spelling system had any logic to it. I saw kids frustrated, defeated, and self-loathing. I saw adults who avoided writing or were embarrassed by their lack of correct spelling. I saw people like me, who spelled everything well but held hundreds of tricks in their memory just to remember where to put an odd, unpronounced letter in a word, clogging up their working memory to a deficit level in written expression. Sounding out words did not work.
Fortunately, that fruitful internet search led me to study with some pretty amazing scholars around the world who taught me that our spelling system is well-ordered and logical; that it was built on an interrelationship between morphology, etymology, and phonology. It taught me how to think critically, analyzing spellings, histories and phonemes to help determine the graphemes. It taught me to find related words in history that may or may not share a spelling but share the origin and denotation. Those little denotations from history are a link in the chain to modern words. These allow me to think of an image that connects these words in meaning and in spelling. I no longer need a giant bag of tricks to spell, leaving my working memory wide-open to do more thinking; leaving my brain open to deeper thinking. I see these very things and more occuring for my students of all ages.
Ten years ago, through practice and encouragement, I completely shifted the way I teach in the classroom and with my private tutor students. Scores soar, kids think deeper and more critically. Smiles, curiosity, and passion for learning have replaced defeated looks and frustration. I am sometimes lovingly called the “Student Whisperer” because I can find a way to work with kids who have been given up on or who have given up on themselves. Some students need lots of time to reach while others are quick to unlock learning. ALL students, at any age, benefit from this learning.
I work with students, teachers, tutors, school districts, and many others who want to reach all their students or learn better themselves. I speak at local, state, national, and international conferences. I teach classes in SWI and work with small groups and one-on-one with students and educators. I am passionate about reaching all learners and training others to do the same.