Louise Spear-Swerling

Louise Spear-Swerling is a Professor Emerita of special education at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, Connecticut, where she taught for decades and prepared both general and special educators to teach literacy. She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Yale University and previously earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Connecticut. Her primary research interests include children’s literacy development across the K–12 span, common types of reading difficulties, and teachers’ knowledge and preparation for reading instruction.

Spear-Swerling has written numerous peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and books on reading and learning disabilities. Her books include Structured Literacy Interventions: Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties, Grades K–6 (editor), part of The Guilford Series on Intensive Instruction, and The Structured Literacy Planner: Designing Interventions for Common Reading Difficulties, Grades 1–9. Earlier works include Off Track: When Poor Readers Become “Learning Disabled”, Teaching for Thinking, and Perspectives on Learning Disabilities (co-authored or co-edited with Robert J. Sternberg). She has served on editorial boards such as Annals of Dyslexia, Teaching Exceptional Children, and Reading Psychology, and contributed to policy work in Connecticut on response-to-intervention and learning disability identification.