Cullinan Education Center

Cullinan Education Center offers instruction in reading, math, writing and grammar, and daily teacher-monitored study hall sessions. The program also offers teacher training workshops and Orton Gillingham workshops that focus on decoding and encoding skills. Instruction is planned to meet the needs of each individual learner using research-based programs for basic math and effective instruction in advanced math.

Cullinan Education Center was founded in 1990 by Joanne Cullinan. The center’s mission states that it provides science based interventions in reading, writing, spelling and math, taking what has been learned in the lab and applying it into the educational setting to support each individual in reaching their full academic potential. The program uses a multidisciplinary approach that draws on expertise from education, medicine, psychology, social work, and language theory, and a multisensory approach that uses seeing, hearing, feeling, and awareness of motion. It also uses a cognitive approach in which students are guided to understand the reasons for what they are learning rather than relying only on memory, and it offers emotionally sound instruction that focuses on successful experiences, self-confidence, and motivation. The curriculum is based on an adaptation of the Orton Gillingham method, which is described as a multi-sensory, kinesthetic tactile, explicit phonics approach, and the Orton Gillingham Workshop meets requirements for Assembly Bill 1369 that went into effect at the start of the 2017–2018 school year. The program is described as one of the few that include curriculum with training, and its Study Hall sessions are daily teacher-monitored group sessions for students whose grades do not reflect their intellectual potential.

Last updated July 2, 2026.