Reaching And Teaching Any Student (In As Little As 7 Days)

Introduction

       For 10 years, a kindergarten teacher worked with supposedly “at risk” children in a small suburb of metropolitan Detroit.  At that time, the school was a primary school that went only to grade three.  The scores for the school were the lowest in the district.  Morale of the teachers had ebbed.  Parents tried much recourse to avoid sending their children to that school.  Subtle changes began to take place after the first year this teacher was hired.     

Within a short period, test scores on the Stanford Achievement Test for Reading and Mathematics climbed steadily.  The Metropolitan Readiness Test for Kindergarten, taken for years, no longer was given as an assessment.  The alternate-first teacher, to whom kindergarteners went when not ready for first-grade, no longer held that job.  That teacher had to obtain a position in a regular classroom, as there was no need for her any longer.  The remedial math aide did not have enough students to keep her full-time in the building.  The Chapter I remedial Reading Center announced that student enrollment had dropped.  The center had been comprised of students formerly from that primary school.  

What happened to cause this change?  Something was making an impact on the development and learning of children who were purported to be behind upon entering kindergarten.  As each year passed, more students left kindergarten having discovered the “joy of reading.”  There was no formal reading program per se, yet at the end of the school year, the staff from the Reading Center administered a reading test.  The children did well.  All the instruction involved developing and enabling the students in literacy skills to be ready for first-grade.

       This teacher subsequently went on to teach remedial reading courses in colleges and helped struggling students to read college-level material and write college-level papers.  The educational path finally wound its way to a College of Education and the work of helping future teachers to do the same things in their classrooms has brought tremendous happiness. 

This book is written to enable them to duplicate, in a systematic fashion, a successful educational practitioner who knows the “art of teaching.”