
A crazy story: From Nurse to Literacy Champion
My daughter was in 2nd grade and was put in her school’s Gifted and Talented program because she was in the 98th percentile in math. On the same Iowa test, she was reading a year below grade level and the spelling in her writing was atrocious. The principal told me her literacy struggles were because we’d moved to Michigan from Guam. He also said her dad was a doctor so she’d be fine.
I’d been a Neonatal ICU nurse for over a decade. That conversation with the principal dramatically changed the course of my life.
Six months of researching, observing programs in schools, attending reading conferences, and obsessing about literacy led me to a former college professor who owned a reading center. In 12 hours of instruction, she was getting students out of Special Education. Seriously??
As a PhD who’d taught teachers for decades, she told me the research shows exactly what one needs to teach anyone to read to their highest potential but they don’t teach it to teachers in college. That’s why she was no longer a college professor and instead owned a reading center. She was insistent on doing the right thing, even though it was a more challenging direction to take.
After reading the book she recommended, Why Our Children Can’t Read and What We Can Do About It by Diane McGuinness, I taught my daughter to read in 3 hours. Twenty years later, she is a highly successful, highly literate professional in Chicago. Check out this interview with Colleen sharing her perspective about her reading struggles.
After teaching many children in my home, I ended up opening a reading center. I had not formal education or experience in either business or education. A few years later, I created a system of reading instruction, EBLI, to help everyone — young and old, non-reader to great reader — read to their highest potential in an average of 12 hours of instruction. I’ve trained thousands of educators to teach this in classrooms. We’ve created online EBLI training so anyone, of any background, anywhere in the world, can learn how to teach EBLI.
EBLI has been a grassroots effort and has spread because people who have been impacted by it — teachers, students, parents, administrators — can’t help but tell others about this revolutionary instruction.
My goal is to teach the world to read and to ensure that others, like my daughter, don’t suffer unnecessarily because they haven’t been taught.
If you’re curious about EBLI, check out our web site: www.ebli.com. There is a very cool infographic video on the home page, illustrated by a Detroit graffiti artist and narrated by Nelson Lauver, a radio broadcaster who didn’t learn to read until he was 29.
Thank you for reading my first post. I look forward to sharing so much more about this crazy literacy warrior journey of mine that started 20 years ago. I remain determined to make a difference in the world by changing lives and improving literacy in society!
