The Reading Teacher

Like addition, learning basic reading fluency is one of those things that has a massive impact on your life. When you become a fluent reader, you can spend your neurons on understanding what you read, you are likely to read more, and a virtuous cycle begins. Having taught beginning readers for several years, I can say that it’s also one of the most scientific processes. Look at any good balanced literacy curriculum and it will lead students through phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, reading strategies, vocabulary, etc. If you could create an app that automated and personalized this in the way that great teachers do, and then added in group reading and live teacher feedback, you could have a tremendous impact on the number of students who become good readers.

As readers know, I have an aversion to selling things to schools, and this one is a tough one, because teachers don’t want tools that dictate the approach as this would have to. So probably the best way to approach this is a fully online reading academy, set up for struggling readers, early readers, etc. Something like Kumon but focused on this one skill that is so important.