There's no mystery to it. Every student learns the same way — some just need more repetitions before it sticks. Everything I do is built on that.
The one idea underneath all of it
A child's mind can hold only a handful of new things at once — about four, for a few seconds — before they're gone. Long-term memory has no such limit. Learning is the job of moving skills from the first to the second, until they run without effort.
That's cognitive load theory, and it explains most of what goes wrong for a struggling reader. Ask a child to work out a spelling they've never been taught, and every scrap of their attention goes on guessing; nothing is left over to learn with. Teach them the rule first, show them exactly how it works, and then have them do it — and the same child succeeds, and remembers.
So I never ask a student to produce something I haven't taught them. I break each skill into the smallest step that can be taught to mastery, teach one new thing at a time against a background they already own, and take the supports away only when the skill can stand without them. Nothing is left to chance or guessing.
"In my other classes, teachers tell me something once and get angry that I don't remember. But with you, you just keep telling me until I can't forget."A Year 9 student, on how the teaching is different
The method
Explicit instruction is a well-researched way of teaching, not a personality. In the room it looks like this: I state the rule. I show it working on real words. We do it together, out loud, with me checking every response and fixing errors on the spot, warmly, before they have a chance to set. Then your child does it alone. Nothing moves on until the last thing is solid — accuracy first, speed later.
The programs I teach from are the Direct Instruction literacy programs developed by Siegfried Engelmann and his colleagues — Spelling Mastery, Spelling Through Morphographs and Corrective Reading — sequenced word by word and rule by rule so that each lesson rests on the one before it. They've been in use, and under study, for decades. I was pointed at them years ago by Lorraine Hammond, one of Australia's leading advocates of explicit instruction and now a professor at the University of Notre Dame Australia, when I asked her what to do about a Year 9 boy who couldn't read his own writing. Her answer was the start of everything on this site. Sentence and paragraph writing follows the same logic, using Judith Hochman's The Writing Revolution: one sentence structure at a time, built up from a formula.
English spelling looks random until you see the parts. Un-happi-ness, re-place-ment: prefixes, bases and suffixes, each with a job. Your child learns the parts and the handful of rules for joining them, so a new word is something to reason through, not a shape to memorise. With those rules a student can spell thousands of words they've never been shown.
Struggling readers guess. They look at the first letter, the shape, the picture, and say something plausible. I teach the opposite habit: read what is actually on the page, every word, and fix every slip the moment it happens. Fluency comes after accuracy, from repeated reading of text the child can already decode. Guessing is the thing we unlearn.
Good writing is built from sentences, and sentences can be taught. We start with a formula, add one move at a time — a joining word, a fronted phrase, a piece of punctuation — and practise each until it comes without thinking. The essay takes care of itself once the sentences do.
Why one session a week is enough
In a classroom I see a student five days a week. The question I had to answer before I'd take on private students was: how do I get the same result from one session? The honest answer is that the 45 minutes with me is the smallest part of the week. It's where the new thing is taught, properly, with heavy repetition and constant checking, so it lands. The learning is then made permanent at home, in two short daily doses:
Reading is done at home too, with you, a few minutes most nights: always a passage they've read before, finger on the word, no fuss over a slip. I coach you on it, and it's deliberately simple. Ten quiet minutes a night with someone who cares about them beats one block in my room, and most parents find it becomes a part of the day they actually enjoy.
Each piece is kept small on purpose — the worksheet under ten minutes, the app under ten minutes — because small and daily is what works, and because a tired child at 7pm does not need a big job. The detail is on What's in a week.
Measured, not guessed
Every student starts with a placement test that tells us exactly where to begin, and I keep the handwritten paper. At the end of a program we sit it again, side by side. The spelling improves; with the students who started furthest back, so does the handwriting — words that were scrawled across the lines come back neat and on them. Practice makes perfect. Hard to argue with a page.
In between, every session is tracked: a short timed reading check for accuracy and words per minute, the week's spelling test, and a written review to you after every session saying what was taught, how your child went, and what this week's practice is for.
I'll be honest about the deal. The work is slow, it can be boring, and plenty of kids grumble through it. I tell them that's allowed. Not one student who has finished the program has told me it wasn't worth it — and the ones who stop early are the ones I lose sleep over, because the last stretch, where the texts get hard and it all comes together, is where the change is biggest.
Every child begins with a full diagnostic assessment — reading and spelling testing, a clear picture of exactly where the gaps are, and a conversation about what comes next. Comparable clinics charge $250–500 for this. With me it's included.
Book your free assessment