Like most educators, I wasn't trained in the Science of Reading. My degrees were thorough. My curriculum was comprehensive. It covered all the strands of reading comprehension, hit every standard, checked every box. By any measure, it was a good program.

Still, I had students reading years behind grade level. Students who were trying. Teachers who were trying. And a gap I couldn't close.

I knew something was missing. I became a curriculum specialist to find out what.

Explicit. Systematic. Diagnostic. Multisensory.

An approach so grounded in how the brain actually learns to read that it worked for students who were in 5th grade not able to identify letter sounds. Students who had decided they weren't readers. Students who had never experienced what it felt like to decode a word and know they had it.

That was the missing piece. Not a new curriculum. A methodology that was classroom ready.