Our unique story

CURSED OR BLESSED... I am not sure what to feel but this journey started back in 1960...

1956Peter Safar and James Elam invented mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. 1957 The United States military adopted the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation method to revive unresponsive victims. 1960 Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) was developed. this is very momentous, because it is not only my birth year, but just before my 4th birthday in 1964 I would be carried from the water in South Australia drowned and in need of CPR resuscitation. A doctor on a lunch time stroll resuscitated me and I believe this set a series of events leading up to this point where somehow I have cobbled a breakthrough method of teaching literacy and reading acquisition that would never have been discovered in the reasonable foreseeable future. After drowning and being resuscitated, like any little boy I played, went to school and was taught to swim!

The first inkling of something amiss saw me at the bottom of my class, having somewhat poor coordination, poor fine motor issues along with plenty of other things my (now wife - speech pathologist) says that indicates a low level of traumatic brain injury. My early schooling was difficult and I always performed near the bottom of my class.

Change really never occurred until 6 weeks before the 'matriculation' - year 12 state exams. Currently achieving A's in Biology, Economics and Geology, my Maths and Physics were a 'D' and 'E' respectively. I self taught myself the equivalent of two years of maths and physics in 6 weeks and achieved a 'B' grading for both. On reflection, that profoundly changed my perception of self, but also changed my understanding of the learning process and gave me insight.

Next came my formal training as a secondary teacher in a mixture of maths science and Technological Arts (read woodwork and metalwork teacher) and graphics ( architectural drafting & drawing).

Unbeknownst to me at this time, this framework is going to be vital in the future. My work teaching a student how to learn simple tasks like holding and using a saw, effectively using a hammer, a screwdriver, drawing lines, accurately measuring and cutting were all skills that I had to teach and effect change in my students.

The next epiphany came years later when looking back I realized that the same students who can't read very well were on balance the very same students who represented the bulk of my class cohort back in woodwork. These same kids learned just fine, they just never handed in their written homework!

We now introduce my exposure to speech pathology and its early role in what is now known as phonological awareness and its basic cousin phonics. My wife and I create a small private practice in speech pathology and literacy becomes an integral part of the business. Literacy is a hot topic in speech pathology circles at this time but it had not yet reached the education faculties who were still promoting the now disgraced whole language approach to reading.

As part of the business and working behind the scenes, helping edit and print our in-house workbooks and in earshot of many discussions a few bits rubbed off. The most profound was that it was only working some of the time and what could we do to help the others children?

Another epiphany..... as said in Apollo 13 the movie, "failure is not an option " in private practice, your success is only assured if you actually fix the problem and being a woodwork type of person who continually makes things and repairs things it never even occurred to me that you wouldn't just fix the reading problem.

Our next steps involved adding in the technical expertise of occupational therapists, optometrists and psychologists and even though they all contributed vital ingredients that proved essential in the long run, by themselves seldom worked very well but in concert they worked much better. We had a better rate of success with ever more students achieving worthwhile short and long term gains. We were on the right track, but still pretty much the same track as everyone else.

We are now in the early 2000's and there are now several software interventions appearing on the market all trying to somehow take advantage of the 'computer' factor as an intervention tool. Some of these survive today, but others have gone into oblivion. The most profound contribution to this was a software called cellfield. Its inventor was able to put together a package that saw a major shift in the rate of improvements that became a new 'normal'. We started seeing reliable results of comprehension scores up around the 2 year mark, also in a 2 week window. When other programs were claiming gains of 2 years in 8 months of effort it was definitely a step in a very different direction. The curious thing was that there was absolutely no exercises in the program that directly appeared to target comprehension, but somehow the gains were there.

Our clinic is now using a mixture of techniques and interventions and improvement rates keep improving with ever more difficult cases being solved.

Problems in our workforce see staff leave and I need to step in and teach the 'actual reading' part of it. So I did. I am a teacher. I have absolutely no specific training in literacy teaching so I just do what is instinctive. I teach woodwork. Meaning I teach just the same as I teach anything else that I would teach. I didn't know that reading was different as I had never been told so. I had never gone to any professional development to brainwashed with that idea.

My wife, as always, is professionally cautious and even though results were evident and the parents were happy that changes were occurring in good order, she insisted that I attend some PD to be up-skilled. Personally, I didn't see the point. If the universities knew the solution, then this poor literacy problem wouldn't be occurring. However I took it upon myself to do self directed reading and pursue lines of enquiry that to me seemed logical in the quest for answers.

Things started to get easier. Solutions came quicker but understanding why it was happening was still a mystery to me.

Enter schoolgirl rowing. I was an actively involved parent of two girls and an older boy and decided I could enjoy the activities better by being in a boat instead of just cooking the BBQ. I was encouraged to coach. Not knowing anything about rowing, I needed a mentor and was paired with one of the AIS Australian rowing coaches and Olympic rowing selector ( read - parent!) who also happened to be a university lecturer behavioural psychology and was of course an elite coach.

This experience gave me a huge aha moment one day when we instructed the lowest crew how to row. Break it down into tiny bits, do it in slow motion and do a tiny amount - perfectly. Five minutes later the girls could row and never looked back ever again.

Seeing the application of perfect technique in action also fit in to the concept by a pivotal trainer and olympian whose book I read some 15 years earlier. In essence, as a shooter... it is NOT 40 shots, but one shot done 40 times. He went on to train all of the major countries and olympic teams in the next era along with armies, soldiers, pilots and anything requiring consistent elite performance.

I suddenly knew why what I did was working. I wasn't teaching reading. I was just teaching another activity that happened to involve symbols, squiggles, sounds, names and relationships between the parts. I was also privy to the idea that when you teach any skill, you do it just a few times - perfectly and slowly, which in turn builds the brain, awakens the needed sequences, allows the synapses to fire and awaken the need for dendrites to grow.

The idea is born that learning to read can be a quick easy and predictable process if adherence to general rules for learning anything are followed.

The tedium of taking my instincts and being required to formally write them was my next personal challenge which really gave me no insight apart from being intensely frustrated that it took a lot of time, much more that I was happy to give. Why am I so impatient?

This was another critical ingredient to add. It was my own clinical depression.

Clinical depression for most of my adult life manifest as having an extremely short period of functioning in any given day. On many days I was only able to do good work for an hour or two. Outside of these times, I couldn't concentrate, would trip and fall, bump into things and in a nutshell not get much done. Fatigue was all consuming for many years and I was forced to learn from it. The lesson learned, you have to do it quickly. Going slow was simply not an option for me. My mantra became, now do it faster, make it simpler, think and it can be better!

The significance of this came from often hearing from other professionals that remediation in learning disabilities takes time, is nearly always very slow and by claiming that you can do it quickly shows that you are probably lying and making it up. It simply can't be done! Apparently.

Computers are now improving and it is time to try and build my own intervention from the ground up so a couple of willing parents come to my aid and create an empty shell with nothing in it. :( Patiently they show me how to put together a page and then another and another. POD is born.

Over about three months a basic version is created that actually works. The computer works and it works on the kids. Their reading also improves.

Next comes yet another major epiphany. I am working side by side with my students and like teachers for millennia, when their student stumbles, they try to understand the reason for the difficulty and rectify it. I did the same, but had the advantage of being able to

program POD so that the next student who journeys down this path will be taken logically along this same sequence that has rectified a problem in another student.

This is HUGE. HUGE. HUGE.

I became very adept at working alongside a student with my computer on and as the student would hit a blockage (think a missing brain link or a logical step is missing) then if I could reason why, I would immediately program a page(s), put it before the student and observe the outcomes. If it worked, it was kept, if not, then deleted.

This cycle of observation, hypothesis, creation, testing and evaluation became something that could occur in minutes and then be validated more substantially over the coming weeks. The results were so glaringly obvious it didn't require the PhD research process to validate it. That can come later!.

Over the next two years, POD was further refined by tackling the ever smaller groups of students for whom it failed to help in its current format.

Now it is quite unusual for POD to not do the job very well but this will always happen and be the constant driver of new research and product.

The car epiphany has only occurred in the last few months: We all own and drive cars, but they are so special because they actually work. They are made up of thousands of little parts that must each do their job, just like BR and POD. However, like cars, if you change any aspect or design of a car, even a little bit, the overall specifications and nature of the car changes and along with it how many people it may be able to carry, what load, how fast it may travel or how far on its fuel. Injust the same way BR and POD is simply a designed product that does certain things very well but not others. You should look elsewhere for the intervention that addresses particular deficit that BR and POD misses.