I have always been skeptical when I read “new and improved” on a product. It always seems to me that soap detergent or bag of chips I was so excited about always seems to have been improved only by getting a new box and there being a lot less of the product in it, for a lot more. I wanted to spend a minute explaining why I have upgraded Great Leaps. Those of you who have been with us a long time know that usually when we make a change, we just add it and make it available to the public as an add on for no cost. Most of those who have been with us for awhile also know we keep our prices as low as possible and try to make the product as inclusive as possible; when progress has been made, there is not another product to purchase. In fact, when substantive progress has been made, we have, on our website, hundreds of Passages available at no cost whatsoever for download to help students select interesting fiction to read. My mission with this company is to help as many children as possible attain adequate reading skills at a very reasonable price.

               When I travel, I do my best to make myself personally available for the duration of the conference to those who have paid with their time, dedication, and monies to attend. When I speak at a conference, I wish to emotionally advocate for what we know works with children. I will never worry about offending or possibly offending those whose theories have disrupted education and actually caused harm to so many of our at risk students. But what I most look forward to, except perhaps sharing war stories from the frontlines, is answering the questions of young, energetic professionals who come with their questions. Having made every mistake in the book in my career, I am a perfect resource for them.

              Great Leaps has undergone some significant revisions that may not change what we get in fluency gains, but will most certainly increase gains in reading comprehension and may increase the speed at which the gains are obtained. The science hasn’t improved much beyond where we presently are, what I have been watching lately is hard science’s technology now getting to the point where it can actually show brain scans of the positive impact of our interventions. It has been nice watching the science of neurology prove what our data has been telling us for twenty-five years, that repeated reading, one on one helps, and immediate correction and modeling are all powerful interventions and motivators. Your old Great Leaps books are still as efficient and reliable as ever.

              Why then, were there changes?

              I have never been one to rest on my laurels or sit satisfied. I have spent my life working with primarily children of poverty in North Florida so I finished my teaching career with them. They taught me one final lesson and I will rely on my intuition and good luck to see if necessary changes can result. Our children of poverty in this land have huge expressive language deficits. These deficits result in low reading comprehension scores. Now, the typical knee jerk reaction when an administration receives across the board low comprehension scores in a district is to come up and purchase comprehension interventions. How I wish it were that simple.

              Such a strategy reminds me of the early days of sight reading errors. Children made high error rates on their high frequency words, so obviously, they must be taught them. This was done in isolation with flash cards and word lists. The problem was the intervention didn?t impact the error data one iota. The problem was not that the children did not know the high frequency words, the problem was in the fact that when reading in “chunks” children substituted other words for these words thereby changing the meaning of the passage or negating meaning altogether. Great Leaps was the first to attack this problem via “sight phrases” and though the intervention is now over fifteen years old, we remain virtually the only fluency intervention group using this very simple, effective strategy.

              I see the same problem now with reading comprehension. As I sat in a middle school library in Ocala, Florida, listening to the children speak; it became obvious to me that these children did not have the expressive language to even meet their own social needs, much less the demands of a moderate curriculum. I then worked a while in a local elementary school with the bottom five or so students there, just so I could sense what was destroying them in school. Again, their inability to adequately express themselves stood out.  No wonder we are encountering what I called a “third grade wall” concerning comprehension. Without going into considerable detail, it is my opinion that a child cannot score comprehension scores beyond that level at which he speaks and understands language. Couple this with the gargantuan deficits in language these children inherit (read the research in Meaningful Differences by Hart and Risely), the wall makes logical sense.

              Twenty years ago it was said, “If a child is not reading by third grade, he will never be reading.” We have proven that idea wrong a million times, now it is time to attack another huge problem. We know that a child develops most of their language developmentally from birth until age two. We also know that most of us will not see these children during those ages, we get them after the damage has been done. If the damage is permanent, then we have a huge percentage of our population “crippled.” However, the optimist in me wonders.

              What would happen if the power of individual communication were as powerful a motivator in language as it is in reading? Could we push that third grade score to fourth? Is there a point in language like the point we see in reading when progress starts to snowball without intervention? (In reading we have called this the independent reading level, somewhere between fourth and fifth grade level reading when we no longer need to teach as much reading but work harder motivate and expand it.)

              This is why there is a new Great Leaps. In the phrases section, I have now incorporated the 750 most commonly used words in conversational English with the express intent of pushing the growth envelope in oral reading levels. In the Stories section I have added (with considerable thought and debate) an entire section dealing with expressive language, where the adept instructor will utilize a minute or two of the student?s time, talking, asking questions, sharing opinions, and eliciting clearer and more precise language from the student in a very unstructured setting. The questions have been crafted to fuel expressive language growth; the amount gained is largely up to the finesse and ability of the instructor.

              I feel the new Great Leaps is a stronger product. It will not look drastically different from the old Great Leaps. What I have been pretty good at is taking research and simplifying it so that it can be imbedded into interventions available to all students. I have spent my career with those of low socio-economic status, why abandon them now? I welcome your input and look forward to meeting you. I do my best to be at the IDA and LDA conferences each year. Last year, after many years absence, I attended CEC, and with the leadership of the state of Florida Council for Exceptional Children plan to advocate even more strongly for the needs of our children.