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Students in NIACC’s College Reading Strategies classes are being introduced to a new reading program during the first three weeks of November. Read Right® is an innovative approach to teaching reading that helps readers at all levels find reading to be more comfortable and the material they read to be more easily understood.

The Read Right® program is being used in schools in thirty states, and it is being conducted in more than eighty workforce projects in corporations.

NIACC began the program on Nov. 3 with four newly hired tutors: Celeste Christensen, Carol Evers, Kathy Novak, and Kathy Schroeder. A Read Right® trainer, Maretha Baltimore, is teaching the tutors how to use the program to help all students understand excellent reading. More than eighty students are learning to use the Read Right® library and MP3 players which are designed to help them read more comfortably and with better understanding.

Dee Tadlock, Ph.D., developed the program in order to solve her own son’s reading problems after traditional instructional approaches had failed to help him. In creating the program, Dr. Tadlock spent three years doing post-doctoral research to discover how the brain learns a process and what the reader’s brain must do in order to acquire excellent reading.

In April 2006 two NIACC staff members, Karmen Shriver and Gerry Schwarz, heard Dr. Tadlock speak at a reading conference and decided that this is a program that many students would find helpful. The three-week session now underway gives the tutors and the students a chance to practice with the materials and to see improvement in their reading abilities.

Gerry Schwarz, one of the College Reading Strategies instructors, observed, “As with all new approaches to learning, students’ attitudes vary widely at first. But after only one week of instruction, students are already seeing that they can improve the ways they read.”

Two students who are working with the program, April Hayes from Hampton and Ashley Gross from Mason City, agreed, “It’s helpful. We found out things we were doing that we can improve.” They are looking forward to the next week’s continuation of the program.

NIACC’s spring class schedule has the Read Right® program as the basis of a new class, Power Reading. This class will be a two-hour developmental credit class, available to all students, meeting each week in either Monday-Wednesday classes or Tuesday-Thursday classes. Sections are scheduled for the 60 minute classes from 7:40 a.m. to 2:40 p.m. each of those days.

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