There are many great explanations of the history of PT on the web, but here’s a quick way to describe it: A special graphic tool, called The Standard Celeration Chart™ is used to record student learning each day. You cannot do Precision Teaching without this chart!

The SCC is semi-logarithmic—it is based on multiplication, not on addition. It can be off-putting to most people, but the use of this graph allows the student and teacher to see learning curves as straight lines—and rapidly assess progress.

In addition the SCC is set up to show not just ‘percent correct’ but the number per minute of whatever is being learned. That is what makes it ‘Standard’. You can look at any kind of learning with the Chart.

PT people learned over 20 years ago that reading fluency is critical for comprehension and retention—because the chart showed clearly what happened if a student did not reach high levels of performance.

Our reading standards are considerably higher than those of most other educational programs—because it works better that way!

For more information about Precision Teaching, see our About Us page and/or Carl Binder’s article, Precision Teaching: Measuring and Attaining Exemplary Academic Achievement.

Reading has been taught over the past 20 years or so as though it was a natural process—like breathing or speech; i.e., give a student sufficiently engaging materials and he or she will become a reader.

The truth is that reading is as natural as learning to play the flute. There are many components, and they all must be learned to fluent, coordinated performance levels to make reading possible. We would not expect a beginning flautist to play a composition by Mozart, no matter how engaging the composition might be. There are scales to be learned, finger positions to be practiced, breath to be controlled, musical notes to be learned—and all must become effortless.

If a student has poor breath control the music instructor does not label him or her as having a deficit. The teacher prescribes targeted practice to increase the skill in that component. The components of reading instruction are quite clear from research done most recently by the National Reading Panel.

The National Reading Panel reached the conclusion that there are four critical components to reading instruction: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency and Comprehension.

At The Fluency Factory we use instructional technology that builds each of these components to fluent performance levels. This allows the student to master each component and put them together to fluently read new and increasingly complex material.

For a description of the critical ingredients of reading visit the National Institute for Literacy website and read the information for parents contained in Put Reading First.