In the News

Summer Fiction Competition winners announced:  The Hingham Journal ran this story about the winners of the Fluency Factory's 2011 Summer Fiction Competition.

In this letter to the editor printed in the Hingham Journal, Richard McManus, Director of the Fluency Factory, talks about the need for handwriting instruction in our schools.

Lessons Learned

Richard McManus writes the monthly column Lessons Learned in the Hingham Journal.  The column discusses education issues important to South Shore parents and schools.

Eric Haughton and the importance of fluency:  Eric Haughton was a trailblazer in many of the techniques we use at the Fluency Factory.  This column has a couple of anecdotes that illustrate the power of these approaches.

Math without Facts:  This November 2011 column discusses a big problem inherent in one of the predominant approaches to math education today.

A Surprising Danger of Whole Language: Mr. McManus addresses the dangers of using the Whole Language approach to teaching reading.  Unfortunately, this approach has replaced phonics in many of the schools in our country.

Dangers of Whole Language, Part 2:  Mr. McManus illustrates the dangers of the Whole Language approach with the stories of three students.  He shows how teaching phonetic awareness and phonics helped solve their reading comprehension problems.

Topics in Learning and Education

Seattle's Math Secret Revealed:  The Seattle school district teaches math using a method called "discovery math," in which students are encouraged to discover the principles of math on their own.  One middle school secretly rebelled and instead used Saxon Math, a traditional system that emphasizes instruction and practice.  The result?  That middle school, with low income children, achieved extraordinary results.

Building Vocational Skills with the Big Six:  Richard McManus wrote the original version of this article as part of an invited workshop at the annual conference for the Association for Behavior Analysis International.  The article discusses methods for building the foundation skills that are used by every person (whether adult or child; whether handicapped or not) to learn, to play, and to work.  Eric Haughton and Ann Desjardins were the pioneers in this work, and Richard McManus was the first to apply this approach to vocational preparation.

Coaching for Success—Precision Teaching:  In this article, Mr. McManus shows how Precision Teaching can help improve the performance of our education system.

Precision Teaching: Measuring and Attaining Exemplary Academic Achievement:  Karl Binder provides a nice introduction to Precision Teaching.

Kidding Around Articles

Richard McManus wrote a series of columns for the South Shore Parents' newspaper Kidding Around.  Here are the articles if you missed them.

Why Bring Your Child to a Tutor?  (from the October 2003 Kidding Around)

Precision Teaching, A Method For Rapidly Increasing Learning (from the November 2003 Kidding Around)

Summer Tutoring—The Best and Worst of Times! (from the March 2004 Kidding Around)

A Reading Miracle (from the June 2004 Kidding Around)

How to Recognize that Your Child Needs Assistance (from the November 2004 Kidding Around)