Our premises are:
- The research on how students learn to read is well-established.
- The research on which instructional techniques work is well-understood.
- The voices of those who know what works best -- the classroom teachers -- are rarely heard in instructional design.
- The power of "we" is far greater than the power of "you" or "I." ...
The goals of Free-Reading are:
- To help educators worldwide teach kids to read
- To make quality, research-based, explicit and systematic instruction for early reading widely available and free (in two senses of the word free: at no charge and openly offered so as to be used, reused, mashed-up and shared again)
- To nurture a community of educators who share effective methods in a form that others can easily apply in their own teaching
- To disrupt spending in education away from expensive textbooks and towards more customized instructional materials, more support and training for teachers, and better tools for data and knowledge management.
- Ultimately, as Catherine Snow has said, for kids to be able to "read books with enjoyment while lying in a hammock under elm trees".
Though no individual skill taught here may be an end in itself, we believe each is a step on the path to that ultimate goal.
