• 
• 
  • A Brief History
  • Michael Maloney
  • The QLC Learning Model
  • Services Available
    • Training
    • Learning Centres
    • Academic Assessments
  • Archives
• 
  • Teach Your Children to Read Well
  • Instructional CDs
  • The Toolbox Series for Literacy
  • Teach Your Children to Spell Well
  • Teach Your Children Math Well
• 
  • Overview
  • Authors
    • Michael Maloney
    • Lynne Brearley
    • Judie Preece
  • Teach Your Children Well
    • Overview
    • Table of Contents
    • Foreward
    • Preface
    • FAQs
    • Accolades
  • Teach Your Children to Read Well
    • Overview
    • FAQs
    • Accolades
    • Level 1A
      • Placement Test
    • Level 1B
      • Placement Test
    • Level 2
    • Level 3
    • Level 4
    • Instructional CDs
    • Reading 1 The Toolbox Series for Literacy
    • Reading 2 The Toolbox Series for Literacy
• 
  • Overview
  • Level 1
    • Overview
    • Placement Test
    • Order Set
    • Individual Books
    • Sample Lessons
  • Level 2
    • Overview
    • Placement Test
    • Order Set
    • Individual Books
    • Sample Lessons
  • Level 3
    • Overview
    • Placement Test
    • Order Set
    • Individual Books
    • Sample Lessons
  • Level 4
    • Overview
    • Placement Test
    • Order Set
    • Individual Books
    • Sample Lessons
  • Level 5
    • Overview
    • Placement Test
    • Order Set
    • Individual Books
    • Sample Lessons
• 
  • Overview
  • Modules
  • Orders
• 
• 
• 

READING

BOOKS | AUTHORS | TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL |
TEACH YOUR CHILDREN TO READ WELL | INSTRUCTIONAL AUDIO CDs | THE TOOLBOX SERIES FOR LITERACY

Teach Your Children Well
Page 3

Foreword

Education can happen at school, and when it does, it can be a fairly dangerous and exciting event. But good learning—the essential foundation for any education—requires good teaching. And that's what this book is about: instruction that works, pure and simple.

Good teaching isn't a nuclear science but it is a lot more important. Its primary characteristics haven't changed much since the invention of the school.

For starters, good teaching assumes all children can be taught. It does so by breaking down ideas or skills into manageable bits. Good teaching is clear, direct and sequenced. As such, it has beginnings and ends. It not only shows children the logic of the subject at hand but then demands that students apply and practise it. Good teaching is also economical. There is no reason why children should spend three years learning how to read with wretched teaching if good teaching (and a good program) can get the job done in a year.

Unfortunately there is no shortage of bad teaching these days. Parents can find lots of it most elementary schools, while students freely experience sloppy and ineffective instruction in university classrooms on a daily basis. Poor children or students with disabilities receive so much bad teaching that they often become experts on the subject. For some unknown reason North American educators tend to concentrate their most offensive teaching in academic skills. Most elementary students, for instance, stand a better chance of receiving more effective instruction on how to swim or play baseball than how to read or spell.

This teaching deficit has the gravest impact on the poorest and most troubled children. A child coming from a home rich in intellectual capital can survive some of this nonsense. But a child who exits a home where nothing works, only to attend a public school where nothing matters, has been robbed twice. Many of these children, of course, spend the rest of their lives teaching society the high costs of bad schooling.

As Michael Maloney notes, none of this is acceptable or excusable. We know better and have known better for a long time. We can teach most children how to read or write without expanding the length of the school year or the amount of time or money we spend on schooling for that matter.

We can do this by training our teachers effectively and by making our schools more accountable for results. Good teachers, after all, are like good ecologists; they can predict the consequences of good actions in the classroom. Maloney wants to see more predictably good teaching, and I hope this prescriptive book furthers that important work.

Andrew Nikiforuk, Calgary, 1998

Top of Page