toe by toe
Keda spent almost all of her teaching career at one school - Sandal Road Primary
School in Baildon, UK. She also almost exclusively taught just one age group,
6-7 year-olds; the age that most children pick up their reading skills. This was
to become Keda’s great passion - the teaching of reading. Initially, she was
baffled as to why a significant proportion of the children in her classes
struggled to pick up basic reading skills. To Keda, they were just as bright as
the other children but - for them - reading remained a mysteriously difficult
skill. Keda always had a keen and inquisitive mind and this question of why some
children had difficulties in learning to read nagged at her. She thought that
she had somehow failed these students, so she made an offer to their parents.
She asked their permission to teach their children at her home - without charge
- at the end of the school day. As a result of this offer, Keda’s house was soon
overflowing with struggling readers. Keda even designed an extension to her
house to include a custom-built classroom and persuaded her doting husband
Albert to build it. For the next 30 years, Keda’s house - literally, just a
stone’s throw away from the school where she worked - was full of children.
Between 4-5pm every school day she looked for ways to improve their reading
skills. Keda's All-Consuming Passion At the time Keda began her research into
children’s reading problems, few people had even heard of the term ‘dyslexia’.
Keda became fascinated by the condition and her private research soon became an
all-consuming obsession. She divided the children into two groups. A control
group where conventional methods were used, and her ‘guinea pigs’, where Keda
tried anything and everything to see what would work. This painstaking process
of trial and error became the genesis of what later came to be known as Toe By
Toe. Keda had no idea what was happening in the psychology departments of
universities. She simply looked at the reading process and pared it down to the
bare essentials necessary to crack the code of this ‘reading thing’. This is
also why Toe By Toe is so refreshingly free of jargon and psychological
gobbledygook. It certainly wasn’t a ‘quick fix’ process. Only after decades of
this meticulous approach did Toe By Toe eventually become the fully functioning
system we have now. Keda named the system ‘Toe By Toe’ after a grateful parent
commented that she could see how it worked: “Progress by tiny steps – almost one
toe at a time…”
