In this video, author Lois Letchford recounts the experiences that form Part 5 of her memoir Reversed, titled “Finding My Path.” After moving from Brisbane to Lubbock, Texas in 1999, she began working as a special‑education reading teacher. She describes how she shifted from ineffective, one‑size‑fits‑all phonics programs to a student‑centered, culturally responsive approach that prioritises engagement. Using drama adaptations of Paul Jennings stories, she helped her first student, Christian, fall in love with reading. She then worked with older students Pedro and Twain, modifying texts and roles to reflect their cultural backgrounds and interests, demonstrating the importance of relevance and flexibility. Later, she describes teaching younger students Laura and Amy through poetry and student‑created plays, emphasizing collaborative learning and allowing students to rewrite language to aid memory. Across roughly 100 one‑on‑one and small‑group sessions, she transformed non‑readers into competent readers, reinforcing her belief that teaching must be rooted in empathy, creativity, and partnership. The narrative also touches on how these teaching experiences inspired the writing of her memoir, prompted by her son Nathaniel’s encouragement.
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Hello, I'm Lois Letchford. I'm the author of the book Reversed: A Memoir and a literacy problem solver, and today I'm talking to you about Part 5, Finding My Part, as I talk about my series Reversed: A Memoir and the story behind the book. Part 5, our family moved to Lubbock, Texas in 1999, and I had just been qualified as special education reading teacher in Brisbane, Australia. I'd completed my studies after 2 years of part-time work, 4 semesters. The reading I did during that time to me was fantastic and I spent hours in the library photocopying articles to gain more information and understand the problems that Nicholas had, the problems that I personally faced. As a child so that I could then teach. I'd taught on and off for the past 2 years in Australia. Some were full-time jobs, some were part-time jobs, but I'd spent time and I didn't feel I was particularly successful during that time. I didn't have the time I needed with the students to understand their problem and then teach them. It was just throw out something and see if the children could pick it up, which is not a successful strategy. So we moved to Lubbock, Texas, and I knew I wanted to teach, so I start looking for work once my visa came through. And it's while the time I was waiting for the work that I met the lady Brenda, and Brenda's son was 13 years old and had spent 4 years in this phonics-only reading program, only to have him come out totally non-reading. Unable to read a sentence accurately and with comprehension, because you need both. You need accuracy in decoding and comprehension to read effectively. And at the beginning of every chapter I have a quote. In the beginning of this chapter I have the quote from Nelson Mandela, it is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life We lead. And my goal is always to take the most vulnerable students and teach them to read. So we're in Lubbock, I meet Brenda, and I said, I think I know what to do. And the first lesson I actually taught him on a Sunday afternoon, in my mind I'll never forget Christian's face. He got to the end and he shook his head. And he said, that was so funny. And he just had a big smile on his face as he looked at this bottle of elephant pee. And I'd bought him strawberries and the book we'd read, The Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business. And I did look at the word it and he didn't understand it, but after that lesson he did. And I knew then I had to do something extra special for Lesson 2. Because it's very easy to do one lesson really good and then slip back into repeating what's been done and saying, you just have to learn it. So I knew if I was to teach him effectively, I had to find something. So I racked my brains and I thought and thought, what can I do? And I realised Paul Jennings books. Paul Jennings. Find them, read them. And I read through 8 books to come out with really only 2 stories that could be turned into a drama. And so I turned that book, turned one of those stories— one was a mouthful and the other is Lip— I turned into a drama first for Christian. And Brenda said to me years later, it, it wasn't the box lesson that got Christian. It was the drama. And if you don't know Paul Jennings, Google him. He's now old, but his work has sold millions of copies around the world, and any book that does that is a seller. And he talks about having few characters in the story, fantastic language with unpredictable endings. And that was perfect for Christian. So the story licked, really got him in, and we performed it. Christian's family and our family got together and did a performance of it so that Christian could read, we could use the props, and we had to create the props. And Christian fell in love with learning as well as with reading and writing. And Christian was my first success story. And I did teach him over the summer. Then Brendan did write to the school district and say, employ this woman or I sue you. I got employed. And with that, now I'm in touch with all these other children who are struggling with literacy. And they have been in numerous reading programs already. Send them to Lois. And my task was to teach them to read. It was a phenomenal training ground for me on many Fears, because often, like what happened in Brisbane, Australia, you're stuck in front of 5 or 6 children, behaviour problems, not seeing them often enough. I was seeing them twice a week. 5 or 6 children. And the task is too difficult, particularly for a beginning teacher in that space. The next students I come up with are Pedro, the Hispanic boy, and Twain, an African-American chap. Both are 16, and I got them because Pedro was in an ARD meeting by himself in 10th grade, and he said, I want to learn to read. And it was the district specialist who said, Lois, this is your next student. And I started to work with Pedro, and I was working in a teacher's classroom, and he was watching and looking and listening. As he did his work. And he said, I'm watching you work with Pedro and his buddy needs help like you're giving Pedro. And that's how I got Twain. They came about 6 weeks apart, which is a challenge because once a child has been through something and got it, they don't want to repeat it. They just want to keep going on. But I managed to do it. And Twain and Pedro taught me So much about culturally appropriate literature. And it's the first time I really recognised how we standardise things. And this is how it happened. I used the same story I used with Christian. I used the story Licked. And I reread it and read it and read it. And my boys were not engaging with it. Because I knew the first step to teaching reading is— it's not decoding. The first step to teaching reading is engagement. If you don't have your students engaged in, in a text, in whatever you're doing, forget it. They're not going to get it. So I'd use Licht. Licht has a full family, a family, a mother and a father, and the father invites his boss home for dinner. So it's a situation that was quite foreign to my students. So I put it away and said, I've got another story for you. And the next story I had had problems too, because the story is written about a father and 2 girls. And Jennings deliberately chose his characters, a single father with a daughter and the daughter's friend. So I said to the boys, you know, can I read this story to you? It's about girls. And Twain was first. No, I don't want to read about girls! And I said, it's really funny. It's really funny. And eventually Pedro said, yeah, I'll listen. I'll listen to it. So I read it to them. And at the end of the story, it's very funny. It's a bit naughty, but very funny. Pedro threw back his head and roared with laughter. So they loved the story. Next I said to them, boys, we, you know, how are we going to do this? Because it's a father. How about we turn the father into a mother? I'll play the mother and you can play the son. You'll be— we'll change daughters to son and you can be the sons. Yes! They said. Now I had my students. And the problem with the play licked. Was that, as I said, it had a full family. My boys came from single-parent households. There was no male figure in the household, and it was a very middle-class story. The story of A Mouthful was entirely different, and my students connected with the characters. It's a critical component, and even more than that, they connected with the characters And then 3 quarters of the way through, we've been reading this story for weeks and weeks on end, Twain got angry with me, his favourite teacher. And we're sitting there and then all of a sudden I see this angry face. And I said, you know, what's wrong, Twain? I didn't understand. I didn't connect. What's wrong? And he juts out his chin and he says, we wouldn't say those words! And the words he was talking about is the girls were talking about what they were doing in school, or the boys were talking about what they were doing in school. Paul Jennings is Australian and he wrote about his experience, the Australian experience. We'll do a debate on Monday. We're going to practice our play. And then we're going to complete an assignment. We wouldn't do those things. Twain, I said, what would you like to stay— to say? And Twain, the child, the boy who struggled so much with literacy and letters and sounds, was the one who said— He'd be the captain of the football team. We'd be going over our football plays. And we'd be completing homework worksheet. Just like that, it split. Twain, we can do that. Now I had Twain as a student for because I changed the teaching to use his words, and it was astonishing to see his reaction. I also set up a community of learners that I am respecting my students in the classroom. And we're working on this together. I'm not the teacher with the knowledge, but we are a group that shares our knowledge and changes it to include every person in that classroom. That incident set me up for life to recognise when children don't get something, let's change it to meet their needs. And years later, we were doing another play And Pedro said to me, Miss, I can't remember these words. I've tried really hard and I can't remember them. But I remember, you know, once before we've changed the words, and then I could remember. Can I change the words? Pedro, of course you can change them. And what happened then was that my students took the words and they made jokes. They made jokes with the new words that they It's powerful when we allow our students to write their own work. And the third group of students I talk about are Laura and Amy. Laura was with me through Parent Connections. Amy I met through being in the classroom and watching her. And Laura— Amy was 11 or 12 years old. Tall girl, and it was obvious that she was bright. And I saw the work that she was doing. It was first grade work, and she was frustrated by it, and you could see that in her behaviour. And her arms would go everywhere, and she would flick things around, and she was loud. And I got to work with her too. She had been in a program, a reading program, for 3 years. And every year they'd completed Book 1 and she would forget it over the summer and then she'd come back to school and they would repeat it again. It didn't work. When she came to me, she didn't know a long vowel from a short vowel. In fact, she'd never met a short vowel. The program she was in started with long vowels, O-A, or O, like goat, boat, and moat. And we're living in Lubbock, Texas. Texas. So again, I changed the teaching. We started with poems with her. Off we went. The poetry was transformative. We did a play, and I have a picture. I hope I can find it and put it on this video. A play of Cinderella Bigfoot. A small play that we changed to meet the needs of the student, and my students loved it. So they're hearing it, They're reading it, they're making sense of it, they're using props to enhance the play, enhance their knowledge, their comprehension, and they are thinking all the time. We did that play for the parents and class. Transformative. And once you've got children, and once they understand that component of reading and literacy and the decoding, I mean, but you've got to get it all for these children who are 12 and 13. And Amy started to fly too. Those were my most challenging students in Lubbock. Over this time, I think I taught about 100 students, teaching one-on-one, one-on-two, sometimes one-on-three, to take them from non-reading to reading and coping in the classroom. And the goal is— my goal is always to have them do well in the classroom. Because once they're in the classroom, they take away more information than what you can just give. So that is part 5 of my book, and this one is titled Finding My Path, and it certainly put me on a path to writing my book. And the other component of this was that I was writing this book in 2016 and '17, and I was with my eldest son Nathaniel, and he'd read the And he— we're at an airport together and he's banging on the table and he said, Mum, this book isn't finished yet. You've got to add your students. And so it's thanks to Nathaniel that Part 5 talked about my students in Lubbock, Texas. One critique said, you should leave the story just as Nicholas and write another book about your other students. That's a possibility. But I wanted to put it in to know that my teaching did not begin and end with Nicholas, but spread to other students in the state school system or in the Lubbock Independent School District system. So thank you. Reversed: A Memoir, available on Amazon. And thank you for listening. Please hit like, hit subscribe, share so that we can share the message. We simply must teach children to read.
