About Kendra
Lineage of Teachers
Kendra grew up in Chicago, with professor parents and a lot of snowstorms. Her childhood dream was to move anywhere that was hillier and warmer, and be a choreographer who worked with at-risk kids. She followed this dream into a disciplined study of the performing arts, which led to a career as a dance and drama therapist, working with kids who had lost a piece of their family or themselves. Obviously her goal to dissent from an ancestry of educators and administrators eventually failed. She kept finding herself in consultation meetings in schools.
The Impacts of Illiteracy
The road to her current expertise in literacy and reading disabilities began over 2 decades ago as a counselor for juvenile delinquents. She discovered that their bitterness and diminished self-esteem were intricately woven into their struggles with reading. On a quest to ratchet up their abilities, she consulted the University of Arizona Library, where she was overtaken with the voluminous and disparate information on how to teach reading.
On a Quest
She then dropped all fictional reading for a year and began her quest: navigating the many roads of how best to teach reading, so as to coach her teen clients in growing literate. She delighted in guiding them to discover how words worked, and how decoding them leads to a desire to know more of them. After getting accepted to several graduate Psychology programs she chose to study Education instead because she kept thinking about those boys!
What Graduate School Didn’t Teach
In the urban classrooms of Chicago, she continued to learn more deeply about how children become readers. She remained mystified by the numbers of children who were non-readers by 3rd grade. How could that be? A devoted workshop and conference attendee, she grew active with prominent national organizations, where she met researchers and made friends. This is where she collected explicit instruction methodologies and tried them out in her classroom. She discovered that the most impressive results resulted from using LD strategies with all of her students. Breaking up the reading tasks into its smallest components illuminated the mystery of reading proficiency and made her a stronger teacher.
Teaching Teachers
Grant money dwindled in 2000 so she moved back to Seattle to return to the classroom, teaching K-6 reading in small groups. Active in the local IDA (International Dyslexia Association) and statewide literacy teacher cohorts, she continued to coach and mentor teachers and build her tutoring practice in reading and writing. She currently contracts with Washington Research Institute, as well as Western Washington and Seattle University. If she could see something other than dollar signs and too much time in a library, she would get her PhD in a heartbeat.
Many Hats
Grant money dwindled in 2000 so she moved back to Seattle to return to the classroom, teaching K-6 reading in small groups. Active in the local IDA (International Dyslexia Association) and statewide literacy teacher cohorts, she continued to coach and mentor teachers and build her tutoring practice in reading and writing. She currently contracts with Washington Research Institute, as well as Western Washington and Seattle University. If she could see something other than dollar signs and too much time in a library, she would get her PhD in a heartbeat.
Rounding Out
Not all of Kendra’s passions and hobbies revolve around reading and writing. She also practices yoga, collects teddy bears, raises teenage stepsons with her talented husband, and enjoys the artistic and mountainous gifts of the Puget Sound.
She believes that within our current culture some children are losing their innate ability to think and reason, so she devotes herself to helping children read and express their ideas in writing, improving teachers’ literacy instruction, and coaching schools in how to best approach instruction.