Founders of BFR

Kristin Dwyer, MEd

BFR was born from the deep desire Kristin and her co-founder had to end the needless suffering of children by creating a straightforward, evidence-based program that engaged children. Pulling from their extensive background in the SoR as Montessorians and OG trained practitioners, they collaborated by evaluating reading practices, field-testing instructional strategies and poring over case studies. Kristin codified their approach and developed a unique sequence of instructional strategies that teachers report tremendous success with from kindergarten through middle school. Kristin has trained hundreds of teachers (individually and district-wide), new tutors (teachers and lay people) as well as parents and volunteers over the past two years. Working with defeated, struggling readers motivates Kristin to keep working tirelessly to provide training and individualized coaching at low/no cost. Why? Because educational equality isn’t possible until we take responsibility for teaching all children to read. We can. We know how. We Shall Read is the outreach partner of Brain Friendly Reading and provides significant funding for this work.

info@brainfriendlyreading.org

Elaine Smith, BA

Elaine spent a lifetime experimenting with instructional strategies to identify those that achieved results with the greatest amount of enjoyment and cooperation on the part of the child. Extensive training plus 17 years of experience as a kindergarten Montessori teacher laid the groundwork for her deep understanding of how children learn to read. As a public school Reading and Dyslexia Specialist in Texas, Elaine honed her craft by identifying key instructional strategies that moved children to full fluency. Later, Elaine began innovating strategies that when applied regularly brought about significant results with her tutoring clients.

She mastered the art of teaching reading to young children of varying abilities first as a Head Teacher in a Montessori classroom. As a TX State Certified teacher and public school administrator, she coached and mentored teachers. After receiving nationally recognized dyslexia training through Neuhaus, she came back to her first love, working with struggling readers as a Reading Specialist in an elementary school with over 1,000 children. Moving children up to grade level fluency as quickly as possible was the goal. It meant She had to innovate new ways of teaching groups of children while getting unmatched results. When she moved to Michigan, Elaine began tutoring. She and Kristin collaborated to create the Brain Friendly Reading program.

belainesmith@msn.com