Testimonials
About the course and teaching by this approach
“It improves the way I teach. Students can be more active. I now have another way to teach non-readers or LD students…I think every English teacher should study and know the Hickey method.”
“I feel very lucky to have been exposed to this method of teaching English and I use it with most of my students.”
Private tutor
This course will help me “to teach non-readers in high-school to read. I have been teaching for 30 years and this course is interesting, enriching, and useful.”
“It will help me teaching in class as well as privately…It was great!”
“It gave me new tools for my teaching; such great material to use in the classroom.”
Letters from Course Graduates
Letter from a Special Education/English education student:
"The reason I am writing this letter is to make make my belief clear to the College and those higher up in Misrad Hachinuch (משרד החינוך) that the Hickey course, in my opinion, should be required of all English teaching students. Other students who are in my track who also focus in Special Education with English do not feel that they have the tools to teach students in the field." (Full letter)
Letter from an Experienced English Teacher:
" In my experience, while most students will learn to read English using any conventional method, there are always students for whom conventional methods fail. These students get completely lost in regular classroom environments, and ultimately 'fall between the cracks.' However, with early intervention in a highly organized, structured, one-on-one program using the Hickey Method, these children can and do learn to read." (Full letter)
Letter from a Course-trained English Tutor:
" I use Hickey partially to totally with almost every student and am seeing great success. My students love having their own flash cards to review and we both particularly appreciate how the stories build on one another and how we’ll never find a letter or sound in a story that they haven’t yet been exposed to or taught. It is a ready-made system with everything a teacher could need, from a word list to a story to a game, not to mention the grammar rules and the irregular (sight) words that every student needs to learn. Both the students and I (and of course their parents and other teachers) feel the excitement of their being able to read an actual story in English after only the first or second lesson." (Full letter)
Letter from a father:
“I am very pleased that R. is making progress in English. I have started to read a book with him this week and I was surprised how well he managed to read. … he is making good progress. We also read several times each week the pages we get from you… and I was also impressed by the way he filled out the pages where he had to write. It is important to stress that, while he seems to be utterly dysgraphic, he has no problem at all to read in his first language.” M.B.
“I have known and used a general phonetic method of teaching English reading since I was a “soldier-teacher” and taught English reading to students in small groups…What I like about the Hickey Method is how structured and organized it is, lesson by lesson, letter by letter, sound by sound. I like the idea of the cursive, the stories and games! This was an exciting innovation for me, as I already had taught reading using a phonetic method.”
A.L, classroom English teacher
“…I never realized that it would be possible to write a story that could be read by a student on such a basic level. I think that to be able to read a real story is a huge self-esteem and interest booster for a beginning student… One of the main things that I took …was to focus less on the name of the letter and more on the sounds and how they can be made in all their various permutations.
I learned a lot about the connection between self-esteem and learning disabilities. This will be helpful as far as creating the student-teacher relationship. I also think using a checklist so the student can concretely see what he/she is learning is a good way to encourage students…
Y.B., classroom English teacher
“In my first lesson…B. had a very hard time remembering and concentrating. I saw that he had many learning disabilities…My fifth lesson…this time B. really improved. It was a lot easier for him to read. He reviewed all the letters and did his homework. Therefore, I decided to continue with Ben with Hickey lessons throughout the year.”
B. B., classroom English teacher
“I enjoyed using the Hickey method and seeing that it could really work. (Frankly, I initially didn’t believe it would work as well as it did.) I started with a learner who had a low English vocabulary, and we started the program from the beginning. The learner was excited and was surprised to see that, having learned only three letters, he was able to really read, and to understand what he was reading.
Great progress was made at every lesson. He quickly learned the structure of the Hickey method, so that he could predict what was coming in each lesson. (He particularly looked forward to playing the game at the end of each lesson.)
I found that both the tutor and the learner benefit from knowing the steps of the lessons. The tutor knows how to divide the lesson time according to what must be completed at each lesson. The learner quickly realizes what to expect at every stage of the lesson.
I am happy to see its potential for teaching both non-readers and weak pupils who are having difficulty learning to read with other methods.
The lessons of Hickey I taught…have inspired me to go on. The learner is also eager to continue.”
S.G., classroom English teacher
”My learner is an adult French speaker who knows all the Latin letters but can’t pronounce them with their English sounds…We used the cards, it was fun and visual. The learner felt good when she could read a story; she was surprised and proud to read in English and even understand the story…It is a very structured technique but there is a lot of space to be flexible and sensitive to the needs of the learner. For example, because my learner is an adult without learning disabilities, I am able to add even more things to each lesson, like teaching additional vocabulary words.”
M.G., classroom English teacher