While at Eastern Illinois University on a football scholarship, our master curriculum developer Stephan Tattum had an experience that changed his career trajectory. Originally planning to become a physical education teacher and coach, an encounter with a child who had cognitive delays set him on a course to work in special education.

As he worked with students over his 35-year career at the Denver Academy, in Colorado, Tattum discovered that existing interventions to help struggling readers took at least two years to achieve substantial results. He also observed that most phonics-based literacy programs didn’t have accompanying books for children to read as they went along. After reading Dr. Dianne McGuiness’s 1997 book, Why Our Children Can’t Read and What We Can Do About It, Tattum started to write books at a first-grade level, with each chapter increasing in reading level.

Tattum also started to adapt existing phonics programs to produce results significantly quicker than their predecessors could using a multi-sensory approach, including a magnetic tile board where children could manipulate combinations of letters and sounds. Tattum had found an interactive way for children to combine vowels and sounds to form and read words without getting bored by flashcards and other traditional methods.

Not content to use his methods for students only, Tattum opened Tattum Reading - Phonics Program, and teaches educators everywhere to use his expert approach. Beyond Basics CEO Pamela Good first encountered Tattum on a visit to Detroit in 2008; she knew immediately that he "held the key to literacy for children." For more than a decade, Tattum has trained our tutors, who guide our students to achieve grade-level proficiency and beyond, with a near 100 percent rate of success.

 “It’s strange," Tattum says, "but it was kind of like I was destined to do this."