Strategic Study Store was created to help students develop the advanced reading skills they will need long before high school test prep begins.
I have spent nearly twenty years teaching students advanced reading strategies, including work as a classroom teacher and SAT Reading instructor. Over the years, I noticed a recurring problem with traditional reading instruction and test preparation: students were often given more passages, more questions, and more practice—but not always a clear system for how to think through difficult texts and questions.
That experience led me to create the Advanced Reading Course (ARC) for students in Grades 5–8.
ARC teaches students to approach challenging reading strategically. Rather than simply completing passage after passage, students learn repeatable processes for tracking what is happening in a text, identifying what a question is really asking, finding the strongest evidence, analyzing characters and perspectives, and working through increasingly complex scientific, argumentative, and biographical texts.
The goal is not to turn middle school into SAT prep.
The goal is to build the underlying reading and reasoning skills before students need them.
By developing these habits during Grades 5–8, students have time to practice sophisticated reading strategies gradually instead of encountering them for the first time during a high-pressure test-prep course in 9th, 10th, or 11th grade.
My teaching approach emphasizes making thinking visible. Students are asked not only to choose an answer, but to explain why it is correct, identify the evidence that supports it, and recognize the reasoning process they can use again on the next passage.
I earned my B.A. in English, Cum Laude, from the University of California, Berkeley, and my M.A. from San Francisco State University. My background in literature, philosophy, classroom teaching, and standardized-test instruction shaped the approach behind the Advanced Reading Course.
Strategic Study Store exists to give students something I believe traditional test preparation often introduces too late:
a systematic way to think about difficult reading.