About the founder
Practitioner first. Researcher because the problems demanded it.
Rob Koch, PhD, created Signal Reading from 28 years of work across alternative schools, residential treatment, special education, and alternative high school settings. His focus is practical: help educators see the full reading problem, coordinate their responses, and preserve the dignity of learners whose needs have been misunderstood.
The work behind the framework
Twenty-eight years close to the learners systems miss.
Rob Koch’s work has included alternative schools, residential treatment, special education, and alternative high school. Those settings make weak explanations expensive. A student described as unmotivated may be carrying a decoding bottleneck. A student who reads accurately may lose meaning under cognitive load. A capable thinker may be unable to show understanding in conventional writing.
Signal Reading grew from the need to describe those patterns precisely enough that educators across roles could act together.
Scholarship in service of practice
Organizational leadership belongs in the reading conversation.
Rob holds a PhD in Organizational Leadership for Education. His work treats literacy implementation as both an instructional problem and an organizational one. Districts can own strong materials and employ skilled people while still losing the signal through fragmented language, roles, evidence, and decision pathways.
The book
The Reading Braid
The Reading Braid develops the full architecture behind Signal Reading: structured literacy, comprehension and language, cognitive learning, and expression operating together across the lifespan. It is written for educators who need a model broad enough for the whole reader and precise enough for instructional decisions.
A practical next step
Bring a practitioner’s eye to your district’s literacy system.
Start with a focused conversation about your current system, constraints, and next decision.