Anna Gillingham photographs

Anna Gillingham (1878-1964) was a prominent Quaker educator and author. Born in Batavia, Illinois, the daughter of Theodore Tyson and Elizabeth (Heacock) Gillingham, she attended Swarthmore and Radcliffe Colleges and earned an M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1910. She taught at Friends Central School in Philadelphia from 1901-05, was school psychologist in the Ethical Culture School in New York City from 1905-36, directed the remedial reading program at the Punahon School in Honolulu from 1936-38, and was a consultant on remedial reading after 1938. After meeting Bessie Stillman at the Ethical Culture School, the two began a collaboration and companionship that would span the rest of Stillman's life. They lived together, traveled extensively, and worked together. One of their most important accomplishments was publishing the manual "Remedial Training for Children with Specific Disability in Reading, Spelling and Penmanship" in 1936. Based on the foundational ideas of Samuel Orton, developed with Gillingham's knowledge of child psychology and Stillman's experimentation as a classroom teacher, the approach was later dubbed the Orton-Gillingham method and is still in use nearly a century later to teach literacy to struggling readers, especially those with dyslexia. Anna Gillingham was a co-founder of the Orton Society, a national organization promoting research and treatment of language disabilities, now known as the International Dyslexia Association.