Jerry Zutell is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the OSU Reading Clinic in the College of Education at Ohio State University. His specific area of interest is the study of children's acquisition of word knowledge in reading and writing. He has done research and written articles about assessing students' oral reading fluency, the stages of spelling development, the connections between word knowledge in spelling and reading, and instructional practices for making students better readers and spellers. He is the developer of the Directed Thinking Spelling Activity (DSTA), an innovative, student-active cycle of word study instruction, and the Theme, Context, Roots, Reference, and Review (TC3R) model of vocabulary instruction. Dr. Zutell has served as a principal consultant on Merriam Webster’s Primary Dictionary, is one of the senior authors on the Zaner-Bloser spelling series, Spell It -- Write!, and is the author of the Zaner-Bloser vocabulary series, Word Wisdom. He has recently co-authored two books for education professionals: Instructing Students Who Have Literacy Problems Sixth Edition with Sandra McCormick, and Essential Strategies for Word Study: Effective Methods for Improving Decoding, Spelling, and Vocabulary with Timothy Rasinski.