Another school is getting on-board with Brain-based Teaching…in Norwalk, Connecticut.
Presentation is here.
From Brain-based teaching part of Rivera’s plan to rebuild Norwalk schools:
Poverty is an important factor in the educational success of school children, but it’s not a game changer, according to Kendall Elementary School Principal Tony Ditrio.
“You don’t have to write schools off or kids off just because you have a high poverty rate,” Ditrio told the Board of Education last week in an enthusiastic presentation of new teaching techniques that Norwalk Superintendent Manny Rivera said are part of the “major plan to fundamentally rebuild our public school system.”
Ditrio shared ideas that will spread next fall from Kendall to four other Title 1 Norwalk schools, ideas he said he first learned about a year ago at a national elementary schools principals’ conference in Baltimore. They’ve been tried at Kendall with good results, he said.
Ditrio said he chose to go to a seminar titled “Teaching with Poverty in Mind,” where Eric Jensen was the speaker.
“Being from my very high level of poverty in a Title 1 School, I said this might be something good. It turned out to be a life-changer for me,” Ditrio said. “… It really was like he was talking about the kids I have in my building and the kids that I know that we have in many other buildings in Norwalk. Why are we missing them? We have been working so hard on our math, so hard on our reading. Those things that we have been working on took us just so far and we have kind of hit a plateau. We’re just making that next level. We are not getting every kid.
Ditrio said he came back from Baltimore with the enthusiasm he had as a rookie teacher because Jensen had put it in a way that “made so much sense and seemed so doable.”
