What 's Learning to Learn?

If you teach a mind to fish...workshops featuring Learning to Learn,
cross-curricular video series for secondary students and teachers.

What's Learning to Learn?

    In 1999, when I was exposed to hours and hours of literacy and reading strategies, I felt overwhelmed and nearly unable to put them to use. When would I teach them? Would I stop my curriculum? What would I skip? Leave out? What about the standards I needed to be covering in my course? I also was worried I might not use the new strategies correctly and had no one else to really bounce ideas off of.
     My district offered me an opportunity to leave the classroom and work closely with the struggling readers classes in the district to try out the strategies, both with teachers and with students.
     Immediately the teachers and I began seeing a major difference in the students. They were more willing to try things, talk about what was difficult in their reading, pin-point problems and were amazed that even teachers don't learn everything there is to learn by reading something once. Over the course of the year, the students and teachers were thrilled with the results and we began trying to come up with a way to teach this to everyone. Teachers and all students in the district, as the students realized quickly that these strategies could and were helping them in all their classes. They told ME that if their other teachers knew the strategies and could help them...Wow!
      And so it began. My quest to find a way to teach all the teachers but not burden them with having to teach the strategies. Formerly known as Reading to Learn, Learning to Learn is a series of video segments with those very same students how began seeing result, teaching them to both the teachers AND the rest of the students in the district. I trained all 300 teachers in the district on ways to use the strategies generically and then they worked together during staff development time and faculty meetings in content area groups find refine their skills at using them to suit their curriculum best.
      So that is really the magic of Learning to Learn and why I started this company. To share the wealth of what we experienced because I truly believe ALL students, Special Ed, GATE, middle of the road and EL learners need these tools to be successful in their futures. Every single student needs these yet the majority of teachers were never taught to teach them. The Learning to Learn strategies fill the gap and help us all do our jobs better.
Teachers become coaches of learning and students become true, authentic and independent learners.

Quotes that make sense...
   " Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves." - Abbe' Dimnet

   " The illiterate of the future are NOT those who can't read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and re-learn."- A. Toffler

    "Spoon feeing in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon." - E.M. Forster

   "We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself."
   - Lloyd Alexander

   " Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." - Dr. Seuss

   " I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they MUST change if they are to get better." - E. Goodman