Summary: This week Dr Gil Tippy interviews 3 special educators using an appropriate, developmental, sensory sensitive approach in public and private education settings for kids with neuro-developmental disorders of relating and communicating. The discussion ranges from the tremendous success of a couple of Vermont public school teachers in their use of the DIR/Floortime model, through our success at the Rebecca School in our Fairytale Literacy curriculum, and even touches on the complications of the Common Core Standards, and what it means for our children. Kathryn Byrne Grossarth is a Special Educator in a small public school in Wells, VT. She attended a conference in Vermont this past summer that Rae Leeper and I put on, explaining how to do a relationship based model in a public school setting. She has implemented DIR in her public school with tremendous success. She is using Rae's literacy suggestions and is finding that it is really working. She is working on creating curriculum and texts, and is passionate about the tremendous change she has seen in her kids, and herself in just the first four months of this school year.Barbara Festa is a Special Education Supervisor in Wells, VT. She did not attend the training, but Kathryn's enthusiasm has been so infectious that she began to use the model in her math curriculum, to great results. She sees that DIR/Floortime is directly in line with the Common Core Standards.Rae Leeper is the Education Supervisor at the Rebecca School, and did the training with me that inspired these two Vermont Special Educators. She has been at the Rebecca School from the very beginning, and instrumental in creating and supervising our classroom curriculum.
