“Since 1985, children with reading difficulties, memory deficits, and other learning differences have found success at Greenwood School, where we believe there is no such thing as a child who can’t learn—just children who have different learning styles,” explains Head of School Beverly Connell. “Finding and implementing the All Kinds of Minds approach has enhanced our ability to foster that success and gives Greenwood School additional tools to tailor its curriculum to the learning differences of its students. Children with reading difficulties, for example, learn more by doing or listening.”
Serving 200 middle and high school students in Jacksonville (FL), Greenwood School sponsored participation by its entire faculty in All Kinds of Minds’ Schools Attuned course in 2008 to provide its educators with a common language (for themselves, parents, and students), more specific teaching strategies to use, and tools to plan lessons and design accommodations and assessments.
Greenwood School Admissions Coordinator Jody Sealy notes that the “All Kinds of Minds philosophy recognizes the importance of involving students in improving their own academic success and gives them the opportunity to help develop learning strategies that work best for them.”
Teachers at Greenwood School refer to their “placemats” (tables listing the eight neurodevelopmental constructs) to create and modify lesson plans and assessments, and turn to their AKOM Management Strategies Binders to help them select a variety of instructional approaches to ensure all students reach their greatest potential. Greenwood high school science students now use social cognition and verbal pragmatics to develop presentations geared for adults as well as younger students, and math teachers have found ways to build temporal sequential skills critical to success in math. “Using the All Kinds of Minds approach helps our teachers understand when to accommodate, when to intervene, and when to develop a plan of action,” says Ms. Connell.
