Sandhills Intermediate School is a public school serving more than 540 grade 2-6 students in the rural communities of Gaston and Swansea, South Carolina.
Principal Sara Ankrapp explains, “Recognizing a need to work more effectively with students as individual learners, Sandhills Intermediate turned to All Kinds of Minds to help us better understand our students’ needs and to gain additional tools to use with students in our efforts to maximize their academic potential.” Since 2007, 75 percent of the school’s educators have participated in All Kinds of Minds professional development programs, and Sandhills Intermediate is committed to full integration of All Kinds of Minds philosophies and processes into its school and classroom curricula.
Using the common language learned through All Kinds of Minds training, Sandhills Intermediate School’s administrators meet monthly with all teachers to discuss students, now viewing them through the neurodevelopmental lens. Knowledge of the eight neurodevelopmental constructs allows them to create “balance sheets” of individual strengths and weaknesses as they relate to learning. “The All Kinds of Minds approach allows us to pinpoint the areas of difficulty, to specify the weak sub-skills, and to create a plan for strengthening strengths and areas in need of improvement,” notes Sandhills Intermediate School Assistant Principal Brenda Connelly.
Using the All Kinds of Minds approach, the School has developed a “Learning about Learning” enrichment class dedicated to teaching students to understand and appreciate their own distinct learning profiles, as well as those of their classmates. This process is helpful in creating student buy-in when it comes to their specific plans for learning success and in fostering a tolerant and supportive environment for learning at Sandhills Intermediate.
