LCIRT's Professional Development program: Mark O'Donnell

Video Transcript

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Mark O'Donnell, Math Department Chair, Woodberry Forest School: I completely changed the way I teach. I was very used to the majority of my career teaching very. Neurotypical students. I didn't really have a lot of students with neurodiversity. And it wasn't until recently that I started teaching classes that had more and more higher percentage of kids with ADD, ADHD, different neurodiversity issues. And this course helped me completely restructure my class. In fact, we introduced a new course out of the two foundations based largely on the things that I learned in this course. I was able to go in depth more and just spend the last few months looking at differentiation to see how can we can apply it throughout the course of our curriculum to make sure that everybody, not just the neurodiverse but also neurotypical, are in that zone of proximal development or learning or struggle. So everybody feels challenged so that for every course and every student in that class they are experiencing rigor, they're experiencing being cared for, and they're being experienced being known. It completely changed my relationship with the students. We we focused a lot on cognitive load, we focused on different ways we took notes using graphic organizers, the way that I demonstrated taking lessons, we used some variation theory so that we could see patterns. We did a lot of group work, think parent sharing. So it was really a foundational shift in how I taught the course. I would suggest anyone who wants to better themselves as a classroom teacher to truly open themselves up to ask, "What else is out there? What else can I learn? How else can I be effective? How can I help the most?" to go ahead and take the course. Invaluable.