5a: As a critical thinker, Maxine Greene had a transformative vision for education that focused on a cross-disciplinary approach with the goal of expanding minds towards human and societal improvement.  Content is important, but so to is how we interact with our learning experience and how we connect that experience to our lives.  No amount of standardized testing will help us to build socially positive communities, but through the content of academic disciplines we can develop young minds into powerfully independent thinkers, not easily influenced or swayed my mass hysteria.  I am a strong believer that learning to learn, and loving learning, is far more important than the content of instruction.  Through my long running and continuing education, as well as a wide variety of life experiences, I have grown increasingly capable and increasingly motivated to not only continue my education, but also work to create educational opportunities for children that address the whole child, connecting learning to life in a way that motivates and inspires.

5b: Interdisciplinary efforts in education have to potential to transform our educational system into one that truly values education, rather than a decades old system of churning out factory mediocrity to sustain a broken machine driven by economic, rather than human concern.  Research aimed at improving student outcomes, not in terms of stereotyped standards, but individual accomplishment will be necessary if we are to ever wake up from our Platonic slumber.  One of the ways I have transformed my therapy is by incorporating ipads as tools of inquiry with the children I work with.  Some kids use them to engage in self-directed research inquiries, while another child is able to expand his expressive language, while simultaneously decreasing challenging behaviors, by looking up things he is struggling to explain.  "I'll show you," he says, but once he does, he continues describing with his language as well, expanding multiple skills at once, all unprompted, and with little to no frustration.

5c: Using local, practitioner-based research to guide student learning, rather than following national curriculum aimed at stereotyped students, is a necessary step towards an educational revolution long overdue.  By beginning with a foundation of exceptionally trained teachers eager to teach through their own research driven practices, classrooms can be transformed into engines for positive social change, rather than places where students go to become dulled and blunted instruments of social mediocrity.  I have been using my own research and data collection to design and implement therapy plans for several months now.  The outcomes for the children are unparalleled and over the last month I collaborated with a colleague to plan and implement an action research plan to develop both a new behavioral crisis plan and a new plan for therapy designed to maximize positive outcomes and minimize the challenges of maladaptive behaviors.  We learned more in a month than other professionals had learned in the previous five years due to a highly collaborative and experimental research approach, eliminating the guesswork.

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