The Educator

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Children with SMS seem to have difficulties in processing information that is given in a sequential or step-wise fashion. One way to work around this problem is to use pictures or charts whenever possible to help the child visualize the different steps involved in a task or math problem. Children with SMS tend to be visual learners, and they often need to refer to pictures for guidance in learning a new task.

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If possible, someone other than the teacher should take the child to a separate, uninteresting room for time-out. Many children with SMS are anxious to not miss any activities with their beloved teacher and may work extra hard at bringing the tantrum to an end. Children with SMS can present major challenges in the classroom; yet for teachers who have faced them, the rewards of teaching kids with SMS can far outweigh the challenges.

You are not alone. We understand it can be overwhelming to understand a new challenging vocabulary and come to terms with the ways in which this diagnosis will affect your student with SMS, their family, and the support you provide. Children with Smith-Magenis syndrome typically face delays in specific development areas. Early intervention is highly recommended and has proven successful for many individuals with SMS and their families. From Behavior and Sleep to Medical Management and Guardianship, there are a variety of factors to consider and educate yourself on when it comes to your student with Smith-Magenis syndrome.

It can be important to share information on Smith-Magenis syndrome with your local community or students, fellow educators and support staff who interact with your student with Smith-Magenis syndrome regularly. Help us build this database by nominating a physician in your area. Research leads to answers. You can learn about research opportunities for your student with SMS that can help to advance research for the community. PRISMS hosts a biennial conference for the SMS community complete with opportunities to network and share with other families and engage and learn from professionals and researchers from around the world.

Through the conference, PRISMS offers a Teacher and Support Staff workshop as well as funding for teachers and support staff to attend and gain the information and resources they need to best support their students with SMS. Her older sister, Briahna who is 28, was diagnosed with the disorder at 11 years old. Callihan has been a caretaker for her sister since age Bri went to her prom, she also went up to her college and stayed in the dorms. Callihan has 26 years of experience growing up with her sister. A Smith-Magenis Guidebook for Schools. The Quest for Adult Attention Children with SMS are very much adult-oriented, with a sometimes insatiable need for individual attention.

The following insights may be helpful: A Small Class Size Rather than working together with their classmates, many children with SMS seem to be in competition with them, seeing them as obstacles to gaining teacher attention. Reinforces and Motivators Children with SMS have some degree of control over their behaviors, but it is important to recognize that many of the negative behaviors seen in SMS have their origins in internally drives impulses.

Visual Reminders Children with SMS seem to have difficulties in processing information that is given in a sequential or step-wise fashion. They learn basic concepts, such as science, history and mathematics, by application in the course of these projects. And teachers are able to leverage their work to support more traditional academics. There's no end to such projects online. Another lecture at the Global Education Conference talked about Polar Bears International, where a group of scientists based in Churchill, Manitoba, work and talk with students worldwide about wildlife in the Arctic.

Another described the Sinebrychoff Art Museum educational program for seniors. Another described the Fulbright Narratives from Turkmenistan. Another the LitWorld Girls Clubs. The list is almost endless; students could choose from almost any discipline, any topic, and even any pedagogy under the sun. What's significant about these examples is not so much the new opportunities they offer students, though there is that. It's that all of them redefine the educator's role in some significant way. They create entirely new categories of educator, such as "online lecturer" or "scientist studying polar bears".

Entire disciplines, far removed from traditional "instructional design", are being created and populated by people who direct online videos, design learning communities, program massive games like Evoke. And they create new categories of roles and responsibilities for in-person educators. What is, after all, the role of a teacher helping Roots and Shoots activists?

What skills does a teacher bring to the table when facilitating conversations with students in Turkmenistan? A couple of weeks ago I went through an exercise with one of Alec Couros's graduate education classes. I asked about the idea of multiple roles in education to Twitter readers and gathered a set of them.

I then took this set and went through it with the class online; as I talked about the roles, the students defined them, added examples, and identified who would perform the tasks described. The result was a unique -- and colorful -- slide show exploring the evolving education profession. It's worth actually taking the time to list some of these roles and to talk about them in detail:. The Learner -- as someone who models the act of learning, the educator helps students with this most fundamental of skills.

This includes getting exited about something new, exploring it, trying it out and experimenting, engaging with it and engaging with others learning about it. Everyone learns, from novices to professionals, and while our approach to learning may change over the time as we become more skilled and more professional, we always have something to teach about learning. The Collector -- educators have always been collectors, from the days when they would bring stacks of old magazines into class to the modern era as they share links, resources, new faces and new names.

They find materials related to their own interests, keep in tune with student interests. They are the maven, the librarian, the journalist or the archivist.

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The Curator -- as opposed to the collector, who goes out and finds, the curator is one who organizes and makes sense of that which has been found. The curator is like a caretaker and a preserver, but also a creator of meaning, guardian of knowledge, or an expert at knowing. A curator is a connoisseur, one who brings quality to the fore, one who sequences and presents. A curator may be a presenter, an instructional designer, or an artist. The Alchemist -- historically, of course, the alchemist was one who transmuted lead into gold; today's alchemist mixes the ordinary and mundane into something new and unexpected.

The alchemist practices the 'mix' of remix, the "mash" of mash-up, the "collage" of bricolage. The alchemist sees patters and symmetries in distinct materials and brings them together to bring that out. The person who created Obama Girl and the artists who created the " I Gotta Feeling " lip-dub were alchemists.

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The Programmer -- the programmer builds sequences into machines, manipulates symbols to produce meaning, calculates, orders, assembles, and manages. A good part of the programmer's task involves working directly on computers, as is the case for those writing software, designing communities or social networks, or setting up wikis. Another part of the task is conceptual, applying to people who develop course materials or creates learning work flows. Authors are part programmers, as are instructional designers, and as are process analysts. The Salesperson -- the salesperson is often thought of as "a big talker who will not do the project" but such a person nonetheless plays an important role in providing information, supporting belief and motivating action.

The salesperson, like all educators, is the champion of a cause or an idea. It's the principal selling to the staff, the teacher promoting a set of values to the student, the scientist informing the entrepreneur, the expert counseling the politician. The Convener -- this is the person who brings people together. Every good office has one; it's the person who wanders from desk to desk signing people up for softball or suds. A convener is a network builder, a community organizer, or as one course participant wrote, a huge part of life in rural Saskatchewan.

Conveners are leaders, coaches, and administrators; they are collaboration builders, coalition builders, enablers or sometimes even just pied pipers. The Coordinator -- this person organizes the people who have been brought together, organizing groups or things together for the common good. A coordinator is an eminently practical person, organizing schedules, setting expectations, managing logistics, following up and solving problems.

The people who are expert at coordination know who they are; they are the ones that wind up coordinating everything for people: A coordinator is a connector and an integrator, but most of all, a systems person. The Designer -- in online learning we tend to think specifically of the instructional designer, but in fact we see the hand of the designer on everything from wall maps to book pages to desks and chairs to classroom paint. The purpose of the designer is to create spaces for learning, whether they are in person, on paper or online.

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They attend to flow, perspectives, light, tone and shading. The designer may be the industrial architect creating a new school or the software architect creating a new simulation. The Coach -- this multifaceted role involves everything from creating synergy and chemistry in a group to providing the game plan for learning to raising the bar and encouraging players to higher performance.

Though the coach is on the side of the learner, in the learner's corner urging them on and giving advice, the coach also serves a larger or higher objective, working to achieve team or organizational goals. The Agitator -- this is the person who creates the itch a person's education will eventually scratch. The role of the agitator is to create the seed of doubt, the sense of wonder, the feeling of urgency, the cry of outrage. The agitator is sometimes the devil's advocate, sometimes the revolutionary, sometimes the disruptive agent, and sometimes just somebody who is thinking outside the box.

We an all be agitators, but scientists, skeptics, journalists and activists have elevated it into a discipline of its own. The Facilitator -- such a person makes the learning space comfortable. Their role is to cove the process or the conversation forward, but within a broad range of parameters that will stress clarity, order, inclusiveness, and good judgment. The facilitator keeps things on track and within reason, gently nudging things forward, but without typically imposing his or her opinions or agenda onto the outcome.

Moderators, arbitrators and mediators are all types of facilitator; so is the chair of a debate or the leader of a classroom discussion. Tech Support -- sometimes tech support people seem like magicians, other times they seem to be power brokers, but their influence on educational processes and outcomes is unquestioned, and they are today an indispensable part of the organization. A tech support person may work with programs and hardware, but his or her primary role is to understand what people need, to solve problems, and make things possible. Sometimes tech support needs to be in the room with you, sometimes they'll be in the corporate office, and sometimes they'll be half way around the world.

The Moderator -- in addition to the facilitation role, alluded to above, there is a separate skill entirely under the heading of moderation.

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Where facilitation is about encouragement and growth, moderation is about governing and pruning. The moderator of a forum is concerned about decorum, good behavior and rules. He or she will tell people to "shush" while the movie is playing, trim the trolls from the discussion thread, and gently suggest in a back-channel that the experienced pro ought to go more easily on the novice. The Critic -- every person needs to be questioned; it is part of the learning process. Values, truths, and institutions need to be questioned as well.

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The critic is the person who asks for evidence, verifies the facts, assesses the reasoning, and offers opinions. But as Roger Ebert so eloquently demonstrates, the critic is also an aide to understanding, one who will extract the threads of a tangled presentation and make them clear. As logic texts everywhere proclaim, criticism consists first of exposition and only then of examination. The Lecturer -- unlike the critic, who will focus on a specific work or author, the lecturer has the responsibility or organizing larger bodies of work or thought into a comprehensible whole, employing the skills of rhetoric and exposition to make the complex clear for the listener or reader.

Today's lecturer includes not only the teacher or professor who stands at the head of the classroom but also speakers and conferences and seminars, priests and public officials, on-air performers and speakers, documentary personalities and television presenters. The Demonstrator -- some things are better shown than described and this is there someone who demonstrates comes in. Demonstration has always been a part of education, whether a carpenter demonstrating proper mitering to an apprentice or a chemist demonstrating proper lab technique to a class.

Traditionally demonstration has been done in person, but today people who demonstrate can use actual equipment, simulations, or video to tell their stories. Many of the educational videos online are demonstrations rather than lectures, following in the model established by television personalities such as Bob Vila , Michael Holmes or Debbie Travis.

The Mentor -- when we look for models and examples to follow, we look not simply for practices and techniques, but often more generally toward the sort of person we want to be. Such a person, if they correspond, converse and work with you personally, may become a mentor. The role of mentor is itself multi-faceted, ranging from sharp critic to enthusiastic coach, but outweighing these is the personal dimension, the presence of the entire personality rather than some domain or discipline.

Not everyone can be a mentor, not every mentor can take on too many prodigies, and of all the roles described here, that of the mentor is most likely to be honorary or voluntary.

The Connector -- this is the person who draws associations and makes inferences. The connector is the person who links or bridges distinct communities with one another, allowing ideas to flow from art to engineering, from database design to flower arranging. The connector sees things in common between disparate entities and draws that line between them, creating links and collaborations between otherwise isolated communities and disciplines. The connector sees emergent phenomena, patterns across different groups or different societies, or conversely, identifies the unusual, unique or unexpected.

Stock analysis, intelligence officers and online journalists are often connectors of one sort or another; so is the teacher who first thought to teach ballet to hockey players. The Theorizer -- the object of theory is to explain, and so the theorizer is one who tries to describe how or why something is the case. The theorizer often works through abstraction and generalization, which leads to critics saying he or she is not very practical, but without the theorizer we would have no recourse to very useful unseen phenomena such as mass, gravity or information.

The theorizer is also the person who leads us to develop world views, find the underlying cause or meaning of things, or create order out of what appears to be chaos. If nothing else, the theorizer helps us remember things by giving us a single structure under which to assimilate numerous details. Priests are by necessity theorizers, but so also are scientists this is what they have in common , and also weather forecasters, economists and sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists.

The Sharer -- we have looked at some specific forms of sharing, such as lecturing or criticizing, but there is a more generic role in education consisting of the sharing of material from one person to another on a wider and much more systematic basic.

The sharer might be the person making e-portfolios available, the person managing the class mailing list, or the person passing along links and reflections from outside. But ultimately, what the sharer offers most are cultures, concepts and ideas.

While most anyone can share we tend to think of creative types -- artists, songwriters and storytellers -- as sharers,. The Evaluator -- for all the emphasis it receives in the media, the role of evaluation is but one facet, and a relatively minor one, in the educational system.

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