Courtney Meyer
After nine years facilitating the Stern Tutoring and Alternative Techniques for Education (STATE) Program’s weekly seminars, Dr. Tim Goth-Owens has retired. This component of the program will now be coordinated by two new, yet familiar faces looking to design a new chapter in the program’s life.
In 2004, the generosity of Mickey and Debbie Stern established an endowment that developed a comprehensive and innovative program to assist students with learning disabilities. Its structured environment provides academic support and tutoring in a disability-specific instructional, tutorial, and peer mentoring components unique to Michigan State University.
Of the approximately 600 students who register with the Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities annually with learning disabilities, 15 to 20 first years, transfers, or students with cumulative grade point averages below 3.0 with the commitment to improve their academic performance are accepted each semester. Since the program’s beginning, more than 200 students have successfully completed it.
Because they perceive themselves as unsuccessful in comparison to their peers, research indicates that students with learning disabilities often lack self-awareness and positive attitudes or beliefs that academic attainment is possible. However, this can be taught, and once developed, it serves a predictor for success.
Students in the semester-long STATE program complete a seminar on successful learning strategies, receive weekly course content tutoring, participate in peer mentoring, and explore the use of assistive technologies to help them fulfill reading and writing assignments. Students also meet individually with a professional learning specialist.
Ultimately, the seminar aimed to connect habits that the students identified having through a learning inventory with knowledge about how brains function best from neuroscience. Reflecting about the most gratifying part of his work, Tim explained, “Every semester, a good portion of [students] make a commitment to work harder, and it’s kind of inspiring.”
The seminars taught and reinforced successful learning strategies, covering topics related to study skills, like note-taking and information processing; motivation, and attention to personal concerns influencing performance like anxiety or sleep.
Using his background in psychology, Tim approached facilitating the seminar as an exercise in helping people change their behavior by taking information and transforming it into something that would transform their lives. “So much of education is done as if all you have to do is give people information and that’s the end of the story.”
The newest seminar facilitators, Learning Ability Access Specialist Dr. Darryl Steele and Chronic Health Disabilities Specialist Shani Feyen are no strangers to RCPD, and their partnership together will reinforce the successful program that Tim built.
Darryl’s degree in special education and Master’s and Ph.D. in counselor education complement a wide range of experiences relating to education, college student development, and counseling. A former teacher, Shani brings a background in K-12 education and a Master’s degree in Education Administration/Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education, where she focused on students with disabilities.
Feyen and Steele discuss plans for upcoming STATE meetings
Together, they plan to extend and evolve Tim’s work to emphasize self-awareness, self-efficacy, and ownership of the educational experience. Group work will present information and counseling techniques facilitate related meaning and skills. They believe it is important to create a flexible and comfortable learning environment in which students can identify using SMART goals what better and more effective performance means and looks like.
Darryl’s hopes are high. “I expect participants to gain a stronger sense of themselves as students and grasp the idea that they are in control of their learning. Additionally, I believe participants will approach future courses with increased confidence as they become more aware of their strengths, more readily set meaningful goals, and accurately assess their progression toward those goals.”
Tim hopes that the STATE Program can become “a program that people know about around the country and come to MSU for. They discover that if they show up here with a learning disability or any kind of disability for that matter…[it will not] prevent them from shining.”