I am a 4th generation teacher, and now my children have chosen this path. Two of my 3 children are educators --our son is a professor of history and one daughter an adjunct professor of education with 8 years as an upper elementary classroom teacher. Our other daughter is an HR executive who adroitly employs many skills and strategies of a good teacher.
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Dr. Ruddiman is.... |
... retired from public education after 30 years working, mostly, with middle schoolers. As a reading specialist, she enjoyed years of reading and thinking with young adults in language arts classrooms. She moved into gifted and talented education, facilitating PRISM (Performance Reveals Individual Student Magic) with 6th -8th graders who were encouraged to self-select into the program rather than the standard of being tested and then invited (or not) into participating in GT program. Dr. Ruddiman is a member of New Jersey Association for Gifted Children (NJAGC) and presents for educators and parents at the annual conference. Dr. Ruddiman offers workshops for educators and students, particularly with New Jersey History Day and New Jersey Future Educators.
Joan Ruddiman is a member of the advisory board and active in teacher and student training for New Jersey History Day (www.NJHistoryDay.org) and for New Jersey Future Problem Solver Program (www.NJFPSP.org). Mrs. Ruddiman lives in the village of Allentown, NJ with her husband John. Their three children are well established in their careers, are married and are the parents of Joan and John's precious "grands." Joan is the current president of the Allentown Public Library Association, and takes great pride in the public/private partnership that supports a free public library in a beautifully renovated 19th century former church that is owned and maintained by the APL Association. Joanie is an avid -- albeit woefully average -- golfer, which explains her love of summer time. |
Significant influences... |
...begin with John Dewey, who proposed that all learning begins with the need to know. Dr. Ruddiman believes that teaching is the art of cultivating students' curiosity and intrinsic motivation and then connecting them to "curriculum" that fulfills their need to know.
Nanci Atwell with her whole language practices deeply resonated with Dr. Ruddiman as a reader and teacher. She wanted her classrooms to be like Atwell's "dining room table." What drove Dr. Ruddiman as a middle school reading teacher is that the most important lesson for students to take with them is the love of learning driven by being life-long readers. When Dr. Ruddiman was asked to move into gifted education, she dove into the research and best practices in the field in order to build on a unique GT program developed by her colleague and mentor Marilyn Roessler. She was strongly influenced by the work of Drs. Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reiss. Dr. Ruddiman saw her role as that of a facilitator who could provide robust learning experiences that would engage students' high abilities, stimulate their creativity, and support their intrinsic task commitment. In recent years, Dr. Ruddiman has found the work of Carol Dweck on Mindset and the research by Angela Duckworth on grit and resiliency put theory and provided academic cache to the philosophy and practices of the PRISM program. Then, where Dr. Ruddiman begins with students and with any workshop she conducts is with Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Theory that transformed how the big collective "we" understands the nature of "being smart." Rather than ask "How smart are you?" -- as in an IQ number -- Prof. Gardner re-frames the question as "How ARE you smart?" Every healthy human brain exhibits abilities in all areas, but one, two, or three tend to be more salient than others. Dr. Ruddiman proposes that "the secret to success is to recognize and embrace what we do well, what we love to do, and claim them as our gifts, while recognizing what does not come as easily to us, what we don't enjoy doing, which are our gaps. We fill our gaps with extra effort, collaboration with others who are good in these areas, and outside the realm of school, we pay people to do for us what we choose not to do on our own. Our gifts drive what we major in, our career paths -- what we do to fulfill ourselves." "This is the secret to success: spend your gifts effectively and fill your gaps efficiently. But the first step (my first lesson) is to know yourself well." Dr. Ruddiman |
