ABOUT US

Mary Jo Johnson's Story

Mary Jo Johnson came to the work of Reuven Feuerstein in the 1980’s as an English teacher in the high school at the North Carolina School for the Deaf. Because it’s especially difficult for deaf students to communicate in a language they can’t hear, the focus of her work had been reading comprehension skills and basic written expression. She was often frustrated that even with her best efforts, progress was slow and uneven. Johnson heard about Instrumental Enrichment (IE) from a colleague and, after investigating a bit more, signed up to attend a beginning workshop. Initially, the program seemed like a good way to help her students, but she was soon astonished at how much she grew in her own learning approaches. She began to teach in a new way, recognizing more clearly that it is impossible to teach everything our students need to know, but that we can instead become coaches, helping them develop the skills to become independent, lifelong learners. In IE, we do this through identifying cognitive weaknesses and finding ways to strengthen these areas. We teach students to search for meaningful connections and to bridge classroom learning to all life situations. This work is Johnson’s passion.

Academic Credentials

Mary Jo Johnson holds a BA in English and Special Education for the Deaf from Lenoir Rhyne College, Hickory, NC (1968) and an MA in Reading Education from Appalachian State University in Boone, NC (1987). She is proudest, however, of the Instrumental Enrichment Trainer Certificate she received from the Leadership Training Institute held at Brown University in 1998. She has continued her professional development, attending the Advanced Trainers Seminar at the international conference held at the University of Surrey in 2002 and most recently, adding the new Instrumental Enrichment BASIC training in Chicago in 2006. She remains excited about how we can help individuals achieve more through using mediated learning experiences.

What are students learning in an IE class?

Take a look as students develop their cognitive skills in Instrumental Enrichment classes.  They're learning strategies, developing skills, and solving problems. And more importantly, they're talking about the processes they use and how they can apply these in new situations in other academic classes, in test taking, in daily living, and in social situations.

A group of elementary students practice describing where things are in relation to a particular object or person. They begin with using pictures and move to working with abstract symbols. It's tricky because often several different answers may be correct!

In a sixth grade class, students analyze a sample drawing and then follow the directions on the page to create a figure that is like the model in size and form, while being different in color and number.  They have to consider all aspects at the same time and then check their work to see that it meets the criteria.

Students in a resource class begin learning the process of classification. Although they aren't familiar with the vocabulary in the lesson, "animate," "inanimate," and "vegetation," they use a skill they've learned, searching for cues on the page, to help them figure out the meanings.

Thinking, problem solving, and decision making are what we continue to study in Instrumental Enrichment classes. Students learn that being able to answer the question "How can I find out?" is more important than knowing a specific answer.  It's impossible, of course, for any of us to learn, memorize and retain all the information and skills we'll need for a lifetime. But if we learn how to find out, how to learn, we will have the tools to be successful in any situation.

We may need to learn to operate a new machine or an unfamiliar computer program for our job. We may find ourselves studying a foreign language, dealing with more complex directions for household appliances, or navigating a trip that involves using complicated maps and bus or train schedules. All of these situations call for us to compare, analyze, make and test hypotheses and come up with a plan. If we have learned how to learn, we can be independent and successful at any of these tasks.