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Consultants

CSEE's consultants all have years of experience both working in schools and working in the field of their consultancy. See our consultations page for more information about topics & fees.

Barbara Dixon Ackerman

...is an academic coach, currently on leave from her position as an Upper School English teacher at Garrison Forest School, in Owings Mills, Maryland. With LouAnne Smith, she leads CSEE's highly acclaimed advisory workshops. Barb is editor of Advisory Quarterly, a newsletter for advisors in Independent Schools published by CSEE. She is co-editor of CSEE's handbook for advisors: Need a Hand with Advising? Here's a Handbook!

Avril P. Beckford

...is a board-certified pediatrician and a fellow of the Amercan Academy of Pediatrics. In addition to her recent book, she has published a chapter in a major pediatric textbook, and articles for medical journals, parenting, and educational publications. She funded the Pediatric and Adolescent Center of Cobb in 1994, and has served on the board of the Georgia chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

She is a past chair of the Section on Families and Professionalism, and is president-elect of the Georgia chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Her teaching experience includes a position as chief resident and instructor at the Penn State University Children's Hospital; she is currently an outpatient clinical preceptor for the pediatric department of the Morehouse School of Medicine. She has appeared as a guest on CNN broadcasts, and is an appointed member of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honors Medical Society.

Dr. Beckford has experience as a trustee and parent in the Independent School world, and she is a member of the Board of Trustees for the Council for Spiritual and Ethical Education.

Tom Collins

...is a frequent workshop presenter for CSEE, and is generally considered one of the most progressive and innovative teachers of religion in the United States. He is co-director of Religious Studies in Secondary Schools, and director of the secondary school project for the Forum on Religion and Ecology.

Collins has set up interdisciplinary humanities curricula in at least four different states, and has advised numerous other schools on their curricula. His current project entails working with his school, and others, to teach the Universe Story. He teaches in the religion department at Annie Wright School in Tacoma, Washington.

Sarah Feinbloom

... is a documentary filmmaker who has run workshops, presented on panels, and done presentations for schools, universities, and organizations around North America.

In addition to her past peresentations for CSEE, Sarah Feinbloom has worked with or done presentations for the American Academy of Religion, the Association for the Sociology of Religion, and Graduate Theological Union. Her film What Do You Believe? has been shown at the Provincetown Film Festival and the Calgary International Film Festival.

Mike Pardee

...is Director of Character Education at The Kinkaid School in Houston, Texas, where he develops experiential curricula in the burgeoning new fields of leadership training and character development. Prior to his position at Kinkaid, he served as the Executive Director of the Leadership Initiative at Suffield Academy in Connecticut.

Mike's years of research and first-hand experience in both boarding and day school environments are assets in exploring the theoretical and practical applications of ethical leadership and character development in schools.

In his capacity as the founding Executive Director of Suffield Academy's Leadership Initiative, he helped generate a four-year curriculum and comprehensive leadership program that culminated in a leadership "practicum" in which all seniors assumed significant leadership responsibilities at the school, while being mentored by a faculty advisor.

In addition to consulting for CSEE, Mike is one of the founding faculty members at the Gardner Carney Leadership Institute (whose primary mission is "teaching teachers about teaching leadership") at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs. He has presented at NAIS Conferences on youth leadership development and character education, and organized the June, 2007, regional symposium on both these topics at the Kinkaid School in Houston.

John Roberts

...has been faculty advisor to the honor council at The Westminster Schools in Atlanta, Georgia for 12 years, and has facilitated CSEE's Honor Codes conferences for the past nine years. His teaching includes experience both at the university level and in the Independent School world. He has written two textbooks and a number of professional articles.

John is editor of CSEE's Connections newsletter, and offers an objective, informed perspective, as well as resource suggestions and recommendations for school-specific programs drawn from years of experience and a variety of schools.

Ann Saylor

...founded and directed the Service Learning program at The Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, Tennessee. In 2000, her service-learning program earned Harpeth Hall recognition as one of 23 high schools in America named "National Service-Learning Leader School. Harpeth Hall's spirit of service under Ann's guidance was contagious: with no service requirement, 95% of students chose to volunteer each year.

Ann authored the volunteer recruitment chapter of Youth Service America's National Youth Service Day Tool Kit (1998), she served on the national review committee for the Points of Light Foundation's YES Ambassador Program, and published in Volunteer Leadership, the national service magazine.

Ann has presented workshops both regionally and nationally on such topics as Introduction to Service Learning, Advanced Service Learning, Planning Volunteer Trips, Asset-Based Service Learning, and Introduction to Developmental Assets.

David Streight

...is a nationally certified school psychologist with three decades of experience teaching in religiously affiliated, and non-affiliated, schools. His teaching has included courses on Christianity, eastern religions, Islam, mysticism, ethics, and love. He is a co-founder of Religious Studies in Secondary Schools, and the translator of a half-dozen books for academic presses on subjects in the fields of religion and philosophy.

He was a team member to translate Routledge's impressive Dictionary of the Papacy. David spent two years as host to the teacher's section of the PBS Web site for Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, and is a Practice Advisor for the Center for Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence for Search Institute.

David has been Executive Director of CSEE since 2004.

Marilyn Watson

...is former program director for the Child Development Project and director of CDP's national Teacher Education Project. The Child Development Project has been called one of the most successful moral development programs ever implemented. Watson has spent the past two decades working with educators to promote children's social, intellectual, and moral development.

In a recent CSEE moral development training session with Marvin Berkowitz, Berkowitz called Marilyn Watson "the master of classrooms for moral growth." She is the author (with classroom teacher Laura Ecken) of Learning to Trust (Wiley, 2002), and more recently of CSEE's booklet on Developmental Discipline and its power to foster moral development.

Katie Zink

...spent years as a human resources consultant and workshop presenter, working with retail stores and small businesses. Her background in early childhood and elementary education later led her to join the staff at Academy at the Lakes, in Land O'Lakes, FL, where she has worked with a team to set up and maintain an innovative character education program centered around CSEE's publication Creating Classrooms and Homes of Virtue.

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CSEE Moral Development Team

CSEE's Moral Development Team is a group of a dozen experienced teachers and administrators from independent elementary, middle, and secondary schools throughout the United States.

Through CSEE's Working With the Best project, the group has trained with the top university-level character education and moral development trainers in the country, in addition to their own individual and collective work to facilitate moral development programs in schools.

Members of CSEE's Moral Development Team have written articles about moral development strategies or related issues for the CSEE newsletter, Connections, and have presented at local and national conferences on character education and moral development.

Arrangement for this consultation will bring two team members to your school for the price of one consultant. Schools will be responsible for travel/lodging expenses for both consultants, but, depending on a particular school's grade levels and needs, trainers will come from the shortest distance possible.