"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens."
- J.R.R. Tolkien
Christine Wlaschin is an experienced office manager, finance manager, and human resource manager. She has worked at the Engelmann-Becker Corporation and the National Institute for Direct Instruction (NIFDI) since 2004, performing a range of jobs. She began her work at the Engelmann-Becker Corporation and NIFDI as a finance auditor and a human resource consultant. Within these positions, she created an employee handbook, conducted interviews, and performed various other duties. In August 2005, she also assumed the positions of Office Manager and Finance Manager, taking on new responsibilities that included building maintenance, running advertisements, and addressing personnel issues. She was promoted to Chief Operating Officer in July of 2019, still retaining her previous positions and responsibilities.
"The whole world opened to me when I learned to read."
- Mary McLeod Bethune
Cheryl Shelton is an exceptional Direct Instruction trainer and coach who has experienced successful implementations of the comprehensive DI model from different, critical perspectives. From 1996-2007, Mrs. Shelton worked as a teacher, mentor teacher, and leadership team member at Margaret Fain Elementary School in Atlanta, Georgia. After mastering Direct Instruction presentation techniques as a teacher with support from the National Institute for Direct Instruction (NIFDI) and coaches training from NIFDI, Mrs. Shelton served as Direct Instruction Coach at Fain. As part of her time at Fain, she was also the Grade Level Chairperson for 1st-5th grades. In 2007, Mrs. Shelton moved to Continental Colony Elementary School, also in the Atlanta Public Schools System. There, she served as Third Grade Teacher, Grade Level Chairperson, and DI Coach. In 2009, she became the DI Facilitator (Coordinator) and helped transform Continental Colony into one of the premier DI implementation sites in Atlanta.
Mrs. Shelton holds a Bachelor's Degree in Early Childhood Education from Clark Atlanta University and a Master's Degree in Curriculum from Central Michigan University.
"The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Bryan has been involved in Direct Instruction for 40 years. Literally starting as a shipping clerk and receptionist at Engelmann-Becker (the development arm of DI) in 1978. From there, he assisted in the development, field-testing, and production of the Reading Mastery, Connecting Math Concepts, Spelling Mastery, and Reasoning and Writing programs, as well as many other projects. He was also an “employee on loan” to the Association for Direct Instruction from its infancy in 1981.
In 1995, he moved over to working full-time for the Association for Direct Instruction as Executive Director. There, he led the development of open registration event DI trainings, including conferences across the US and Canada. In 2012, he began assisting NIFDI in expanding its outreach activities, including the National Direct Instruction Training Institute. Through events such as these, educators will have access to high-quality training and information to support their implementation of DI.
"How well we teach = how well they learn. Teach with passion. Manage with compassion."
- Anita Archer
Bonnie Grossen, Ph.D., taught high school German and English before beginning her career in Direct instruction in 1975 while teaching elementary Native American children. Later, as a high school special education teacher, she taught DI for 9 years before embarking on the Ph.D. program at the University of Oregon. Subsequent to graduation, she served as Head of the English Department at a black teacher-training college in South Africa. The mandate there was to raise teacher trainee competencies using DI programs and to implement DI in the homeland elementary schools.
Bonnie’s career in DI involved three different roles: researcher, author, and implementer/teacher trainer. As a researcher, she received the Award for Outstanding Research in Learning Disabilities presented by the Council for Learning Disabilities in 1989; the National Young Researcher Award presented by the Association for Computers and Educational Technology in 1989; and the American Federation of Teachers’ Contributing Researchers Award for bridging the gap between research and practice in 2002. The first two awards were for her research demonstrating that logical thinking and reasoning could be taught successfully to low-IQ individuals, a finding that contradicted the mainstream belief that logical ability is innate and cannot be taught.
