Meet Dick Piazza
Richard “Dick” Piazza has worked in public education for forty years. His passion for learning has been the central driving force of his professional career.
He has taught on the elementary, middle, high school and college levels. His area of specialty is English Literature, with a heavy emphasis on Shakespeare, James Joyce and writing. During his years in the high school he created “The Writer’s Workshop,” which became a popular elective. In 1971, he spent a year at England’s Oxford University. During this time he also taught in three Oxfordshire primary and intermediate schools that were using a child-centered and interdisciplinary approach. This experience became the foundation for the work he would later do in his Brain-Compatible Learning Workshops.
When he created the Paramus Community School in 1978, his dream was to provide a setting in which the whole community could come together and share in the joys of learning. Twenty years later, the Paramus Community School is one of the most successful programs in the county.
In 1979, he was instrumental in starting the “Transitional Program” for disenchanted students who were at risk of dropping out of school. This special education program, still in existence, has won State and Federal recognition for excellence and compassion.
In 1994 he was elected president of the New Jersey Association for Lifelong Learning. In addition to his brain-compatible learning workshops, Dick Piazza offers 4MAT training to teachers and administrators across the country. As a national consultant for About Learning, Inc., Dick has trained hundreds of teachers in Texas, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The 4MAT design is a cohesive framework for teaching and school organization developed by Bernice McCarthy from the research of David Kolb, Kurt Lewin and others. It provides educators with the “Natural Learning Cycle,” a model for instruction and curriculum development that is also reflective of current brain research.
Currently, Dick provides individualized coaching in a design he calls Conversations That Matter. Using a Socratic approach combined with transitional tools for rewriting personal narratives, individuals become newly empowered to edit those aspects of their “stories” that no longer serve them.
Dick has recently published his first book, Everyday Epiphanies. It is a collection of short poems, longer pieces called Everyday Love Songs and a collection of essays called Everyday Reflections.