Special to the Herald

In April 1985, Stephanie DiChiro started teaching special education part time at Glen Hills Elementary School.

That launched a career that has spanned several decades and impacted hundreds of lives, including at Garden City Elementary School, where DiChiro taught for three decades.

“The next year [after starting], I moved from Glen Hills over to Garden City Elementary School, where I had actually attended school as a kid,” she said. “I moved to teaching first grade the year after that, and that’s where I was, in Room 1, until 2017. I loved every minute of that. I worked with a lot of different people in that school and I learned so much from them.”

DiChiro has seen the way early childhood education has changed through the years. During her time at Garden City Elementary, she worked with five different building administrators, including the current Assistant Superintendent Norma Cole.

She also experienced many challenges over the years, including the death of some of her students and even some of their parents. She also met many students who had physical challenges.

“They always had great spirit, and they were the ones who taught me something,” she said. “It wasn’t easy for me to make the decision to leave Garden City after all of those years, but I was ready for a change.”

Now, DiChiro has a new role as the district’s elementary literacy coordinator.

“When I first started teaching, kindergarten was very developmentally appropriate,” she said. “As time went on, it became a lot less so. I believe that we should always have expectations for our kindergarteners but we should also be mindful of their ages.”

In her new role, DiChiro is assisting current early childhood educators in Cranston as they work through the implementation of an early childhood program that she believes is much more developmentally appropriate for young students, while still embedding critical skills.

The Boston Public Schools kindergarten program is now being used in 21 Cranston Public Schools, with six first-grade classrooms piloting the program’s Focus on First component.

“We have some fabulous teachers implementing this. The state is very much behind the implementation of this program and many other districts across the state are doing it as well,” DiChiro said. “Everyone began with rolling it out in kindergarten, and now some districts, including ours, are piloting it in first grade this year.”

DiChiro cited some of the things she loves most about the program.

“It’s developmentally appropriate, yet it has high expectations,” she said. “It has literacy embedded everywhere. There is oral language, phonemic awareness and high vocabulary. It’s very personalized. The students have voice and choice. It is play-based, but it is very purposeful play, and the activities are based on the units being studied. In kindergarten there are four units, and while the program gives the kids a choice to pick the center they want to go to, for example, the things they do at that center are very purposefully play-based on the unit of study. We use guiding questions to help students think more and we help them to use their creativity more. This program brings joy back into the classrooms.”

DiChiro noted that the classrooms also use the Fundations program and Eureka Math.

“As a first-grade teacher all those years ago, I would have embraced this program,” she said. “The first-grade program is very appropriate. There are fewer worksheets and fewer dittos and more applying of what they’re learning. My job is to help them by coaching them and providing feedback as they are implementing the program. We are in our fourth year of implementation in kindergarten now, and it’s our first year of implementation for our first grades”

Additionally, DiChiro is helping the third-, fourth- and fifth-grade teachers at Eden Park Elementary School as they adjust to working in their new 21st-century education space.

“I consult with them by helping them with lessons they’re teaching, by modeling lessons in classrooms on close reading and writing, and I work with them on scheduling because there are lots of requirements to the program,” she said. “You are required to have 190 minutes of literacy and 85 minutes of math at the kindergarten level.”

However, she noted that those minutes are embedded in the program’s centers, stations and lessons, they are not lessons taught in isolation.

“I am helping them to figure all of that out and have it look the way it should,” she said. “The program is very organized and everything is available online, it’s just getting it implemented that first year that is challenging. It’s a different way of teaching.”

DiChiro is grateful that the district’s administration has given so much support to the teachers, and she feels that her coaching, along with that of other district curriculum coaches, is key to the program’s successful implementation. She also credit’s Roxanne Gustafson, the district’s director of education programs, with having a vision for the program in Cranston.

As a Teacher on Special Assignment, or TOSA, DiChiro has been trained in coaching through the Rhode Island Department of Education. She said that year-long training has been helpful in everything she’s done.

“I’m not an administrator. I don’t evaluate anyone, but I collaborate as a coach with the teachers,” she said. “I ask them what I can do to help them and I help them determine their next steps. Coaching has to be very collaborative between a coach and a teacher. It’s all about relationships. I have incorporated the thinking and feedback part of the BPS program into my coaching and shown the teachers the power of that protocol which they can then use in their classrooms.”

In addition to her own coaching, DiChiro has helped to set up Professional Learning Community meetings between the various cohorts of teachers using the BPS program.

“Cohort 1 can help Cohort 4 by sharing their experiences, concerns and information about what’s coming up,” she said. “They can also help grade to grade because the kindergarten teachers who have had the students already know some of the students and their learning challenges.”

One of the things DiChiro has gained through her new position is a wider lens through which she can see the work being done by her colleagues across the district.

“After 32 years in one buidling, I have seen now that there are fabulous teachers out there and there is a lot of good work going on at a lot of different schools,” she said. “There’s always room to grow, but there is a lot of good as well.”

In retrospect, DiChiro believes that the move out of the classroom and into a position with a wider impact on both students and teachers was a good one.

“After all of those years, the change has been good,” she said. “I thought I’d really miss the families and the community, but now I have relationships all over.”