David Scanlon, Ph.D.

David Scanlon

 

Affliations: 

  • Program Director, Moderate Support Needs - Boston College
  • Associate Professor - Lynch School of Education and Human Development
  • Fellow, International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities
  • Fellow, Autism Consortium Doctoral 
  • Fellowship, Hammill Institute on Disabilities, awarded to doctoral students studying with D. Scanlon

Background and Interests:

While to this day I miss being a special education teacher in a vocational agriculture high school, I entered into the higher education field because I wanted to learn more about how people teach and learn. In fact, I only took my first education class while in college because my advisor pushed me to do so. I became so enthralled with thinking about teaching and learning that I switched out of my plant-science major before that semester was even over. I’ve never tired of the basic questions, “How do people learn things?,” and “What does that tell us about how to teach them?” As my life unfolded, I needed a lot more pushing, though. Another advisor pushed me to take my first special education course, and that got me so excited that I changed my new major from vocational education to vocational special education.

As I was studying, the “paradigm wars” between explicit instruction and constructivist instruction and between phonics instruction and whole language instruction were raging. I found myself intrigued by all perspectives, and I was thoroughly confused as I tried to figure out with which side I agreed. Finally, I had the epiphany that both sides were right; we just need to figure out the right balance. That’s why the Strategic Instruction Model (SIM) made a lot of sense to me: it bridges top-down and bottom-up teaching and learning practices. Thus, I worked at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning (KU-CRL) for a few years as a researcher to learn more about SIM, and that is where I conducted the initial research that eventually resulted in the ORDER Routine.

I continue to be interested in higher order literacy strategies for the content-areas, and I continue to do research in that field. I also have interests in adult literacy and adult education. I have studied speech and language instruction for children with Asperger’s Syndrome and related conditions and have been very happy teaching college courses, with students ranging from freshmen to doctoral students. Teaching about the things I research has provided me a whole new way to learn about them, plus I get to be at the front of the classroom again!