Dr. Carolyn Nooks Teague holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership with a focus on Brain-Compatible-Learning. She is a retired elementary teacher who has taught for thirty years in the public and private schools of Cincinnati and Chicago. In addition to teaching in the elementary grades, Dr. Teague was a preschool director and college adjunct professor. She presently enjoys tutoring and practicing sensory-integrated vision therapy.
Dr. Teague was introduced to the Hidden Disability, Vision Dysfunction, and the therapy used to treat it during her years of teaching in Chicago with the Woodlawn Experimental Schools program. During this time, she volunteered at the Plano Child Development Center where she learned about the widespread negative impact this disability has on student learning. She was then invited to be an educational consultant for Chicago’s Center for Inner City Studies. During her employment there, she wrote and developed programs on the Psycholinguistic Approach to Learning and consulted with parents and teachers in the public schools of Topeka, Los Angeles, and Chicago on how to use this program to increase student academic success.
After finishing her tenure at the Center for Inner City Studies, Dr. Teague became an educational consultant with Harcourt, Brace Publishing Company. While consulting for Harcourt, Dr. Teague got married and moved back to Cincinnati, her home town. After having children, she returned to the classroom as a fourth grade teacher.
Dr. Teague was destined to return to the classroom. She was blessed to be the daughter of an elementary teacher who loved all children unconditionally, who had taught her about the connectedness of the many parts of the child and the importance of addressing each part. Dr. Teague had originally decided that teaching was not for her; it was just too complicated. However, all that changed after moving to Chicago and volunteering to work after school with children that were academically challenged. She became acquainted with the whole child, and discovered that so many bright children were not reaching their full potential and in some cases failing because they were being affected by different unknown conditions. Her complacency was replaced with compassion and the commitment to find answers.
Dr. Teague has traveled extensively, and her perception of education is influenced by what she discovered to be educationally sound and constant in various cultures. While working on her doctorate, she was invited to a national science conference in St. Petersburg, Russia where she had the opportunity to observe Brain-Compatible-Learning techniques in the classroom. She was especially impressed by their curricular development and sequence of skills as they were presented in the elementary schools. It was obvious that the physical and emotional development of the child was considered the prerequisite for cognitive development. This visit, along with her mother’s influence and her introduction to Hidden Disabilities, would be the catalysts for her researching the concept of teaching the “Whole Child “and the role that brain development plays in it all.
Dr. Teague remains in her home town, Cincinnati, Ohio. Her teaching experiences from diverse school systems like the public schools of Chicago, the Winton Woods City Schools of Cincinnati and the private school, Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy, gave her insight into the needs of all children. It filled her with the desire to share what she has learned with parents and other teachers. After retirement from CHCA, Dr. Teague has become a full time children’s advocate, tutor, vision therapist and now author. She is a grandmother, an avid researcher and life-time learner. For more fun she loves swimming, line dancing, and going to the movies.
