Colleagues:

Dr. Dorothy Rich, humanitarian, adult educator, children’s teacher and
advocate, and internationally renowned author of MegaSkills ®, died on
October 25th, 2009 following a battle with cancer. She was age 77.


I first met Dorothy some thirty years ago when I worked for the U.S.
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s National Institute of
Education. Given my own interest in adult education, I was struck with her
insights into the importance of parents in the education of children. She
knew that parents were the basis of critical values, which today some have
referred to as “non-cognitive skills.”


Her insights led her to eventually put her ideas into a book in which she
listed what she called MegaSkills®: confidence, motivation, effort,
responsibility, initiative, perseverance, caring, teamwork, common sense,
problem solving, focus, and respect. The book was aimed at adult education,
in this case educating parents about how they could help their children
develop the MegaSkills ® that support achievement in school and beyond. The
book has also helped educate tens of thousands of teachers in developing
children's MegaSkills® in over 4,000 schools across the nation.


Though I had not talked with Dorothy for many years, just last year she sent
me an email after she read a piece I had written about the need for more
investment in adult education, especially parental education of
disadvantaged, underserved youth and adults. She was glad to learn that I
was still at work in adult literacy education and was pushing her favorite
issue: education of parents to help their children develop the fundamental
values and habits that would help them succeed not just in school but in
the workplace and beyond. She told me that she was moving to engage more
adults in her MegaSkills ® education projects.


To honor Dorothy’s lifetime work in adult's and children's intergenerational
education and learning, I am dedicating my workshop on Adult Literacy: A
Focus On Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills and Behavior With Children’s
Picture Books By Leo Lionni  to her memory and to the common sense (which
she loved) and  important message she has left for us all:


“Adults need to send children the clear message that education is important
and that children, in their own ways, can and will achieve.”


Tom Sticht
tsticht at aznet.net