If I have it right in my data base, 2 January is the birthday of Margo Mastropieri, a great friend of kids with disabilities and their teachers…and she’s my pal. Folks should gather around the intertubes and raise a “huzah” for Margo!
Margo studied at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and earned a Ph.D. From Arizona State University in 1983. She’s a former professor at Utah State University, Purdue University, and George Mason University.
One can ask her many admiring colleagues to rank her among special educators, and I think you’ll learn that Margo is at the top of their colleagues. Why? Because she has collaboratively and considerately done so very, very much good work.
Margo’s been an extraordinarily productive scholar; just check the 100s of her publications that have been cited by 1000s of other scholars:
She, makes engaging presentations—you’ll just have to trust me on this, but I’ve seen many of them;
She’s contributed to executive boards even without getting compensated (we served together on the board of the Division for Learning Disabilities for years; if you root around on that group’s site, you’ll find Margo’s fingerprints and footsteps repeatedly);
She’s a former editor of Exceptional Children (which is one of the reasons that I’m honored to have been an editor) as well as DLD’s Learning Disabilities Research & Practice; and
She’s an excellent communicator about complicated ideas—a teacher!
To me, she’s still that lively former teacher whom I got to know in the 1980s when she’d moved in to academia...and carried the same engaging teaching competencies into promoting evidence-based instruction and reasoned discourse about disabilities and instruction. She and her partner, Tom Scruggs, focused on how to help teachers help kids to learn academic content (e.g., science and, especially, vocabulary). Her contributions will outlive her by decades, and I’m happy about that. But I’m really even gladder that she’s getting to notch another spot on her belt for this year.
Readers, don’t miss a chance to learn from Margo.
Margo, you go, girl!
Happy birthday, Margo! Your many contributions to special education, many with Tom, are invaluable. I remember meeting you and Tom at one of the first TECBD meetings at ASU. All best wishes to you for many more years.