About the AuthorSusan F. Tierno, Ed.D.Dr. Tierno's education career has spanned from K-12 to higher education. Her 501c3 educational foundation, Let's Think-kids Foundation, Inc., channeled her social entrepreneurship by creating school partnerships with teachers, students, and their families with specific training in the brain and how to think and learn. She is a recipient of the National Creative Thinking Recognition Award for innovative programs for teachers, parents, and children from the Creative Thinking Association of America. Dr. Tierno holds an Ed.D. with a dissertation focused on Hispanic parent engagement, which has now evolved into ¡Andamio!: Engaging Hispanic Families for ELL Success Using Brain-Based Learning, published by Andamio Press LLC. Her life experiences-and growing up within a military family that descended from immigrants-formed her thinking and shaped her career of service to parents, students, and her fellow teachers.187As a member of the Baby-Boomer generation born in Fort Benning, Georgia, Dr. Tierno is the only daughter in five generations of an Italian family from Abbruzzi, Italy. Because her father was in the military, her life as an "army brat" was rich with travel from Army post to Army post, and she grew up in various parts of the United States and South America. Her father, who recently passed and was interred at West Point, was a survivor of Pearl Harbor. Her grandmother was a survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Dr. Tierno attended Marymount College in New York, and spent a month studying in France because that was her selected second language for many years. Shortly thereafter, her father was stationed as the Military Group Commander of Southern Command in La Paz, Bolivia. To prepare for such an educational challenge, she turned her focus to studies in Latin American history, sociology and anthropology.She requested permission from the dean to conduct an independent study in Bolivia. As a result, for six months she worked with a Resurrection Catholic nun and priest in a small Aymara Indian school, taking several daily bus rides up the mountain to the village school. She developed a progressive literacy program working with the children there, building stakeholders in the Catholic and military communities. This experience laid the profound groundwork for her already well-familiar passion for teaching, and it added the bilingual perspective that built her background sociologically and anthropologically with cultures of the Third World. Many years later, Dr. Tierno was not only teaching in bilingual classrooms, but received a master's degree in bilingual education from the University of Texas-Pan 188American. Her experience in Bolivia was the beginning of a deep understanding of her personal passion for teaching and its relationship to immigrants and their impact on education today.Dr. Tierno's life experiences not only led her to teaching in elementary classrooms, but also took her to the positions at University of Texas, Pan American; the University of Nevada, Reno; Post University in Connecticut; and to positions in school publishing companies, where she learned the business of building a business. Thereafter, she designed her first education 501c3 foundation, dedicated solely to school partnerships with bilingual teachers and their professional development, to their bilingual students, and their families with specific training in how to think and learn using the engagement model for children, teachers, and parents. Her children's project-based writing program, now in its second iteration for parents and third edition for ELLs, was focused not just on writing for ELLs but was built around mediated learning.After taking a break from four replication projects, her lifelong experiences culminated in the dedication of the 501c3 foundation, Let's Think-kids Foundation, Inc. (www.LTKF.org), and its vision of critical and creative thinking and learning for English language lea
