Sandra Milne, a third of the ICOL team, is an experienced educator. Her 37 years of working with learners of all ages and abilities provides the centre with a depth of background and experiences necessary for assessment, planning, and understanding the needs of each individual or family who decides to use the integrated approach to understand and facilitate learning.

Her practical education experiences span from teaching three year olds in preschool to adults at both college and university levels. Her pre-school experience involves chairing a cooperative preschool where she was responsible for management, program and parent education. In the elementary panel she has taught grades three, four, five and six, as well as serve as a teacher librarian. While working with these younger children she also taught language arts courses for junior teachers through the Ministry of Education. She was well respected as an elementary teacher using creative approaches in order to stimulate learners.

At the secondary level, she has worked as head of special education in secondary schools. She has been responsible for supervising developmental education, life skills and gifted programs as well as working with a resource room team to develop and monitor Individual Education Plans for students with learning barriers in the regular classes. Perhaps she is best known for her personal quest into meta-cognition, learning how to learn. She is well respected for her depth of knowledge about how people learn. It is natural that with all the current knowledge about brain based learning that she has been active in putting the most current facts into practice in her resource centre. She created and taught a learning strategy course many years before the ministry of education standardized it as a credit for secondary school. Besides cognition, she is well respected for assisting students with diagnosed learning disabilities to find successful methods of accommodation in order to graduate from secondary school and transition to college or university courses with success. Also, she has created and taught courses for students at the secondary level who are many years out of phase academically and socially. Sandra has a depth of experiences with teenagers, which allow her to assess, and create individual learning programs for young people looking for academic success.

For several years Sandra taught continuing education courses and community based courses on literacy. She developed courses for adults in her community who wanted to continue to pursue individual levels of literacy no matter what level of cognitive functioning was evident. This mainstreaming into night courses at the college level was innovative and groundbreaking. It is no wonder she is seeking a new educational endeavor through ICOL.

Sandra is pleased to be part of the ICOL team. Her recent studying of brain gym, vestibular activation and cognition using the mind body connection sent her on a new path. Using this approach, she has seen changes in the students she has trained both privately and in a school setting. She is delighted to be able to work with individual families and look at the "whole child" piece by piece with understanding and assimilation of cognition, nutrition, emotional health and energy awareness. The Integrated Centre for Optimal Learning provides her with a physical place to activate current research, and team members who wish to practice these most current understandings of how children of the new millennium learn and need to be taught.

Sandra's qualifications include:

• Teacher Qualification Elementary/Secondary
• B.A. Wilfrid Laurier University
• Special Education Specialist Western University
• Guidance Specialist York University