Perinton Firm Aims to Update Teaching
MITA trains businesses and schools in new learning methods

A Perinton firm is pushing for a whole new way of teaching.

Matthew Daneman
Staff writer

PERINTON — The front carpet at 14 Windrush Valley Road has seen lots of foot traffic in the past year.

Medical faculty members from Ireland have tromped through the front door, while staffers at the Perinton-based MITA International Brain-Based Renewal Center have headed out to Chile and China, all in the name of changing how people teach.The two-person MITA operation — CEO Ellen Weber and Senior Vice President Robyn McMaster — maintains that the traditional educational system, with an emphasis on lectures and memorization, is broken. And the solution they offer is seminars, workshops and training on ways of changing the way teachers teach, as well as the way business leaders lead."The last thing these (primary and secondary) schools need is a new funnel of money," Weber said. "They need a new paradigm. If you go to regular classes and sit and listen, you use very little of your brain."The company's work involves the theory of noted Harvard University professor in cognition and education Howard Gardner that people have multiple intelligences — verbal, logical/mathematical, visual/spatial, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, bodily/kinetic, naturalist and existentialist. ("MITA" stands for "multiple intelligences theory to achievement.")A native of Nova Scotia, Weber set up operation in Perinton about 18 months ago after doing some teaching at Houghton College.

"This is the board room," said the 58-year-old as she sat in her dining room.Weber said she developed the training to use those multiple intelligences when teaching or heading up a business over the past three decades. She has written a series of books about teaching techniques, the most recent of which, MI Strategies in the Classroom and Beyond, is part of the curriculum."We're using that man or woman who might've been laughed at as a jock ... by letting him come at that knowledge in a different way," Weber said.

Weber and McMaster will head to Ireland in May and back to China perhaps this summer.MITA also has been hired by the State University of New York at Buffalo to teach a graduate course in July.

"MITA Renewal Center is a world leader in leadership training for business and learning institutions," said Xiufeng Liu, associate professor of science education at Buffalo's Graduate School of Education. "We would like our graduate students, mostly current high school science teachers, to be trained on MITA so that they will assume leadership roles in schools for science curriculum and instruction."MDANEMAN@DemocratandChronicle.com"

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