Bill Page, a farm boy who graduated from a one-room school forged a 46-year classroom career teaching middle school “troublemakers”. For the past 26 years he has taught teachers across the nation to teach the lowest achieving students with his proven premise, “Failure is the choice and fault of schools — not the students.”

Bill Page is a classroom teacher. For 46 years, he has patrolled the halls, responded to the bells and struggled with innovations. He has had his share of lunchroom duty, playground duty and bus duty. Bill recently finished his forty-sixth year of teaching.

He has had remarkable success in closing the gap between successful students and those at-risk. His specialty is school-alienated students, learning disabled and those labeled troublemakers, deprived, delinquent, rebellious and at-risk. He prefers working with problem students in heterogeneous groupings in regular classes and regular schools.

Bill has spoken to hundreds of thousands of teachers in staff development programs throughout North America. He taught extension courses for twenty-six consecutive summers at the University of California at Riverside, San Diego, Irvine, Santa Barbara and Davis, and has taught fourteen different methods courses for teachers at eighty-six universities.

As a speaker, Bill does not present himself as an "expert," instead, he offers his testimonial as a classroom teacher who discovered and developed his own educational philosophy and created his own effective strategies. Bill's personal message gets at the heart of professional attitude, personal responsibility and individual teacher initiative for increasing effectiveness and increasing the achievement of all students.

Bill Page Resume

Bill Page, a veteran educator with more than 30 years of experience teaching at-risk students. He was one of the featured speakers at the recent Midwinter Conference of the Texas Council of Administrators of Special Education in Austin, Texas. Page’s presentation, “What Every Special Education Administrator Needs to Know”, was made to an audience of more than 1,000 educators on January 24, 2006.

Bill Page is eminently qualified with the experience, knowledge, expertise, research and success to offer fresh, effective and proven, staff development programs that guarantee increased achievement for all students including those most at-risk.

Bill served as originator, program director, teacher trainer, and demonstration teacher for Project Enable — a six-year research project of the Central Midwestern Regional Educational Laboratory (CEMREL) funded by the U.S. Office of Education. The program, implemented in St. Louis Missouri and Nashville, Tennessee, was extended and jointly funded by Peabody College, The Kennedy Child Study Center, Nashville Schools and Model Cities.

Page is known nationally for his staff development programs and presentations. He is also known for his remarkable classroom success in closing the achievement gap between successful students and at-risk, school-alienated, learning disabled and “trouble-making” students — in heterogeneous groupings in regular classes and regular schools. He taught in reform schools, inner city schools and elite suburban schools. Bill taught 14 different courses at 86 universities including 26 consecutive summer courses at the University of California at Riverside, San Diego, Irvine, Santa Barbara and Davis. Armed with the lessons he learned about “kids who have trouble in school” and with his humor, clarity and commonsense, Page has informed, inspired and motivated more than 100,000 teachers — and administrators — at hundreds of seminars and conferences in more than 2,000 school districts throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Page, who has lived in Nashville since 1969, is the author of the book, At-Risk Students, which was published in January 2006. In the book, he discusses the problems facing failing students, “who can’t, don’t and won’t cooperate”, and then reveals how to overcome these obstacles to learning. The solution, he states, is to recognize and accept student misbehavior as defense mechanisms used to cover their embarrassment and incompetence; and to deal with the causes rather than the symptoms by entering into a democratic relationship, where the students assume responsibility for their own learning. Through 30 vignettes, teachers see the hapless students through the eyes of a fellow teacher, whose success in the classroom with these students made him a sought-after speaker in school districts across America.

Above all, Bill cares about kids. He cares about their lives outside of and beyond school. He says, “Not every child has a home, living parents, a religion or people who care, but everyone goes to school. It is the one experience common to all. We have the opportunity to help them develop productive, satisfying lives and to become good citizens. We must not fail them by failing them.

“To the world you might be just one person, but to one person you just might be the world.”