Farmington Faculty


Sue Thorson, Ph.D.

Associate Professor - Special Education

Ph.D., The Claremont Graduate School
M.Ed., Temple University
B.A., The Pennsylvania State University

Creativity in the Classroom: Engaging Students — Setting High Academic Expectations
In many of her Special Education classes Sue Thorson refrains from formal written testing. Instead, she requires her students to produce a number of creative assignments, often times without using any words (text or oral) whatsoever. Sue does this as an innovative way to give her students a deeper understanding of how children with communication difficulties can learn and understand without the use of words. Her Special Education students often find these assignments very challenging — and enlightening.

An example: In one assignment, a student produced a diorama depicting what an ideal classroom setting would look like, as a way to illustrate — without using words — a concrete example of the philosophy of teaching (part of a lengthy segment of classroom discussion how children with special needs will learn better in a traditional classroom setting). The student's diorama, a 3-D school classroom designed to scale, showed how a traditional classroom can be modified to make it vastly improved for students with special needs.


Outside the Classroom: Innovation and Excitement — Putting Theory into Practice
All students majoring in Special Education at Farmington are required to do off-campus work, most often working with those with special needs and their caregivers. Sue Thorson arranges for the students to work with area agencies, some public some private, in a range of special needs settings and with a variety of special needs clients.

Sue's students routinely work with a number of community action programs, and work with people with different levels of ability and disability. For example, a group of her students is currently working with Gentiva Health Services, Inc., the nation's leading provider of comprehensive home health services. (Gentiva is a single source for skilled nursing; physical, occupational, speech and neuro-rehabilitation services; social work; nutrition; disease management education; and help with daily living activities, as well as other therapies and services.) In one of these case settings her students are working closely with children with mental retardation, in another instance they are working to help a mentally disabled 18 year-old get closer to independent living.

She also works with students majoring in Special Education outside of the classroom to help them learn how to do non-teaching things, for instance how to write a grant.

Sue Thorson knows that in the real world, Special Education professionals will often find it necessary to write grants to provide funding for resources and programming. Rather than simply tell her students how to write grants, she has her special education students actually write real grants, themselves (with her supervision and direction). She believes this learning-by-doing method is far more valuable than something she could ever lecture to them in a traditional classroom setting. It also helps to teach her students to be more independent.

With a chuckle, Sue says her students may not appreciate it now (it is, after all, a tremendous amount of work) but not long after graduation students find they've acquired the skills and experience needed to write grants — a professional, non-teaching skill extremely valuable in the field of Special Education.


A True Academic — Areas of Special Interest
Sue Thorson said she is constantly intrigued by the teaching-learning process and enjoys working hard to serve the pre-service needs of teachers. She also enjoys helping to develop a heightened level of spirituality — not religion — in her students. By this she means instilling in her students a deeper way of thinking about serving others, of helping others to achieve and to develop as best they can. She said she is constantly looking for innovative ways to include this “helping others as a true calling” philosophy into her classroom.


Respected in the Field — Noteworthy Accomplishments
Sue Thorson has published the education textbook, Listening to Students: Reflections on Secondary Classroom Management, which synthesizes current research, teacher practice, and student comments about discipline in secondary schools. The authentic student discussions about discipline procedures integrated throughout the book provide honest reflections on classroom management and stories from real teachers to reflect and expand their practice. “This book is needed to inspire pre-service and in-service teachers to make a significant attempt to understand the student as an individual, them move toward probable solutions to misbehavior in a constructive, communicative and rational manner,” said Jack V. Powell of the University of Georgia.

Sue has also published articles about students with disabilities studying Shakespeare and on discipline in the classroom with a focus on exceptional students.


Outside of Academia — Personal Interests and Activities
A self-avowed "urban person" (she has lived in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Düsseldorf, Germany) Sue Thorson has learned to love and treasure the still, quiet life of rural Maine, spending her off-time knitting, reading, and enjoying the spectacular natural beauty of the region.

She still manages to travel to the west coast on occasion, but thoroughly enjoys being settled — and peacefully grounded — here in western Maine.


Faculty Profiles