MARVA COLLINS utilized her personal power to affect the future by making a real difference in the lives of children. Her challenge: Her first teaching job was in what many considered to be a ghetto of Chicago. Her second-grade students had already decided that they didn’t want to learn anything.

    When two people meet, whoever has made a real decision - whoever is committed at the deepest level - will eventually influence the other person, if there is rapport.

    Marva’s mission was to touch these children's lives. She didn’t have a mere belief that she can impact them; she had a passionate, deep-rooted conviction that she will influence them for good. There was no limit to the extent she would go. Faced with children labeled as dyslexics and with every other kind of learning or behavioral disorder, she decided that the problem was not the children, but the way they were being taught. As a result, these children had no belief in themselves. They had never been pushed to break through and find out who they really were or what they were capable of. Human beings respond to challenge and these children, Marva believed, needed that more than anything else.

    So she threw out the old books that read “See Spot Go” and instead taught Shakespeare and Sophocles and Tolstoy. All the other teachers said “No way! These kids will never understand that.” Many attacked Marva, saying she was going to destroy these children’s lives. But Marva’s students not only understood the material, they thrived on it. Why? Because she believed so fervently in the uniqueness of each child’s spirit, and his or her ability to learn anything. She communicated with such congruency and love that she literally got them to believe in themselves - for the first time in their young lives.

    The results she has consistently produced for decades have been extraordinary. Marva increased the quality of her students’ lives by using three organizing principles -

    1. She gets them to hold themselves to a higher standard;
    2. She assists them in adopting new and empowering beliefs that enable them to break through their old limitations;
    3. She backs all this up with specific skills and strategies necessary for lifelong success.

    The results- her students became not only confident, but competent. The immediate results in terms of their academic excellence are striking, and the effects generated in their everyday lives are profound.