STEVEN DAVID HORWICH
Steven David Horwich has been both a professional writer, and a professional educator, his entire adult life.
His involvement in the arts led to an Emmy Award at age 17 for "My Littlest Revue" , a musical theatre piece he authored, directed and performed in. By age 21, he was employed as the Senior Copywriter for two ad firms in Los Angeles. Steven has directed well over 200 productions, and has appeared as a performer in at least that many again. He has choreographed over 1,000 musical numbers; musical directed (while accompanying on piano) over 50 musicals; composed over 1,200 pieces of music and written lyrics for at least that many songs; orchestrated many musical works; authored novels, short stories, poetry and text books. Over the years, he has operated several theatrical companies, and produced well in excess of 100 productions. Talent that he's directed and worked with have included John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, Jonathan Winters, Anne Archer, Jenna Elfman, Isaac Hayes, famed screenwriter Ernest Lehman (author of "North by Northwest", "Sabrina", and "West Side Story"), and Alex Haley, the author of "Roots". His works have been presented from Los Angeles, to Toronto, to London, to St. Petersburg, Russia, where he co-authored and directed the first Russian/American co-workshop of a musical.
While doing all this, he has simultaneously worked as a professional educator. He started teaching workshops for large groups of actors at age 16, while teaching private students in acting, writing, musical composition, singing, and directing. He's continued the workshop and private student route for over 40 years, now, and has taught well over 20,000 hours in this manner. In his twenties, he taught at USC, in the Professional Writer's Program. He also taught for the Los Angeles Unified School District, at the High School level. He continued to lecture at various Universities and Colleges in Southern California, including UCLA.
Having two children, Steven taught at Private School for almost 10 years, running their art's departments and teaching theatre arts and music, because his children were attending. In 1998, he started authoring courses in Creative Writing for the school he was teaching at. The classes were piloted under Steven's direct supervision for over two years, with more than fifty students, and with profound success. After this additional 4000 hours + in the private school classroom, he became very dissatisfied with the available curriculum. Withdrawing his children from private school in September, 2002, he looked around for a workable curriculum. Finding none, he started authoring the rest of what would become the Connect The Thoughts curriculum. (Incidentally, Steven's daughter, Katherine, came up with the name for the curriculum, and his son, William, was the first to complete the entire Upper School program.) He worked exclusively authoring CTT from 2002 to 2009.
In 2005, while serving as headmaster at a private school to test out the Connect The Thoughts courses, Steven was approached to author curriculum for children younger than Connect The Thoughts , which is constructed for students ages 9-adult. He experimented, and authored several courses which were piloted by a good friend in the U.K., to great success. It was at that time that he realized he could not use the same techniques he'd developed to teach older students, with students ages 5-8. He developed a new set of techniques. However, having few students at that age, he set it aside to complete Connect The Thoughts . But with the on-going success of Connect The Thoughts , in 2008, the demand for a curriculum for younger student has grown substantially. The 1st Step curriculum is Steven's answer to that demand.
