Phyllis Chiasson completed her bachelor’s degree in speech and theater education, and her master’s degree in secondary education, at the University of Arizona. She taught speech, directed plays, and coached the forensics team at Salpointe High School in Tucson before joining the Tucson Unified School District in 1970. There, Chiasson taught speech and English classes, first at Pueblo and then at Palo Verde High School, until 1980. In January of 1980 she became co-director of Educational Consultations, also in Tucson. While with this agency she assisted parents, teachers, foster parents, social workers, and counselors in helping students improve their reasoning capabilities. She also provided workshops and wrote for professional journals. In the fall of 1983, Chiasson relocated to the Seattle area where, after a brief stint as a corporate writer, she co-founded the Davis-Nelson consulting group. This agency addresses learning and performance issues within the business community. Chiasson and her husband, Hal Leskinen, raised a blended family of five unique children: natural, adopted, step, gifted, average, learning-disabled, and biracial. They applied the Engaged Intelligence methods and the non-verbal model referenced in this book while raising their children. Most significant was the usefulness of this information for determining how to parent two of their adopted children, both drug affected and learning disabled. In May of 1997, due in great part to the successful raising of these children, Chiasson was featured as one of four “Moms of a Lifetime” in a nationally televised program. In addition to her work with the Relational Thinking Styles (RTS) model, the Davis Non-verbal Assessment, and Engaged Intelligence training, Chiasson is also author of the Chiasson Temperament Indicator (CTI), a computer-ized temperament test based upon Carl Jung’s typology. In 1996 she and her husband moved to Port Townsend, Washington, where Chiasson is affiliated with Peninsula College. Her first contact with other pragmatism scholars came in the spring of 1998 when she joined the Peirce and Dewey discussion groups on the Internet. Although she occasionally teaches for Peninsula College and provides workshops for interested groups, her primary efforts continue to be focused upon the explication and application of the Relational Thinking Styles model of non-verbal reasoning habits and its accompanying non-verbal assessment tool.
