About Us
Our history
It all began in 2003 When our Creative Director, Patrick Cerria, began his studies in Eurhythmics at The Juilliard School in New York City. In addition to his Eurhythmics studies, Patrick was teaching his own early childhood music program, TumbleJam(TM) in his New Jersey based studio. One day the mother of a 4 year-old boy came and told Patrick about her son who had a diagnosis of PDD-NOS. Her son loved music, but other programs she'd tried didn't seem to understand her son's classification. She and her son attended one of Patrick's classes the next day and her son not only ended up loving it, but thriving.
Before long, TumbleJam began gaining recognition within the special needs community. Eventually, Patrick was approached by a group of occupational, physical, and speech therapists about working together. It was during this three year period - working with therapists and studying Eurhythmics - that Patrick began to recognize the power of music in working with all kinds of students.
Patrick was awarded the Dalcroze Elementary Teaching Certificate from The Juilliard School and has spent the last 18 years teaching varied populations of students. Patrick is currently in the next phase of his Dalcroze studies at the Marta Sanchez Dalcroze Training Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. He is the music teacher in a public county school district that provides special and alternative education services and teaches in three schools each serving a specific population: Students on the Autism spectrum; those with developmental and/or physical disabilities; at-risk students with behavioral and/or emotional classifications.
Patrick has presented staff development workshops throughout New Jersey as well as the mid-west, and in 2022 published his first book. The book, Finding the Flow: How Dalcroze Eurhythmics and a New Approach to Music Education Can Improve Public Schools, is available on Amazon.
Education Flow was created to bring arts based based strategies and research into schools and help them teach the dynamic students that now comprise our public school populations. This type of creative and innovative work is even more essential in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Who We Are
Education Flow was founded by Laura and Patrick Cerria. We are an organization dedicated to helping public, private, and charter schools in their teaching strategies and protocols regarding classified and/or students with special needs - as well as those typically developing.
We are rooted in over fifteen years of teaching experience, research, and practice - and are dedicated not only to helping students, but also teachers, therapists, aids, para-professionals, and administrators. Our goal is to help implement creative ideas that will help educators introduce creative strategies to better serve the developmentally, socially, emotionally, and economically diverse students they now teach. We help with:
- Developing a healthy class dynamic
- Social and emotional support
- Sensory themes
- Creativity
- Lesson Plan Design and Implementation
- Inter Disciplinary Collaboration