Balance Publishing Company

Our Mission    

Our Philosophy

For decades educators have known that using hands-on activities is a more efficient teaching method than theoretical discussion.  A woodshop instructor attempting to teach students the skills involved in building a table without allowing the students to use of rulers, hammers, and saws is destined to fail. 

The woodshop instructor could teach required skills piecemeal--measuring  a board, sawing a board, driving a nail.  Effective teachers, however, know that a project approach works best.  For one thing, building a table is an activity that culminates in a practical product--a table.  Secondly, all the smaller activities--measuring  a board, sawing a board, driving a nail--are obvious steps to reaching an easily understood goal.  The student can easily see that these specific skills are necessary parts of the whole activity--building a table.

Effective language skills teaching requires a no less hands-on approach than does woodshop.  A language arts project that culminates in a tangible product and involves listening, speaking, planning, visualizing, group interaction, reading, and writing is infinitely superior to a piecemeal skill development approach.  The key difference between these two approaches is that, with the project approach, the student can readily understand why individual skills are important.

The materials created for this site are designed to involve the imagination, inspire the desire to create, and encourage students to become involved in language intensive projects that culminate in tangible products.

Balance Publishing Company is owned and operated by Don Kisner, a former classroom teacher.  After graduating college with a major in theatre and a minor in English, Mr. Kisner taught language arts and drama in California public schools in grades five through twelve, for over 20 years.  During his years in the classroom, he used radio drama extensively as a motivational tool for developing the skills of writing, reading, listening, visualizing, literary analysis, thinking, and group process.  The strategies for using read-along in the secondary schools were developed while using Read-Along Radio Dramas in the classroom.  In 1996, the Read-Along Radio Dramas series won Learning Magazines' Teachers' Choice Award.

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