STEPS™ author 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. In the theater, 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 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. Some of the people he's directed or 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 in Los Angeles 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 35 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 at UCLA.
Having two children, Steven taught at Private Schools for almost 10 years, running their art's departments and teaching theater 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 two years, with more than fifty students, and with profound success. After some 20,000 total hours of classroom/private teaching time, he became very dissatisfied with 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 Steps. He worked exclusively authoring Steps from 2002 to 2013.
In 2005, while serving as headmaster at a private school to test out the Steps courses, Steven was approached to author curriculum for younger children. (He experimented and authored several courses which were piloted by a good friend in the U.K. and 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 Steps. With the on-going success of what is now Steps, in 2008, the demand for a curriculum for younger student grew substantially. The Step 1 and Step 2 curriculum were Steven's answer to that demand. These were completed mid-summer 2010, providing an additional four years of educative materials, and making it possible to homeschool a child from a pre-school age through High School, obviating the need for a child to ever take a step inside a school.