Why Is My Smart Child Struggling In School?

"My 5th grade son has trouble reading.  He stumbles over words, he doesn't always remember what he has read, and he can't put his thoughts down in writing.  But he is very verbal and seems very smart".  These were the words a father used to begin his conversation with me last week. 

They are familiar words.  Many parents call confused about their child's progress in school.  "My child is bright.  I believe he wants to do well in school, but he is struggling.  He does not qualify for help, but he did not score well on the MSP.  How can this be?"

"What's Really Going on When Kids with Average (or Above) IQs Struggle in School?

What most parents, and many professionals, don't know is that about 30% of children in school today have some degree of difficulty with reading or learning, but only about 5% are formally diagnosed with a learning disability.  In spite of caring teachers, supportive parents, intelligence, and adequate motivation, many students experience academic frustrations as a result of weak or inefficient underlying learning skills.

Socializing with friends and making jokes gets Blake through his day in 7th grade. When given free time to work on his assignments, he more often than not wastes it. His teachers are extremely frustrated with him for not working up to his potential.  They cannot understand how such a smart boy can refuse to do his work and get so very little accomplished during the day.

The truth about Blake is that he is very intelligent, but his listening skills are weak. His intelligence has gotten him by this far, but the load of verbal information he must take in and process overwhelms him now that he is in middle school.  Verbally, he shows himself to be bright, but he often checks out during class lectures or discussions and then doesn't know where to begin with his assignments. Sometimes, he just shuts down and doesn't try.  To his teachers this simply looks like laziness.  His parents realize his potential and are doing all they can to get him through his homework each night.  But they are also getting weary.  As mom has puts it, "I already did 7th grade.  I am tired of doing it again."

Blake's real problem is his auditory processing

Math in particular makes Blake want to throw in the towel.  He feels like he's trying really hard, but too many things just don't make sense. He may start out a new unit well, but before long he is back to that familiar place of not quite getting it. 

All of it is making him start to hate school.  All he really wants is to have friends, but somehow that doesn't seem to work out very well either.  Blake misses information in conversations, so he says the wrong thing or misinterprets what others are saying.  He has no idea that his difficulties' processing auditory information are causing problems with his friends just as they are causing problems in the classroom.

Jake's teacher thinks he has Attention Deficit Disorder.
In reality, he is dyslexic.

He can't do the work easily, so he finds other ways to entertain himself. Being a very social kid, his way of entertaining himself most always involves others.  It is not that he can't read, but his reading skills have always lagged, as has his spelling. But it is his behavior that catches the teacher's attention because he is disruptive when he should be working. Jake's mother sees how hard he tries at home, but even she is frustrated because Jake needs so much of her help to get through his homework.

Dad is mad because he thinks Jake could do better if he tried harder. And Jake just wants to give up. No matter how hard he tries, he still can't manage to make the grade. No one has reason to think his reading skills are hindering his success in the classroom.  In the early years of elementary school, he became a master of memorizing what he could not read well.  Once he did learn to read, it was reading by sight - visual memory.  He never could "decode" unknown words.  But now that he is in fourth grade it is assumed that is reading skills are O.K.  His poor spelling is ignored because he does well enough on the weekly tests.  His teacher is aware of poor comprehension, but her biggest issue is his behavior, not his reading.  Surely, he must have attention deficit disorder.  Why else would he act out the way he does?

Amanda appears to be an ideal 5th grader. She is eager to please, has a positive attitude, and is always glad to be helpful to the teacher.  She's so quiet and well behaved in the classroom no one would ever guess how much she is struggling. 

In reality, Amanda does not know how to break her assignments into smaller pieces or how to get herself going when the task seems big.  She loves making her binder look cute on the outside, and she presents herself as totally together.  But she can't organize information, or assignments, or even her time very well.  Homework takes her forever, and more often than not requires way too much intervention from her parents. Getting her ideas from her head onto paper feels like pulling teeth.  Too often, it just isn't worth the effort it requires.

Amanda is struggling with weak attention skills and poorly developed executive function skills.  She will never look like a student with ADD.  In fact, she may not ever qualify for such a diagnosis, but that doesn't erase the fact that her weaknesses in attention regulation and executive function skills get in the way of her performance in the classroom.

Amanda is beginning to feel stupid and her parent are wondering how she will ever make it in middle school.

Amanda has no way of knowing that most of her classmates are not struggling with the same brain weaknesses that she encounters.  She may be every bit as intelligent as they are, but she simply can't show it.  Her difficulties maintaining focus during classroom instruction leave her with a "Swiss cheese" effect .  She has holes where she was not fully engaged.  But she has no way to recognize these holes or to understand why, when she goes to do her math assignment, she is missing some critical links.  Her teacher is equally unaware of these holes because Amanda is one of her best behaved students.  She appears to be listening well.  And she is certainly smart enough to get it.

Because of her brightness, Amanda was able to get by in her early years of school.  She could afford to miss pieces of information because her brain would just fill them in.  And getting her work done was easier.  It came in shorter spurts, and just required doing the assignment once. Now that she is in 5th grade, many of her assignments are projects that require her to use organizational, planning, and self monitoring skills.  Furthermore, she can no longer fill in the information she missed from her teacher when her brain was zoning out.

Regular kids, with average to above average intelligence are sitting in class, day after day, frustrated and misunderstood by their teachers, parents, classmates, and even themselves .

They want to do well in school. They know they should be able to. But somehow, they just can't seem to do it.

• Why does it take them so long to finish their work?
• Why do they have hours more homework than other kids in their class?
• Are they just stupid? Must be, since everyone else seems to be able to do the work more easily.

Surprisingly, these kids exist in every classroom in every school . They might be good at hiding it, but they are suffering nevertheless. Somehow, no matter how good they are at other things, reading or math, or some other aspect of school just isn't working out for them as well as it should.

The 4 Groups of Learning Skills

Easy learning is built upon a continuum of neurodevelopmental learning skills that start with reflexes in utero and continue developing to the highest levels of thinking. We think of that continuum in four basic levels:

• Developmental or Core Learning Skills - Learning, or information processing, is actually stimulated by movement. It begins in utero with movements triggered by reflexes. When babies are born, these reflexes begin to go away, or become integrated, as higher levels of thinking begin to take over. Integration happens through trial and error movements and gradually intentional movement. Physical movement and exploration is critical to developing visual skills and becoming internally organized.

People often think of organization in terms of planning and organizing time, projects and materials, but internal organization is needed in order to sit in a chair or walk across a room without bumping into things.

• Processing Skills - Processing skills is the second level in the learning skills continuum. These include such skills as memory, attention, visual processing (how we think about information that we can see or imagine), auditory processing (how we think about information that we hear, such as the sounds in words or the tone of voice our friend is using), language processing, and processing speed ( how quickly we can think about and respond to information).

Challenges in any of these areas will cause the learner to have to work longer and harder than they should.

• Executive Function Skills - Executive function is like the brain's CEO. This is the part of the brain that guides our behavior and attention, that helps us plan and reason and solve problems. Students are notorious for putting long term projects off to the last minute. But the bottom line is it takes a number of sophisticated executive function skills to plan out and execute a project.

If a student looks lazy, unmotivated, or disorganized, the real culprit may weak executive function skills.

• Academic Skills or higher learning s kills - The highest level on the continuum is academic and higher learning skills. Success in this arena depends upon a solid base of skills in the levels below. People of all ages learn how to compensate for their challenges, but compensating is hard and inefficient. The supporting skills must be in place in order to learn new information easily.

Learning problems are very broad. They look different on different kids, but the thing they have in common is this:

Something is breaking down in their processing of information.

Learning is all about processing incoming information - whether it's a toddler picking up a cracker and finding out that it breaks in his hand or a 12th grader doing calculus.

When students that you know are struggling in school, when you are tempted to write it off as lazy, or attention, or immaturity, take a closer look. There are dozens of skills that may not all be working together to make learning easy.

The Good News : All those skills can be taught, built, corrected. There is REAL hope for all those kids.

Check out http://www.lehmanlearning.com/