Dr. Seuss Meets Neuroscience

Great video series on reading and the brain. Find it here

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/

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It's Time to Change the Future for Students with Learning and Attention Challenges

 

"We need to make current choices with an eye on the future." Barak Obama

President Obama, in a recent speech on the economy, said that by 2020, the U.S. will once again have the highest percentage of college graduates in the world.
Here is a key question:
How many of those college grads will be students who have struggled their way through school because of dyslexia, attention deficits, and other learning challenges?
Casey is a bright 17 year old senior in high school. His friends are all talking about where they're going to college next year. Casey stays quiet as usual. His grades aren't nearly good enough to get into college, and why would he want to anyway? School has been a nightmare for him. He works hours and hours more than anyone else and in spite of special help at school, which is pretty embarrassing in itself, and years of tutoring, he's still barely going to graduate.
Casey always wanted to be a veterinarian, but that takes far too much schooling. He knows he'd never make it. So what's he going to do when he gets out of high school? He has no idea. Who will hire him?
Casey is bright and capable with dreams like any other high school senior, but he doesn't feel very smart, and can't image how he could ever pursue his dreams. He doesn't see how he could ever be a part of that "highest percentage of college graduates." Even though he has a special gift for working with animals, being a vet feels far beyond his grasp. He's resigned himself to settling for something less.
Approximately 14.9 million children in school today are struggling to learn in spite of good intelligence . These children may receive help through special programs at school or tutoring outside of school, but in most cases, the help involves support and accommodations to get them through their homework and classes.
Very rarely does the help that children receive actually focus on solving the learning problems permanently and completely so that they don't spend their school days frustrated and embarrassed over their underachievement.
What happens to these children when they leave high school? What kinds of choices do they believe that they have if school has always been a struggle and they've always had to have help to make it through?
Most learning and attention challenges, including diagnosed learning disabilities and dyslexia do not have to be permanent. There's no magic pill and its not a quick fix, but through specific and intensive cognitive training, the brain can learn more efficient ways of processing information. We've seen this in thousands of cases over the past 25 years and current brain research validates the brain's remarkable ability to change through training.
It's time we quit accommodating, or helping people get around their learning problems and do something to permanently help these bright, talented, misunderstood, and frustrated learners to reach their potential and have the futures that they dream of! Without good learning skills and the supporting education, we are dumping 18 and 19 years olds into the work force every year without the skills to find fulfilling jobs that will support themselves and their families.
According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, people without a college degree are twice as likely to be unemployed as those with a college degree and those without a high school diploma are three times more likely to be unemployed. These are young adults with all kinds of potential whose talents and abilities are being lost to society because their learning differences have put up roadblocks to their future. We all lose in this scenario.
Parents contact our learning center for help because their children are having problems with reading, math, or some other academic area in school. We explore with parents what the academic problem looks like at school or when the child is doing homework. This provides important insight into what might be causing the problem. But the key piece of the puzzle is to understand what is happening underneath the obvious academic struggle and poor grades.
We look at learning as a continuum with academic skills at the top of the continuum being supported by everything that comes earlier. Here is the how the continuum builds:


Below is a brief explanation of the first three levels of the continuum and a few of the symptoms parents might notice if their child has challenges at that level:
Developmental Learning Skills : These are basic visual and motor skills that help children develop a sense of self, internal organization, and body and attention awareness and control. Challenges in this area might show up as follows:

• Poor posture
• Awkward or uncoordinated
• Fatigue, low stamina
• Laying on desk
• Confusion with directions, spatial orientation, letter reversals

Processing Skills : These are skills such as attention, memory, auditory and visual processing (how we think about and understand things that we see or hear), processing speed, language comprehension, and phonemic awareness (the thinking process critical to reading that supports learning and using phonics). Problems in this area will show up as:

• Trouble sounding out words
• Trouble memorizing spelling words or math facts
• Can read but can't remember or understand what was read
• Get very tired when listening
• Miss information when listening
• Trouble understanding visual organization in math, charts, etc.
• Can learn words for spelling test but can't remember them next week
• Poor attention
• Can do the work but can't "get it together" to get the work done and turned in
• Slow work / working too hard or too long

Executive Function: This is our personal manager that guides and directs our attention and behavior. It helps us reason, problem solve, organize, and make decisions. Problems in this area may appear as follows:

• Poor time management
• Can't organize materials
• Trouble reasoning
• Wait until the last minute to start a long term project
• Can't plan and organize projects
• Lack tact
• Poor follow through
• Trouble getting started

If a 10 year old fourth grader is laboriously reading at a second grade level, something is wrong. More practice reading or someone sitting at his side helping him say the words is not going to fix this problem
Solving the reading problem first requires retraining the brain to learn more easily and efficiently. To do this, we must look at what underlying skills on the learning skills continuum are not supporting the learner well enough. It is only by developing these areas and then remediating the basic academic skills that students can become the truly independent and comfortable learners they can and should be.

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