External Supports
For children with dyslexia, the support they receive from parents, teachers, and the right school environment is also critical in getting off to a good start.
Many of our interviewees spoke gratefully of the support they’d received from parents during their critical formative years when their self-concept was most vulnerable. Blake Charlton spoke of how important it was for him that his parents recognized and praised his hard work, even when he was earning poor marks in school. Entrepreneur Douglas Merrill recalled the endless hours of tutoring in math that his mother gave him all the way through high school. Civil rights advocate Ben Foss stressed the importance of his parents’ decision to pay more attention to what he could do than what he couldn’t. “From a very early age my parents looked for ways to find my strengths and encourage them, and they started me out in life with the assumption that you don’t have to do things the way everyone else does. I think that freed me tremendously to experiment with different ways of approaching knowledge.” Ben’s mother also continued to help him proof his papers all the way through law school. He described to us how he would fax his papers home and his mother would read them aloud to him over the phone to help him identify his mistakes. Speech professor Duane Smith also praised his parents for helping him maintain his optimism for the future. “One thing I always knew was that my parents loved me unconditionally. To this day they’re still my biggest fans. They always knew that somehow, some way, I would accomplish something. They didn’t know how it was going to happen, but they always made me feel that they knew it would someday, and that has helped make me who I am.”
Teachers also played a critical role in building the self-esteem of many of our interviewees. We mentioned earlier how Jack Laws credited two of his high school teachers with turning him around as a student by recognizing the quality of the thinking that lay behind the superficial errors in his writing.
Duane Smith also spoke of the important role played by one very special teacher. Duane was making his fourth attempt at community college when he finally met a teacher who was able to spot his special abilities. “We were in a classroom and I delivered a speech for her, and she looked at me and said, ‘You have such presence.’ That was the first praise I had ever been given in my twenty-one years of attending school, and it was empowering. That phrase became my internal mantra: if I felt discouraged or overworked or tired or had sudden stage fright when I had to give a speech, I’d just repeat, ‘Betty says you have presence. Betty says you have presence. . . .’ If not for that teacher, I would never have joined the speech team, and I probably would have continued bouncing around L.A. as a bartender or a salesman, or as somebody who was hanging out in nightclubs every night of the week, and who knows where I’d be now.” Teachers should never underestimate the power that even a passing word of sincere praise can have to motivate and inspire a student with dyslexia. Often these students are so starved for praise that even the slightest bit of encouragement can do wonders.
Finding a Supportive Environment for Education. It’s also essential to find an educational environment that’s a good fit for each child with dyslexia. Children with dyslexia differ tremendously in the kinds of environments they find intellectually and emotionally nourishing, so there’s really no single educational “size” that fits all students with dyslexia equally well. Instead, it’s a matter of finding “the best school” or “the best teacher” for each child.
Usually, the student’s own response to a particular educational setting is the best guide to the quality of its fit. In good-fitting environments, children with dyslexia are challenged, but the challenges are matched to their individual needs, abilities, and states of development, and they’re increased one small step at a time so that goals remain obtainable. When children with dyslexia are challenged in this careful fashion, the result is typically positive. After a brief but essentially inevitable period of frustration and discouragement, the child begins to make progress, and this progress builds confidence that sustains the child through further slowly increasing challenges.
In contrast, when children with dyslexia are given challenges they cannot meet, their frustration persists and they are at risk for reactions like stress and anxiety, anger, misbehavior, demoralization, even clinical depression. If prolonged, these responses can become a lasting part of a child’s emotional and behavioral makeup. It’s important to remember that the nervous system treats anxiety and depression just like it treats any other “skill”: the more you practice them, the “better” at them you become. For example, the more you “practice” stress, the less it takes to make you feel stressed out, and the longer you remain feeling stressed. Stress also has a highly negative impact on learning because it lowers working memory, focus, and motivation. That’s why keeping children in environments where they feel chronically stressed is emotionally harmful and educationally counterproductive.
To better understand the effects of the academic challenge we place on children with dyslexia, think about how we train the bodies of young athletes. We help young athletes build their strength by having them start by lifting light weights, then we increase the weights gradually as their progress and development allow. We’d never begin by loading a three-hundred-pound weight on a seven-year-old child and expect that it would produce strength. At best this would cause frustration and failure, and at worst it would cause serious injury. It’s surprising that we expect better results when we give children with dyslexia unbearable academic burdens. We place demands on them that they can’t possibly meet, then react with astonishment when they become frustrated, anxious, inattentive, bored, depressed, unruly, or overactive. But this response is inevitable, and the fault is ours, not theirs.
As we’ve shown you throughout this book, children with dyslexia are “programmed” to develop in good ways but along different paths and at different rates from other children. Attempting to bend and prune them to fit the educational programs we’ve designed for very different kinds of learners is both harmful and unreasonable.
Students with dyslexia need a kind of education that’s designed specifically for them, an approach that spends as much time enhancing their strengths as it does diminishing their weaknesses. Students with dyslexia need an educational environment that teaches them about things that interest them in addition to helping them learn to read and write. Unfortunately, in our obsession to have them master basic skills at younger and younger ages, we often fill the days of our young students with dyslexia entirely with the kinds of rote and procedural tasks that they find most difficult. As a result, their days become times of unrelieved frustration and failure, and before long their motivation and self-confidence drain away.
It’s essential that we give children with dyslexia learning environments that balance basic skills training with exposure to fascinating information about our world. A few “mainstream” schools do a good job of this, and if students with dyslexia are given the extra help they need to address their challenges along with appropriate accommodations in the classroom, they may do well in such environments. This is especially true of children who are naturally blessed with highly resilient temperaments and a strong sense of self-confidence, as these strengths allow them to cope well with the often highly visible differences that set them apart from their classmates.
However, for children who remain constantly aware of—and discouraged by—their differences from classmates, remaining in a conventional classroom can be emotionally devastating. In our own clinic, a shockingly high percentage of early elementary students who come to us with reading and writing challenges have expressed thoughts of death and suicide. For older students, these numbers remain alarmingly high. These emotionally vulnerable children often do much better in a setting where they’re grouped with other children with similar academic challenges. Several of our interviewees spoke of the extra confidence they received from spending several of their early years in a special education classroom where they were viewed a
s relatively successful.
For some students, attending schools that specialize in teaching students with dyslexia or other learning challenges can be a good alternative. David Flink, who heads a remarkable nonprofit mentorship program for individuals with dyslexia called Project Eye-to-Eye (which we’ll discuss in the next chapter), described the benefits he experienced in going to a school devoted to children with learning challenges. “In fifth grade I was finally diagnosed as dyslexic, and I started going to a school specifically for kids with learning disabilities. At that school I was given a ramp into learning, and that experience helped me realize that I wasn’t what was broken: it was what was being used to teach me that was broken. I never changed, but the way I was taught changed. That realization made all the difference. In the two years at that school I learned to read . . . and it was an amazing ramp into books. I left that school feeling incredibly empowered.”
There are many excellent private schools that specialize in teaching children with dyslexia and other learning challenges, and we keep a list of several at our Dyslexic Advantage website. Some general education private schools may also provide a good fit for students with dyslexia if they offer flexible or individualized alternatives for students to work at their own pace.
Finally, we have seen some students with dyslexia flourish with homeschooling. Suitably equipped and motivated parents can sometimes provide all the teaching the child needs, but often the addition of private tutoring in more difficult subjects like phonics and writing can be helpful. Homeschooling offers a number of benefits that can be especially helpful for students with dyslexia. It removes the stress of comparing personal progress with peers, it allows more time for focusing in depth on special interests, and it allows children who are ahead in some subjects but behind in others to pursue more advanced studies as their ability permits. There are now many excellent alternatives for online learning that can be pursued at home as well. More information on homeschooling options is also provided on our website.
In closing, we want to stress again how important it is to pay attention to the response of a child with dyslexia to his or her learning environment. Never assume that a child who is showing resistance or acting out in response to a particular lesson, curriculum, or classroom is simply shirking. Children crave success, and it’s in their nature to learn and grow. If they reject what we are offering them, that rejection is often a form of defense that they’re using to avoid failure when they feel that success is impossible. However, when provided with an environment that’s appropriately nurturing, and where success is both possible and praised, most children will respond with greater motivation, effort, and interest. That response is essential to helping them get off to a good start during the early years of school.
How to Help Students in Elementary and Middle School
• During their early years, it’s every bit as important to make sure that children with dyslexia develop a healthy self-concept as it is to make sure that they develop basic skills in reading and writing.
• A healthy self-concept can be fostered through the right combination of internal and external supports.
• Internal supports include:—The self-confidence that comes from focusing on and developing strengths
—A sense of optimism (or optimistic interpretive framework) and a firm belief in a bright future
—An understanding of how one’s own mind works, including what’s unique and special about how dyslexic minds function
• External supports include the care received from parents, teachers, and the right school environment.
• The appropriate educational environment must be determined for each child. All good environments provide challenges that are doable and that increase incrementally as progress allows.
• Remediation in areas of weakness must be balanced by interesting and engaging work in areas of strength if students with dyslexia are not to lose heart.
• The child’s own response is often the best indicator of whether the right balance has been achieved and the right environment identified.
• The stress response is treated by the brain like any other “skill”: the more it’s “practiced,” the stronger and more long-lasting it becomes. Children who show signs of significant stress in school must be treated with great care and attention.
CHAPTER 28
Thriving in High School and College
The period from mid adolescence to young adulthood is also a critical time for individuals with dyslexia. During these years they must become increasingly responsible for their own organization, learning, and significant life choices.
One of the most important choices facing individuals with dyslexia during this time is whether to attend college or to head directly into the workforce. In this chapter, we’ll focus on the decisions and challenges facing those who choose to go to college. We’ll discuss issues related to work in the next chapter.
Developing the Skills and Supports Needed in College
Students with dyslexia who plan to attend college face two important tasks during their high school years. The first is developing the skills and supports they’ll need to succeed in college.
Learning and Study Skills. Students with dyslexia must first and foremost develop the ability to identify and use their ideal learning style. An individual’s ideal learning style is determined by his or her blend of four key learning components. Those components are Information Input, Information Output, Memory (or Pattern Processing), and Attention.
Information Input refers to the routes through which we absorb information. Some students take in information best through auditory routes and are good at remembering things they hear, while other students learn almost nothing by listening and find lectures a waste of time. Some students (even some with dyslexia) learn best by reading, while others learn poorly through print. Some students learn well by looking at visual representations of information, while others must put things into words to remember them. Others learn best by interacting physically with information or learning through exploration, while others find that activity distracts them from learning. Each student must find the routes that work best for him or her, then do everything possible to channel incoming information through these routes.
Information Output refers to the routes through which we express or communicate information. Some students are powerful oral communicators and can easily express their thoughts by speaking. Others communicate better by putting their thoughts in writing. Others express their thoughts best using visual or structural representations, like diagrams, schematics, or working models. Finding educational environments where work requirements are well matched to output strengths is also essential.
The third learning component, Memory, we discussed in chapter 16, but understanding memory is so important for determining ideal learning styles that we’ll touch again on some key points. During this discussion you can refer to figure 1 on page 115, which illustrates the structure of the memory system.
Memory can be divided into two main branches: working and long-term memory. Working memory is like the random-access memory (RAM) on your computer. It’s where information in current use is kept so it can be quickly accessed for processing. Working memory has visual, verbal, and spatial/kinesthetic branches, and different students may show big differences in how much information they can hold in each. Knowing which branch of working memory works best for them can help students with dyslexia channel information into the appropriate form. For example, students with strong visual working memory can turn all sorts of information into visual representations like charts, graphs, icons, pictures, or mind maps. Students with strong auditory-verbal working memory may use key words or acronyms to hold a larger amount of information in a smaller working memory space. And students with strong spatial/kinesthetic working memory can use movements or positions in space as “pegs” to keep information in mind. We discuss such memory (or mnemonic) techniques in detail in our book The Mislabeled Child.
The other major branch of memory, long-term memory, can also be divided into two branches: procedural memory and factual (or declarative) memory. As we’ve discussed, procedural memory helps us automatically master procedures, rules, and rote tasks so we can perform them without consciously thinking about them or using working memory. Inefficiencies in procedural memory are common in individuals with dyslexia, but just as with working memory, problems can often be prevented by using appropriate strategies and accommodations to offload procedural memory. These strategies involve explicitly studying and practicing the rules and procedures for complex tasks and having memory aids containing this information available when they are being practiced.
The Dyslexic Advantage Page 22