A decade ago, when I was in graduate school, I could hardly contain my excitement when it came time to take remedial reading courses. I simply couldn’t wait to find the answers to the questions that had plagued me about why seemingly bright children had a hard time learning to read. Imagine my pain when I discovered that the class was preparing me to assess, spot learning differences, track reading rates, classify text by reading level—in short, do everything but successfully teach a non-reader to read.
In the last ten years, I have learned about a whole series of classifications of disabilities. There are so many! The impression one might get is that children are breaking down more and more, and we are developing more and more detailed labels to describe them. What I haven’t seen, however, are increasingly evolved solutions to go along with this highly ranked collection of tags. Solutions are what have always interested me!
If we continue to test the child instead of the educational system, we are essentially pitting thousands of children against an educational system. We have a specific educational approach with little variations here and there, but also thousands and thousands of unique children. Which ones are we going to scrutinize? The children or the method? Which one are we going to measure against the other? Imagine taking your five children shopping for clothes. You walk into Kid’s Clothes dragging your children behind you. Children’s clothing is highly organized and research based to give you the best shopping experience. The store has a long shelf of boys’ shirts, another of boys’ pants, a long shelf of girls’ dresses, etc. So you take your girls to their zone and the boys to theirs. Within a few hours all of you are distraught and upset. You only have a child who fits clothes! Oh no! The other four children are all wrong! This illustrates the concept of viewing children as failing rather than reassessing teaching methods when children don’t learn.
When we focus on the child and label them using a term that sounds absolute and professional, the child will be encouraged to become that even more! One day that is etched in my memory is a day when I was filling in for a fourth grade teacher. I walked into the room and was accosted by a skinny, very eloquent guy who told me assertively that he had ADHD and that he couldn’t control himself. And he spent the rest of the day trying it out. He informed me, very articulately, every few moments what he couldn’t stop doing. He was living up to what his diagnosis said he was.
The more we focus on the imagined problem with the child, the less effective we will be as teachers. As a kid trying to learn to ride a bike, there were two big things I didn’t want to hit while wobbling around the yard. One was our cinder block house and the other was a particularly prickly orange tree. The more I wanted to avoid running into those obstacles, the more I looked at them and guess what? How much more unerringly did my bike head straight for them! If I am teaching my son and my mind is focused on his inability to memorize spelling words, my disbelief in her will be transmitted to her and my focus on the problem will become her focus on the problem as well. Nothing good will come of this.
All of the adults I’ve taken the time to talk to can describe what tasks they’re gifted at, what they like to do, and how they remember things. Some of us know well that we can’t hear verbal instructions and remember them for more than a nanosecond, so we look to and trust maps to navigate. Other people can solve really complex math problems in their heads. So why do we assume that all children should be able to memorize strings of letters (spelling), memorize math facts, or memorize and apply phonics rules? This makes sense? I do not think it does. We are all wonderfully designed to do exactly what we are meant to do in our lives. And none of us should compare ourselves to another person. We don’t tend to as adults, but the moment a child comes along, we often try in every possible way to make it fit into a narrow educational mold.
Let’s take a look at our traditional education system. It doesn’t work for many children. So the question is, do we change him or do we try to change our son to fit into the system?
General rules for teaching all children, but especially children with learning difficulties:
Get rid of unnecessary clutter. For example, in teaching reading, you do not need to first learn all the names of the letters, or memorize their related sounds, or be able to put the letters in ABC order, etc. Those traditional steps, which include pronouncing and memorizing mixtures, are so familiar that we feel if we don’t teach them, we will fail our children. The best way to teach a child to read is to get right to the point! I can attest to the amount of clutter that exists in our teaching day. A really strange concept for many adults is the fact that some children learn whole words more easily than small pieces of words.
Learn to distinguish between effective lessons and busy work. Much of what filled our day in the classroom when I was teaching was busy work with minimal earnings made by the child. You can tell which activities fall into this category because the child just doesn’t enjoy them and isn’t engaged. For example, copying is usually a waste of time for most children. It will make the child’s hand tired and put the brain to sleep. Try it yourself. Put on a TV show that interests you a lot, and then sit down and copy a whole page out of the dictionary while you watch the show. Did you get much from the copy? Any activity that is effective, useful, and that engages the child will be one in which he has to figure something out, invent something, or think! If you are engaged, you are learning!
Use images whenever you can. Pictures are magical for many, many children who do not memorize well. Try it yourself. Ask someone to do you a favor. Ask them to drive to a street not far from you and take a picture of something distinctive, such as an interesting house, a strange building, or anything out of the ordinary. Then ask them to come back to you and first describe verbally, orally, what they saw. When they have finished, ask them to show you the photo they took of that interesting item. Which is more effective in conveying the reality of the object? The oral description or the photo?
Use a body movement to help remember. When I have trouble remembering a phone number (which I always do), I can pretend to dial it on a keyboard. As I do that, I’m noticing the shape of what I marked and I’m also storing that visual pattern in the muscles of my body. Any child who is good at physical activity will benefit from physical movement to accompany learning. And I don’t mean just bouncing; I mean a movement that reflects what they are learning. When counting by twos, for example, have the children march in a line but lean far over each even number. Their bodies will remember the even numbers when they hear their mouths say the even numbers at the same time.
Relate learning to a real life experience. When you learn to tell time or count money, do it throughout the day, not at a desk with a pen and paper. Measurement is best learned when the child is creating something very interesting to him.
Have the child discover some things for himself. With any science lesson, the more practical and real the lessons, the better. Anything a child can cut and paste is marginal at best. It could just be a time filler. Anything a child investigates and then does, writes down, or puts into action (that he has to figure out) will be valuable.
Find patterns and similarities in everything you teach because that’s what the brain loves. There is beauty in patterns, and nature is full of them. Music is made of patterns; math is too. I have seen a child come alive when he saw the patterns in learning. It’s hard to do anything with the unrelated details.
Don’t just say; show. I’d love to get a penny for every time I heard a teacher complain: I’ve told you that more than once. Hmm. Could it be that saying is not effective? Show them. Show them examples; show them how you do it (modeling); show them what a good result is. Remember: Don’t tell me… show me!
Keep the lessons as short as possible. Stop at the moment when the child is tired or restless. Of course I don’t mean ten minutes of the school day! I do want to say, however, that when your children start to fidget or fidget, check the activity or lesson they are doing to determine their interest level. If you can inject some mystery, some novelty into it, by all means do it! But if you take step one and get rid of the clutter and stick to the meat and potatoes of school work, you might find that your day job, the significant part, can be done in a couple of hours in a day or three. .
No, please no, keep doing what you see is not working. What the child needs is not more exercises, but a radically different approach. Remember, we are going to drop the notion that the child is broken! We need to change what we are doing when the child is unresponsive at first.