Dyslexia and LD in Famous People | Many celebrities have ADHD or learning disabilities like dyslexia and dysgraphia—from Steven Spielberg to Tim Tebow.
Lou Salza's insight:
Excerpt:
"... well-known individuals with dyslexia come from all fields and walks of life: Olympian Bruce Jenner won a gold medal in the decathlon. Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad’s creative names for types of furniture partially resulted from his trouble remembering traditional product numbers. Newscaster Anderson Cooper is among America’s most admired television personalities. Designer Tommy Hilfiger has had a tremendous influence on the fashion world. Racecar driver Stan Wattles enjoyed a successful Indy Racing League career. Chef Jamie Oliver has become a television star and a crusader for healthier school foods. Three-time NBA Most Valuable Player Magic Johnson mesmerized fans with his grace on the court. Investor Charles Schwab founded one of the world’s largest and most successful banking companies. This list could continue at length: Actors Alyssa Milano, Liv Tyler, Salma Hayek, Danny Glover, and Keira Knightly, activist Erin Brockovich, and comedian Jay Leno are just a few more of the success stories....."
Today the word “hyperactive” doesn’t just describe certain individuals; it also is a quality of our society. We are bombarded each day by four times the number of words we encountered daily when my mother was raising me. Even vacations are complicated — people today use, on average, 26 websites to plan one. Attitudes and habits are changing so fast that you can identify “generational” differences in people just a few years apart: Simply by analyzing daily cellphone communication patterns, researchers have been able to guess the age of someone under 60 to within about five years either way with 80 percent accuracy.
To thrive in this frenetic world, certain cognitive tendencies are useful: to embrace novelty, to absorb a wide variety of information, to generate new ideas. The possibility that such characteristics might be associated with A.D.H.D. was first examined in the 1990s. The educational psychologist Bonnie Cramond, for example, tested a group of children in Louisiana who had been determined to have A.D.H.D. and found that an astonishingly high number — 32 percent — did well enough to qualify for an elite creative scholars program in the Louisiana schools.
Lou Salza's insight:
Some of the characteristics and conditions we call disorders in children result from the requirement to sit still and quiet in classrooms where they are one of 20 or 25 and are generally left to their own devices to learn. It is no surprise that these environmentally determined disorders morph into something different-- even strengths--as the background shifts.
Researchers from the University of Minnesota and the University of Toronto studied 180 schools across nine states and concluded, “We have not found a single case of a school improving its student achievement record in the absence of talented leadership.”
What do principals do? They build a culture. Researchers from McKinsey studied test scores from half a million students in 72 countries. They found that students’ mind-sets were twice as powerful in predicting scores as home environment and demographics were. How do students feel about their schooling? How do they understand motivation? Do they have a growth mind-set to understand their own development?
These attitudes are powerfully and subtly influenced by school culture, by the liturgies of practice that govern the school day: the rituals for welcoming members into the community; the way you decorate walls to display school values; the distribution of power across the community; the celebrations of accomplishment and the quality of trusting relationships.
Principals set the culture by their very behavior — the message is the person.
The field of workplace learning—and the wider education field—have fallen under the spell of neuroscience (aka brain-science) recommendations. Unfortunately, neuroscience has not yet created a body of proven recommendations. While offering great promise for the future, as of this writing—in January 2016—most learning professionals would be better off relying on proven learning recommendations from sources like Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel’s book Make It Stick; by Benedict Carey’s book How We Learn; and by Julie Dirksen’s book Design for How People Learn.
As learning professionals, we must be more skeptical of neuroscience claims. As research and real-world experience has shown, such claims can persuade us toward ineffective learning designs and unscrupulous vendors and consultants. Our trade associations and industry thought leaders need to take a stand as well. Instead of promoting neuroscience claims, they ought to voice a healthy skepticism……
Lou Salza's insight:
Sad but true: Artful images of brains--even fMRI images fool us into thinking the article below it is worthy of our attention, time and even our money! Stay Strong!
Lawrence School is committed to reframing the conversation about the diverse ways children with dyslexia, ADHD, and other language-based learning differences learn.
Lou Salza's insight:
Last Friday, Head of School Elect Doug Hamilton, Head of Upper School Jason Culp, and I met with a group of eleventh and twelfth-grade students to listen to how they were feeling about recent school shootings and find out what we could learn from them. It was a poignant and powerful discussion. Our students were thoughtful, candid, insightful, and articulate. We asked about their reactions to last week’s events and about their own experiences with violence in schools. Each of the adults in the room expressed deep sorrow about the national environment in which these young people are coming of age. Students told us they think about the possibility of gun violence almost everywhere they go now. They have grown up with school shooter drills since they were in primary school. Our children think about and worry about the possibility of shootings at malls and sporting events as well as at school:
The nature of news is likely to distort people’s view of the world because of a mental bug that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind. In many walks of life this is a serviceable rule of thumb. But whenever a memory turns up high in the result list of the mind’s search engine for reasons other than frequency—because it is recent, vivid, gory, distinctive, or upsetting—people will overestimate how likely it is in the world.
Plane crashes always make the news, but car crashes, which kill far more people, almost never do. Not surprisingly, many people have a fear of flying, but almost no one has a fear of driving. People rank tornadoes (which kill about 50 Americans a year) as a more common cause of death than asthma (which kills more than 4,000 Americans a year), presumably because tornadoes make for better television.
Lou Salza's insight:
There is so much good news in our schools! Remember those "bring your son or daughter to work days? How about a "Bring your parents to school Day?" This would be a day when adults get to remind themselves about what is actually most important for the future of our communities, our country and our planet.
If you have the privilege to be around young people in school as I do every day, it is possible to remain optimistic-- even upbeat --about the future and clear about priorities. Every day our young people by the millions get it right for themselves, for their peers for all of us. As educators and parents our challenge has always been to foster in the adult community the same ideals and values we espouse in our schools for student communities: Respect for self and others and willingness to step out of our comfort zones to learn new and challenging skills and concepts.It is our schools that plant and cultivate the seeds of academic, social and personal growth in our young people that gives rise to a future of positive civic engagement and strong democratic communities. Isn't it about time that adults (citizens, voters, politicians, businesses) swallow the same medicine we have prescribed for our children? --Just sayin'--Lou
For elementary-aged children, research suggests that studying in class gets superior learning results, while extra schoolwork at home is just . . . extra work. Even in middle school, the relationship between homework and academic success is minimal at best. By the time kids reach high school, homework provides academic benefit, but only in moderation. More than two hours per night is the limit. After that amount, the benefits taper off. “The research is very clear,” agrees Etta Kralovec, education professor at the University of Arizona. “There’s no benefit at the elementary school level.”
Before going further, let’s dispel the myth that these research results are due to a handful of poorly constructed studies. In fact, it’s the opposite. Cooper compiled 120 studies in 1989 and another 60 studies in 2006. This comprehensive analysis of multiple research studies found no evidence of academic benefit at the elementary level. It did, however, find a negative impact on children’s attitudes toward school.
Lou Salza's insight:
At Lawrence we assign just enough homework to get kids over the trauma they and their families have been through at other schools. We "fire" parents from any role in homework, and we assign 5-30 minutes of mastered work for practice. Our students have much ground to cover due to the teaching disabilities they have encountered elsewhere. --Lou
Our mantra—our driving force—has become “Give each child what she or he most needs.” But to deliver on this lofty goal, we needed to understand deeply what exactly it is that a child most needs. And that meant having a means of making the child’s data useful for directing his or her educational program. This led us to create an interactive student information database that assigns cognitive development activities based on a student’s data profile. Sometimes the needs are obvious. When a child’s oral reading fluency score is more than a standard deviation below average, the response is to give the child more time with a teacher or tutor who can deliver high-quality reading instruction. But at other times, the needs are embedded and subtle. Why can’t this thoughtful child reveal the depth of her complex thinking in writing? Why doesn’t this great thinker know his multiplication facts? We shifted from wanting to understand what a student struggles with to understanding why a student struggles. This is a shift that heralds the arrival of more effective education. When education can identify and address the underlying causes of a child’s academic struggles, schools become lifesavers.
Lou Salza's insight:
Excellent article by Head of School Steve Wilkins at the Carroll School in Lincoln MA. W. Edwards Deming — 'In God we trust; all others bring data.'
For the last decade and a half, I’ve engaged in anthropological research on higher education, identifying several challenges and mismatches between what we know about learning “in real life” and learning in college. In my most recent book, “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College, I identified a number of ways that formal education has led to a lack of learning. Colleges promote credentials, obedience and the sorting of haves and have-nots, but not necessarily learning. People kept asking me what I would do to improve things. And I said that if I could make one change, I would get rid of grades.
Childrens' author Vanita Oelschlager, who is also a Lawrence alumni grandmother, spent time with Lower School students on Oct. 25, sharing her wonderful collection of books.
One of her best-selling books, "Knees: The Mixed Up World of a Boy with Dyslexia" is actually dedicated to the students of Lawrence School.
As a part of the visit, the Lower School library was formally named the "James and Vanita Oelschlager Library" in appreciation of the couple's generous support of the school and Vanita's contributions to children's literature.
Lou Salza's insight:
As a children’s author, Vanita addresses topics of importance to children and parents and takes children and parents on a journey to identify and develop their strengths without allowing them to be completely defined by a problem or a struggle. In Vanita’s stories, labels inform—but do not define characters. Her illustrations are whimsical, her texts convey messages of hope, encouragement and resilience. At Lawrence we feel privileged to call her our friend. --Lou
Siedenberg’s scathing blog post in Language Log heaped criticism onto the study, claiming it contained a remarkable number of errors, lack of information and poor science.
Several reasons he believes the study is substandard include:
Thirty students in each group is too few to make any kind of conclusion. Basic information comparing the two groups was not provided – such as handedness, language background, nonverbal IQ measurements, measures of spoken language such as vocabulary comprehension. There was no testing to determine that the students were actually dyslexic – they were only described as having poorer reading skills than one would expect.
Lou Salza's insight:
Dyslexics represent complex nuero-diversity. It is not a disease; therefore we seek is no "cure"! Dyslexics have a print challenge and there are ways around and through those challenges that take time, practice and engagement of well prepared teachers, committed students and parents. The are high standards for research design which so many so called "cures" and "treatments" for dyslexia consistently fail to meet. Simply toss this one out on the ash heap with the 'brain-SCAMS', colored lenses, visual training, 'Cog-MUD' and so many other expensive, wasteful, inaccurate treatments recommended for students who suffer from obsolete school and curriculum design. --Lou
People often try to crack the code for the best path to becoming a chief executive. Do finance people have an edge over marketers? How many international postings should you have? A variety of experiences is good, but at what point does breadth suggest a lack of focus?
It’s a natural impulse. In this age of Moneyball and big data, why not look for patterns?
The problem is that the world doesn’t really work that way. There are too many variables, many of them beyond your control, including luck, timing and personal chemistry.
The career trajectories of the C.E.O.s I’ve interviewed are so varied that spotting trends is difficult, and a surprising number of the executives do not fit the stereotype of the straight-A student and class president who seemed destined to run a big company someday. I’ve met C.E.O.s who started out in theater, music and teaching. Others had surprisingly low grades in school.
Lou Salza's insight:
Fascinating article about the complexity and diversity of effective leadership--Lou
Supporting this dyslexia-friendly understanding of reading is a burgeoning understanding of dyslexia itself as being not so much a “learning” disorder, as a “print” disorder. As I have mentioned in previous posts, Dr. David Rose points out that all learning disabilities are in truth a function of normal human neurodiversity in a specific context that fits badly. In the case of dyslexia, the disability resides in part in the print. Seen through this lens, audio books are a logical and easy piece of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an approach focused on giving diverse learners access to content.
Lou Salza's insight:
Thank you Ben Foss for teaching us that there are 3 ways to read: eye,ear, and finger reading and that dyslexia is not a learning issue but an issue with print and written language.--Lou
smarter, faster, data-driven way to assess students for reading accommodations Help your team make the right decisions on reading accommodations and help students perform their best in inclusion classrooms and during high-stakes testing. uPAR is the smarter, faster, data-driven way to assess students for reading accommodations.
In fact, it’s the only automated tool available that improves accommodation decisions!
Lou Salza's insight:
Ask NOT: "which students require print processing accommodations" ASK " How can we make these tools universally available to anyone, anytime, anywhere?? All Schools, for all kids, must add these tools to those already available for students to experience effective, efficient success in processing print.--Lou
the decision about whether to support or disapprove of a teenager’s activism is as personal as any in family life. Some adults will cheer on students who wish to participate in the walkout while others may oppose them or worry about the potential safety hazards, educational costs or disciplinary consequences of joining in. While some schools have threatened to suspend students who participate, legal scholars say students have the right to demonstrate unless they are disruptive. And dozens of colleges and universities said that any disciplinary actions against those participating in the protests would not affect their admissions decisions.
Looking at the issue from a social science perspective, adults should nurture adolescents’ efforts to catalyze political and social change because civic engagement can help teenagers grow. America has a long history of benefiting from the activism of young people; it’s good to know that the young people usually benefit, too.
Lisa Damour (@LDamour) is a psychologist in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and the author of “Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions Into Adulthood.”
Lou Salza's insight:
These demonstrations will also be good for parents and adults and for our nation if we have the good sense to listen to what the young people are asking us: In the richest, most powerful nation on earth, do we have the will to keep our children safe, fed, housed and educated? Yes or no?
Dyslexia is the most common learning disability, affecting tens of millions of people in the United States. But getting help for children who have it in public school can be a nightmare.
"They wouldn't acknowledge that he had a problem," says Christine Beattie about her son Neil. "They wouldn't say the word 'dyslexia.' "
Other parents, she says, in the Upper Arlington, Ohio, schools were having the same problem. The district in a suburb of Columbus wasn't identifying their children's dyslexia or giving them appropriate help.
So, in 2011, the parents pooled their resources and hired a lawyer.
"I was not surprised there was a group of students with dyslexia who were not getting the kind of instruction that they really needed," says Kerry Agins, an Ohio special education attorney who represented the Upper Arlington parents. She says the issue of public schools failing to address the needs of students with dyslexia is widespread, in Ohio and across the country.
Agins advised the parents to file a group complaint against the district.
Parents typically fight special education cases alone, seeking remedies one by one. But a group complaint, Agins told them, could force the school system to make broader change.
Nineteen people signed the complaint, including parents, students and graduates of the Upper Arlington public schools.
In August 2011, the Ohio Department of Education found the Upper Arlington Schools in violation of the law when it came to promptly and properly identifying students with learning disabilities and finding them eligible for special education services.
"We felt vindicated," Christine Beattie recalls. "Like, we aren't crazy. We know what we're talking about."
Lou Salza's insight:
Many thanks to mobilized Moms who activate, motivate, advocate and dominate on behalf of their kids!
Through the generosity of the Edward E. Ford Foundation and our founding member schools, we have secured the funding to develop the transcript tool, which has allowed us to kick off design work and undertake plans for a series of pilots during the 2018–19 school year. And we have begun the process of building partnerships with an amazing array of organizations who are also committed to supporting more authentic and engaging learning experiences for students.
On this day, we want to pause for a moment and say thank you. Thank you to the EE Ford Foundation and to our member schools for providing the funding to support this work. Thank you to our founder, Scott Looney and our initial Board for their vision; and thank you to the team that has made great progress this past year. Thank you to our new friends and partners for your ideas, energy, and guidance. And, most of all, thank you to our members for joining this movement and ensuring that this work will get accomplished.
We are looking forward to another energetic and busy year. You can expect to see our membership continue to grow as we welcome public schools to the Consortium. We will be iterating through design models and an initial build of technology this year, and we know that our pilot and working group schools will provide us with innumerable learnings. We are happy with the progress we’ve made in year one, and anxious to build upon and exceed those successes in year two and beyond!
Lou Salza's insight:
Stacy Caldwell is the Executive Director of the MTC. She has years of organizational and change leadership under her belt most recently serving as Chief Product Officer for The Princeton Review and vice president for the SAT Suite of Assessments, playing the lead role during the most recent redesign of the SAT. Stacy is a passionate proponent of mastery-based learning and an advocate for developing a transcript that will serve all students.
"...At the White House on Wednesday, President Trump suggested that if a football coach at the high school, Aaron Feis, had been armed, he would have saved even more lives than he did, perhaps even his own, because rather than simply shielding students from gunfire, he could have drawn his weapon, fired and killed the assailant — putting a tidy end to the rampage.
This is absurd. More likely, had Mr. Feis been armed, he would not have been able to draw his weapon (a side arm, presumably) quickly enough to stop the shooter, who with an AR-15 would have had the coach outgunned. Even if the coach had been able to draw his weapon — from where? his athletic shorts? — any shots he managed to fire would have risked being errant, possibly injuring or killing additional students. As some studies have shown, even police officers have missed their targets more than 50 percent of the time. In firing a weapon, Mr. Feis would have only added to the carnage and confusion...
What if a history teacher had also been armed? And an English teacher, and a math teacher, and the janitorial staff members? In this National Rifle Association fever dream, a high school would concentrate so much firepower in the hands of its employees that no deranged individual with a weapon would dare enter the premises. This sort of thinking also has no grounding in reality. People attack heavily armed institutions all too often, as with the mass shootings in 2009 at Fort Hood in Texas and in 2013 at the Washington Navy Yard. Assailants in such cases aren’t typically worried about losing their lives in the process. Usually, losing their lives is part of the plan..." By ANTHONY SWOFFORD FEB. 24, 2018
Lou Salza's insight:
Last Friday administrators at Lawrence Upper School met with members of the High School student council to listen to how students were feeling about the recent school shooting and find out what we as a school community could learn from them. It was a poignant and powerful discussion. Our students were thoughtful, candid, insightful, and articulate. We asked about their reactions to last week’s events and about their own experiences with violence in schools. Each of the adults in the room felt deep sorrow about the national environment in which these young people are coming of age. Students told us they think about the possibility of gun violence almost everywhere they go now. They have grown up with the school shooter drills since they were in primary school. Our kids think about and worry about the possibility of shootings at malls and sporting events as well as at school.
For me the inescapable conclusion was that our nation lacks the will to love, protect, nurture and educate all our children. What have we done?
At other high schools across the country, students rallied in solidarity with Stoneman Douglas High and staged walkouts to protest what they called Washington’s inaction in protecting students and teachers. A gun control advocacy group, Moms Demand Action, said it had been so overwhelmed with requests from students that it was setting up a parallel, student focused advocacy group.
“People say it’s too early to talk about it,” Mr. Kasky said. “If you ask me, it’s way too late.”
His argument reflects the words of other students who want action: The issue is not an abstraction to them. These are their murdered friends, their bloodstained schools, their upended lives.
Students said they did not want to cede the discussion over their lives to politicians and adult activists.
“We need to take it into our hands,” Mr. Kasky said.
Lou Salza's insight:
Voters and elected officials in every state take note! We cannot change what we are willing to tolerate. We have created a generation of young people who have grown up with the deadly reality of school shootings. This is not about our rights as sports enthusiasts, or our 2nd Amendment rights to carry firearms. This is about the fundamental rights of our children to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in their schools.
Most adult dyslexics who share their personal stories mention that their feelings of shame created a significant barrier to living with dyslexia. That was certainly my case. Children fear to reveal to parents and teachers that they cannot read. If they don’t know they are dyslexic and don’t understand dyslexia’s many implications, they feel ashamed. Most think that they are stupid because they can’t keep up with their classmates in reading, writing, and spelling. Also, the challenges in memorizing things in sequence affect many aspects of learning and performance. Shame has a crippling effect—if we’re failing because we’re defective, and working harder hasn’t worked, we may feel like there’s no solution.
Dyslexic pupils were particularly vulnerable to negative reactions from parents, teachers, and peers. Most educational models value results, not effort, and when results are not forthcoming from the dyslexic student, most parents and educators express disapproval. The easiest thing for observers to conclude is that the student simply doesn’t care enough to do the hard work that will get the job done. Here’s the thing: character assassination rarely leads to an efficient support system.
Lou Salza's insight:
Important article for parents and teachers about how to support children through the challenges of feeling isolated and shamed about school failure and struggles due to dyslexia.
I asked students to talk to me about the terms “disability” versus “difference” with regard to the ways they learn. Not surprisingly, each rejected the term disability and shared that while they may work longer or harder, eventually they understand and feel good about their ability to master the tasks in front of them. They accept that there are things about themselves that will not change, but those challenges do not prevent them from learning and each felt those old labels would mean less the older they became. We discussed the difference between “growing out of a learning difference” versus “growing into it” and “learning how to cope with it.”
Lou Salza's insight:
I met with our six October Upper School Students of the Month this morning in his office. Their discussion proved to be a powerful reminder that Lawrence School is a place where students feel understood, respected, and are engaged in learning. Read our Lawrence School blog here: https://tinyurl.com/yay7py7k
Facts about the condition of the planet and what we can do to reduce our ecological footprint and limit the amount of garbage being landfilled are taught with this multisensory approach in mind. By replacing the textbook cause-and-effect model with hands-on activities and projects, we enable our students to develop a deeper connection and sense of responsibility for the natural world.
At the Upper School, several multisensory initiatives are in place to help students examine the relationship between humanity and the environment, and more will be added soon with the recent completion of our greenhouse facility.
Lou Salza's insight:
Ms. Nieves-Caraballo writes a thoughtful blog about the importance of "acting locally and thinking globally"! She advises Lawrence's Chapter of the Global Youth Leadership Institute (GYLI). Her students built and currently maintain a compost system on the Upper School campus grounds.Kudos!-Lou
Colleges are required by law to provide accommodations to students who qualify. Here, six students in the Eye to Eye mentoring network share accommodations that helped them succeed in college. (Also, be sure to look at this list of college supports and services to see what else may be available.)
Did you know that nearly every mobile device offers text-to-speech? In other words, your phone can actually read to you what’s displaying on the screen. For kids with reading issues, this can be extremely helpful in everything from doing research for school to browsing social media.
Watch as assistive technology expert Jamie Martin walks you through how to turn on text to speech on various mobile phones (both iPhone and Android). It’s much simpler than you may think!
Then learn more about text to speech and other assistive technology tools on Understood.org.
Lou Salza's insight:
I use my phone frequently to read or dictate! Thank you Jamie Martin for a clear 'how to' instructional video in 3 minutes!!--Lou
On behalf of the Lawrence School Board of Trustees, it is with great pleasure that I announce the appointment of Douglas Hamilton as Lawrence School's next Head of School, effective July 1, 2018. The Board was unanimous in its support of the Search Committee's enthusiastic recommendation of Doug following an extensive and highly competitive search process that began last January.
Lou Salza's insight:
Congratulations to Doug Hamilton who is no stranger to the Lawrence community, having positively impacted countless students and families as an educator and administrator at the school for nearly three decades. He first joined the school's faculty in 1989 before being elevated to his current position as Director of Admission in 2000. During his time at Lawrence, Doug has developed a comprehensive understanding of learning differences, the needs of diverse learners, and our school curriculum. Additionally, as a member of the Lawrence Executive and Leadership councils, Doug has had an important voice in critical decisions that have led to our school's impressive progress in recent years.--Lou
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Not everyone with dyslexia will be famous or wildly successful, but it is good to know that difficulty in school is not a life sentence...