I just got off the phone with a good friend who’s worried about her daughter’s comprehension skills. Years ago, she accepted the diagnosis of her daughter’s dyslexia – a reading disability marked by significant problems in phonological processing (the ability to identify and manipulate the smallest segments of sound). But now she’s wondering why her 11 year-old struggles so much with writing a few paragraphs, while the other girls in her class are writing up to fourteen chapters for a school assignment about their make believe characters. Grace wonders why her daughter needs to read things over and over again, now that her daughter’s decoding skills are basically in tact after years of intense tutoring. She’s also noticing that her daughter watches the same movie over and over again without getting bored at the same silly parts.
Hours earlier, I submitted the final grades for the course that I teach at the University of Colorado at Boulder. There’s a good chance that one of the students in my class will be my daughter’s teacher sometime within the next five years. Will my student know how to support my friend’s daughter? I’d like to say YES. The students in my class cleared up most – if not all – of their misconceptions about dyslexia (e.g. it’s not a problem of letter reversal), and they practiced numerous instructional strategies that support students with dyslexia (e.g. color to identify sentence and text structure). Most of all, they learned that students who do not do well in school are not necessarily students who are not trying…that some students are trying so ridiculously hard, but we just don’t really know what’s going on in their heads. The inner workings of the brain are invisible to the naked eye. We don’t exactly have MRI machines hooked into each classroom to get minute-by-minute brain scans.
If we had an MRI machine hooked to my friends’ daughter we’d likely notice a significant weakness in her working memory. Actually, the MRI machine wouldn’t even tell us that – the battery of tests she takes in a psychologist’s office gives us that information. Working memory refers to one’s ability to hold onto pieces of information until you form a complete thought (while referring to other bits of information). You read part of a sentence about birds, for example, and relate that bit of information to the entire passage’s main point about forest depletion.
So, what to do if you have a weak working memory? Or how about if your son or daughter does? (At this point, at least…because remember, the brain is elastic; neural connections will strengthen in the areas that receive the most attention).
1) Use Graphic Organizers – they’re like file cabinets for your brain. Visual reminders of what goes where, what is related to what, etc.
2) Play pretend games – and stick with the rules. When my daughter Siena is pretending to be Farmer John, she has to hold information in her mind about that man at her school. She works with the information she knows about how he walks, for example, or what types of jokes he tells on his tractor.
3) Write with Graphic Organizers too…ones that you Create using mind-mapping software such as Inspiration, or its free online version mywebspriation.com
4) Make lists…jot down everything you want to say/are thinking about a particular topic (go back and do the organization part later)
5) Do what you can to reduce stress, including test and performance anxiety. When stressed you are less likely to remember things. And if you can remember certain bits of information (e.g. the correct answer on a test), you may still be less likely to work with that information in terms of relating it to something else you know or something else you just read, for instance. Belly breathing, positive self-talk, visualizations, music, an emphasis on effort and small gains in achievement…there’s lots of tactics for reducing “bad stress” – a topic for future posts, indeed.
As for my students teaching Grace’s daughter in the future….sure, they’ll be able to support her. They may not be the “magic bullet” in her life. There is still a lot they have to learn, too, about supporting students with dyslexia…as well as with a weaker working memory. But they will be one of the many educators in her life who are showing her ways to actively seek and accept support so that she can learn innovative, effective ways to shine as a learner and as a beautiful young teen.
