LD Expert Podcast with Jill Stowell
40 Years of Unlocking Potential
Jill Stowell: Kids do well when they can. This is very different from, “Kids do well when they want to.” It’s actually a pretty profound statement - kids do well when-they -can.
That indicates that if they aren’t doing well, whether it’s in school or with behavior, or really anything else, there is something deeper at the root of the challenge.
In the case of learning and behavior challenges, this is nearly always weak or inefficient underlying skills. The great thing about this shift in perspective is that it helps us approach difficulties with empathy and it shows us a way forward.
Welcome to the LD Expert Podcast, your place for answers and solutions for dyslexia and learning differences.
I’m your host, Jill Stowell, founder and executive director of Stowell Learning Centers and author of Take the Stone Out of the Shoe, A Must-Have Guide to Understanding, Supporting, and Correcting Dyslexia, Learning, and Attention Challenges.
At Stowell Learning Centers, we work with children and families just like yours - helping parents understand what’s going on when bright students struggle in school and what can be done to change that permanently, and we understand that having a child with dyslexia or a learning disability can be very lonely for a parent. You feel like you’re the only one whose child is struggling and you don’t know who to talk to. This podcast is for you. This is part of our mission to equip parents with knowledge and practical tools for understanding and helping your child. If this episode brings up any questions for you, go to stowellcenter.com and give us a call.
Forty years ago, I gave my school principal notice that I would not be returning to my special education position and I ventured into the world of private practice. I actually knew nothing at that time, but I was ready to set the world on fire with the idea that learning disabilities could be changed - not just supported or accommodated, but actually, permanently changed.
I had been a learning disabilities specialist in a public school. I worked with really fun, cool kids who were struggling, usually with reading or math. I remember there was a 3rd grade teacher who was really hard on any of my students who were in her class. She could see that they were smart enough to do the work, and so she just assumed that poor performance was a choice - that the students just didn’t want to do it. Needless to say, she was not my favorite teacher at the school.
The thing that really bothered me though, was that these kids did have the potential and I could see that they also had the motivation, so why was it that it was so hard for them? It just didn’t make sense.
I’ve reflected on the last 40 years and tried to think about all I’ve learned. And it’s a LOT! But my basic premise has always remained the same: Struggles associated with dyslexia and learning disabilities CAN be changed.
I know people don’t especially like the term learning disabilities - I don’t love it myself - but it is actually a specific diagnosis.
By definition, individuals with learning disabilities have average to above average intelligence AND difficulty learning or using specific academic skills such as reading, writing, or math.
So the question I was seeking to answer when I left the public school was, “If students have the intelligence to learn and their struggles seem to be specific to academics, what was getting in the way”?
That started me on an amazing journey that continues even today to find the people in the world doing the research on the brain, and attention, and learning.
I had some maverick mentors early on in my practice - Patricia Lindamood, Dr. Joan Smith, Svea Gold, Gayle Moyers - amazing women who also simply could not accept that struggling students were lazy, unmotivated, not trying hard enough, or just not school material. They knew there had to be something underneath the problems and just felt that it had to be identified and developed so that students didn’t have to continue to struggle.
Today, forty years later, we live in an age where clinical evidence and research on the brain, human development, and learning skills backs this up.
If you follow us, you know that I often refer to the Learning Skills Continuum or Learning Ladder.
Think about a nice tall ladder with lots of rungs. Imagine that you are up at the top of that ladder doing a job. If you are going to feel comfortable and confident up there, the rungs underneath have to be solid and secure.
But what if some of the rungs on the ladder are wobbly? Now, you’re going to feel a little off balance. Chances are, your attention is going to be divided because now you’re focused on not falling off the ladder. You’re going to have a harder time doing the job, it’s going to take you longer than you expected, and you’re going to be less motivated to get back up there again.
The world looks at things like reading or math, or paying attention, or managing your behavior, as things that kids ought to automatically be able to do. And a lot of kids can do them automatically. But some can't.
In fact, the research indicates that about 30% of people in the population across the board, have some degree of difficulty with a key auditory processing skill that impacts reading, spelling, and speaking, and that's just one of numerous underlying skills.
All these skills that we assume to be in place, are like the rungs on that ladder. Academic and social skills are up at the top. If you’re going to operate well up there at the top of the ladder, you need to have strong, stable supporting skills, or rungs underneath.
If any of those underlying skills are weak or inefficient, it's like having weak or unstable rungs on your ladder.
That’s exactly what’s happening to our struggling students. They’re working so hard to manage with wobbly rungs - or the weak underlying skills - that their attention system is stressed and they have to work harder or longer than expected to do the job.
Now, a lot of our kids are good compensators - they may have real strengths that allow them to compensate well, but it’s uncomfortable and it’s taxing. Even if they can fool their teachers, their parents usually see the struggles and the child’s self-esteem, identity, and of course their learning, is impacted.
In this episode, I’m going to talk about what those rungs are, and give you some examples of what weak skills at that level might look like in real life.
The bottom rungs on the ladder are the most foundational skills for learning. These are developmental visual and motor skills that we call Core Learning Skills.
These are our body control skills that allow us to sit in a chair, move easily through the classroom, move our eyes or our pencil across the page - skills that most of us take for granted because they are so automatic that we don’t even have to think about them.
Babies are born with reflexes that help them in the birthing process and get them moving in the first months of life.
If you've been around an infant you know, they just move all the time. These are reflexive movements that jumpstart learning.
As babies grow and develop, these primitive reflexes begin to disappear or morph into more mature reflexes. If they continue to fire when they’re no longer needed, they cause interference to learning and attention - kind of like little neurological roadblocks or a short circuit that gets in the way of fully developing skills at the core learning level.
And that can make everything more difficult.
And so as a result, you might see anxiety, attention challenges, or poor connections for language and higher thinking.
I'll give you an example.
Zoe was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. She came to us in second grade because she couldn’t read, but she was also pretty much driving everybody crazy.
She was very, very particular about what she would wear to school.
There were only a few foods that she would eat. At school, she just popped up and down out of her seat all the time. If she was in her seat, she was wiggling all over the place.
Zoe had challenges at the lowest level of the ladder.
She had retained reflexes that were triggering involuntary movement. One of those reflexes is called the spinal galant.
Babies are born with this reflex. If you touch either side of a baby’s spine, its hips will flex side to side. Well, the purpose of that is so that in utero it can wiggle itself up to next to the mother's spine and start to get sound through bone conduction. That's how auditory processing starts to develop.
The spinal galant reflex also helps in the birthing process to help the baby kinda twist its way through the birth canal. After a few months of life, that reflex is going to integrate - or disappear - because it's not needed anymore.
But what if it doesn't?
If it doesn't, then you have a child that every time they have tight clothing on or their back rubs up against the chair, it causes them to wiggle.
So now you have a kid in the classroom who’s distracting everybody, and distracting themselves, and knocking things off the desk, or accidentally kicking or bumping other people.
It looks like it’s either a behavior problem or attention problem, and there is no doubt that that child is being told to sit still.
In order to try to stop the involuntary movement and sit still, the child is going to have to tighten up their muscles and become very rigid. So now, so much energy is going into holding their body still that it’s really hard to pay attention to what the teacher is saying.
And if you can’t pay attention, it’s going to be hard to learn and remember.
The brain and body are connected so our thinking brain is going to reflect what's happening in our body.
If you have a child that is physically all over the place, it's very possible that their thinking is also going to be kind of scattered.
If you have a child that’s learned how to make themselves very rigid and very still, well you’re probably going to have a pretty rigid thinker: “Don't make me do something different. Don't make me stand somewhere different or sit somewhere different. Because I can only have control if I stay just like this, if I do it just the way I always do.”
A lot of the difficulties that we see that we think are executive function or attention challenges, go back to the core learning skills level.
Zoe also had challenges at the next level up on the learning skills continuum or learning ladder.
The next level up is the processing skills level.
These skills are a little higher level in the brain. They are skills like auditory and visual processing, processing speed, language processing, memory, and attention.
Auditory and visual processing are not your hearing or your seeing, but how the brain perceives or thinks about the information that comes in through the eyes or ears.
Many dyslexic learners, like Zoe, have visual processing abilities that enable them to mentally see things 3 dimensions. This can be a real gift when it comes to artistic endeavors or sports, but when applied to two-dimensional print, it can create disorientation and confusion on the page.
We’re working with a little girl right now who bursts into tears whenever she has to do her reading homework. She has learned to read, but it turns out that the text on those particular worksheets is so dense that it’s painful and nauseating for her to look at.
Auditory processing challenges for our dyslexic learners are usually related to phonemic awareness - or being able to think about the sounds in words.
Because we have a phonetic language, confusion about the sounds makes it hard to make sense of how words are put together. And so, of course, that makes reading, spelling, and sometimes speaking difficult.
Zoe attended sessions at the learning center for about 9 months.
We worked with her on integrating the retained reflexes and developing a solid base of core learning skills.
She did auditory training so that she could make sense of the sounds in words and learned visual orientation strategies so that she could look at print comfortably.
When the end of second grade rolled around, Zoe was one of the top students in her class - both with reading and with behavior.
She had expanded her wardrobe to anything in her closet, and she ate whatever the rest of the family had for dinner.
She made these changes not because of discipline or incentives, but because the rungs on her ladder got stronger.
So let’s get back to that idea that kids do well when they can.
And if they can’t, it’s a skills problem.
If your kid doesn’t do well in baseball today, if they can’t do well on their homework, if they can’t seem to get up in the morning, if they can’t seem to take direction from you, if they can’t pay attention - whatever it is, if you say, he won’t pay attention, he won’t do his homework, there is an underlying assumption that he’s choosing not to.
But if you look at it as can’t, not won’t - if you operate on the assumption that people are doing the best they can at any particular moment, and that when they don’t do well, it’s because something is getting in their way, that changes everything.
It ‘s more compassionate and productive because it allows us to look deeper. To look for the root of the problem - not just the symptoms, so that we can address the real issue.
Many years ago, I tested two boys in the same month who were really similar: They were both about 13, both named Michael, and both failing in school.
The real root of the problem for both boys was poor auditory processing and comprehension.
One of the boys went through about a year and a half of auditory training and comprehension development. The last time I heard from him, he had been accepted into Brown University Medical School.
The other Michael did not get help to build his underlying skills.
He was intelligent and street smart and his mom and his teachers thought that he could do better if he wanted to.
The last time I heard from his mom, Michael was 14 and had been picked up for shoplifting. When asked why he did it, he said, “Well at least it’s something I’m good at.”
I’m not saying there is an excuse for shoplifting, but Michael’s poor grades in school were misinterpreted as a choice. It was assumed that he could do better if he wanted to. He couldn’t. He had lagging underlying skills that were getting in the way. So unfortunately, he gave up on school and chose shoplifting - something he felt he could be successful at.
Forty years ago, I started Stowell Learning Center to help children and adults with learning disabilities and dyslexia learn to read and develop the underlying skills that would allow them to work to their potential.
Because of decades of clinical evidence and the growing brain research that shows how remarkable the brain is and how it can change, I feel very confident in saying that struggles associated with dyslexia and learning disabilities can be eliminated.
Our population at the learning center has grown to include students on the autism spectrum and other neurodiverse learners.
While I won’t claim that their challenges will be eliminated, I know that changes are possible and things can get easier. Because every brain - neurotypical, neurodiverse, diagnosed, not diagnosed, relies on these underlying core learning and processing skills to function optimally.
Thank you for taking this journey with me today. We’d love to hear from you if you have questions or comments.
At Stowell Learning Centers, we help children and adults eliminate struggles associated with dyslexia, learning, and attention challenges by identifying and developing underlying skills at the root of the problem.
We work with students both onsite and remotely. If you’d like to speak with someone about your child, visit our website or give us a call.
Thanks for listening.
