LD Expert Podcast with Jill Stowell
Here’s What I See: Looking Beneath Learning Struggles in Bright Kids
Jill Stowell
Jill Stowell: You sit down with your child to do homework and what do you get?
“She’s wiggling all over the place. She slides out of her chair. She gets up. She leans back. She rocks.
She starts talking about all kinds of random things - anything to get you off track and keep from doing her homework.
You just want to say, “Sit still! Focus!” but that’s like telling someone who’s really agitated to “Calm down!” It doesn’t work.
Here’s a simple tool that you can try today.
Before sitting down at the table to work, have your child go get their water bottle and take a drink.
Then, have them do cross crawls. In a standing position, have your child alternately touch one hand to the opposite knee. Do this to a slow count of 20. When they're done, have them close their eyes if they can do so comfortably, and take a deep breath in through their nose and a slow exhale through the mouth. Do 3 deep breaths like this.
Then calmly have them sit down and put their name on their paper.
Here’s why this works:
Walking forward neurologically calms the nervous system - we’re just built that way. Getting their water bottle gives them a destination, and water hydrates the brain for quicker connections and thinking.
Cross crawls activate both hemispheres of the brain and gets them working together for clearer, more effective thinking.
The 3 slow breaths with long exhales, release tension and settle the nervous system.
Having your child put their name on their paper gets them started. It’s something they can do successfully and it gets them in motion.
This 90-second routine can make a world of difference.
The behavior that we see is just a symptom or a clue to what’s really going on under the surface.
When I see a wiggly, avoidant child, I don’t see a child who’s trying to be difficult.
I see a nervous system that’s working overtime just to stay upright and organized.
In this episode, we’re going to take some of the behaviors parents see every day — wiggling, avoidance, slow reading, exhaustion — and connect them to what’s really going on underneath. I’ll walk you through what those underlying skills are, what it actually looks like to develop them, and why addressing the root of the problem can make such a meaningful difference for kids who are bright but struggling.
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.
When I talk to parents about underlying skills that are making learning harder than it needs to be for kids, they seem to get it. It bothers them that their bright child seems lazy or unmotivated and they already kind of know that there has to be something else.
What’s harder to picture is what that “something else” could be and what it would look like to actually train those skills.
Today, I want to make that concrete. We’re going to look at common behaviors associated with dyslexia and learning challenges, and talk about what we might do in sessions to address what’s underneath those behaviors.
As I go through this episode, you might recognize some behaviors that remind you of your child or your student. If you have questions, please put them in the comments on whatever platform you’re on. We do read them and we do try to respond to all questions.
When students struggle in school, poor attention is very often the first thing that parents and teachers notice. You might see kids
- Slouching or
- Sliding down in their chair
- Leaning on the desk
- Constant shifting or rocking or popping up and down.
It’s easy to think, “They just need to focus.”
But here’s what we often see underneath that behavior.
Many of these students still have early reflexes that never fully integrated. If these reflexes are firing when they shouldn’t be, they can interfere with sitting upright, so the body keeps moving to compensate.
When babies are born, they come with a set of automatic movements called primitive reflexes.
These reflexes have really important functions. They help babies get moving in the first months of life, respond to their environment, begin developing visual skills and organizing their nervous system.
Things like turning their head when touched, or grasping automatically, or pushing against the floor all come from these reflexes.
As a child grows, those reflexes are meant to fade into the background as higher parts of the brain take over moving with intention and control. In other words, the brain kind of “graduates” from reflex-driven movement to thoughtful, purposeful movement.
For most children, this happens naturally.
But for some, those early reflexes don’t fully integrate.
When primitive reflexes are still active past early childhood, they don’t disappear — they interfere.
It’s like having an app running in the background that keeps interrupting everything else.
The child isn’t aware it’s happening.
And they’re not choosing it.
But it can show up as:
- Difficulty sitting still
- Even falling out of their chair
- Slouching or laying their head on the desk
- Losing their place when reading or copying
- Poor handwriting or sloppy work
- Fatigue during schoolwork
From the outside, it can look like:
- Inattention
- Poor focus
- Immaturity
- Even defiance
But underneath, it’s a nervous system working harder than it should.
When we work with students, we’re not trying to “override” those reflexes with willpower or reminders to focus.
Instead, we use specific, intentional movements to help the nervous system do what it was designed to do — integrate those reflexes and become internally organized so that body control, regulation, sitting in a chair, navigating their space, coordinating eye and hand movements- all those kinds of things can all happen automatically without extra effort or thought.
If you could take a peak into our sessions you might see a student walking on a low balance beam or laying on the floor doing variations of Angels in the Snow. If you’re watching this, here’s a little video of a student doing “The Rocker” a reflex integration exercise. In a session, you might see balancing on one foot or rhythm and timing exercises with stomps and claps.
You might look at that and think, “Well that doesn’t look anything like school. How is that going to help my child pay attention and learn to read?”
You’re right. It doesn’t look like school, but all that movement is building physical and mental organization, self-awareness, and control. These are the building blocks that attention, higher learning, memory, and even executive function and social skills sit on.
Our sense of space and time develops through movement and without that, we don’t understand measurement in math, we can’t organize or manage our things and our schedule, we invade other people’s personal space.
Without the visual skills developed through early reflexes and movement, we can’t effectively move our eyes across the page for reading and writing.
John Ratey, M.D., author of A User's Guide to the Brain says, "Mounting evidence shows that movement is crucial to every other brain function, including memory, emotion, language and learning. Our 'higher' brain functions have evolved from movement and still depend on it."
That is such a great quote. It’s so true.
Children with learning and attention challenges are often very inflexible. They’re disrupted by any change in routine. They have only one way of doing things because they don’t have the physical and mental flexibility to feel secure trying something in a different way.
The mental flexibility and adaptability needed for ease in learning, social relationships, and just general functioning begins with movement and what we call the core learning skills level of the learning skills continuum.
Retraining core learning skills can help learners of any age develop higher brain functions and mental control.
I remember one summer we worked with a little guy - I’ll call him Chase- who was 7 years old. He was really sweet and compliant, but he was struggling with everything, especially reading, in school.
Chase had had surgery as a newborn and had been immobile for several months. And those first few months are really critical for integrating primitive reflexes, which happens through movement.
Chase did an intensive summer program. He worked with us 2 hours a day for 10 weeks doing reflex integration, Core Learning skills training, and beginning reading development. It was fascinating to see that for Chase, as soon as his physical system and visual skills started to organize, everything else, including reading fell into place. He went into second grade the next year ready to keep up with his peers.
As a part of our intake process, we ask parents what they see that concerns them. Many parents report that their child
- needs directions repeated,
- struggles to follow multi-step instructions,
- reads slowly
- doesn’t understand what they read,
- or gets overwhelmed in noisy environments
We do assessments to confirm what we’re seeing, but that tells us the brain is likely having to work too hard to process sound.
This may also be the case for kids who speak too loudly, or who have difficulty keeping friends because they speak in a harsh tone of voice or misinterpret the intent of others.
We recommend a home listening program for these students using one of the auditory training programs developed by Advanced Brain Technologies.
At home, the student listens to specially engineered music through headphones for 15 - 30 minutes 5 days a week. It seems very simple, and it is, but it is also a powerful tool that stimulates the auditory system in a way that other kinds of therapies can’t.
The listening that students are doing at home is passive listening. The music is doing the work of helping to regulate and energize or calm the student.
It helps the brain process sounds in words and language more completely and accurately so that in sessions we can begin to develop articulation, verbal fluency, reading, spelling, and comprehension skills using active auditory training.
If you were to watch an active auditory training session, you would see the student and clinician using over-the-ear headphones and speaking into microphones doing specific discrimination, fluency, and reading or comprehension exercises.
Amplifying the clinician’s voice assures a clearer message for the student while they are developing their auditory skills. Hearing their own voice through their headphones helps students self-monitor their clarity, tone, articulation, accuracy, and fluency.
The high frequencies in sound are energizing to the brain and support motivation for learning.
As the brain is able to process a greater range of sound frequencies through their home listening program, the audio-vocal training, or the active auditory training, is done on the microphone helps the student’s voice to acquire those sound frequencies as well.
This is important because it allows the student’s own voice to become an on-going stimulus for the auditory system and to be an energizer for the brain. With improved auditory skills, kids and adults become easier to listen to and understand, which supports confidence and friendships.
It’s fascinating to me how the brain works and how everything works together. I remember a 9 year old student, I’ll call him Evan, who could not read; he was very uncoordinated, and he couldn’t make or keep friends.
His mom made sure he was very consistent with his home listening program. In sessions, we had him doing Auditory Stimulation and Training, or AST - Reading and Spelling. This is one of our auditory training programs that combines home listening with active auditory training in sessions.
As Evan’s auditory system supported him better, he began to pay attention. His language got dramatically clearer, and he started to read. I’ll never forget the day his mom shared with me that he had made a friend. He’d also learned how to swim, and had written her a note that he slipped under her door! She was really excited about that because she could actually read it. When Evan finished with us, he was maintaining friendships and learning on a level playing field with his peers.
When a child struggles with processing skills, the signs usually show up in very everyday ways.
You might see a child who needs directions repeated — even though you know they were listening. Or a child who starts an assignment but loses track of what they’re doing halfway through.
You may notice reading that’s accurate but slow, or exhausting, or hard to remember. Or a child who understands a concept when you explain it, but can’t apply it on their own or do it under time pressure.
Some kids take much longer than their peers to get work done — not because they’re distracted, but because their brain needs more time to process information. Others struggle to shift gears — like moving from one task to another, or adjusting when something changes.
You might also see frustration, avoidance, or emotional shutdown — especially after a long school day — because working that hard all the time is exhausting.
These aren’t motivation problems. They’re processing challenges. And when we strengthen the underlying processing skills, learning becomes easier, faster, and far less draining.
Processing skills training can be very challenging but fun. It looks like brain games and drills.
Learning isn’t just about knowing the answer — it’s about how efficiently the brain can take in information, organize it, and respond - so, many of our processing skills activities use a metronome to help students synchronize attention, processing speed, memory, and motor output all at once - which is exactly what school demands every day.
If you’re watching this, I’m going to give you an example of a processing skills activity. I’m showing a printed list of color words, like green, yellow, blue but the words are printed in different colors of ink. Now, I’m going to turn on a metronome and if you’re watching, I want you to read these words on every other beat.
- Stop. Now, instead of reading the words, I want you to continue on, but say the color of the words on every other beat.
If you are a reader, then reading the words was probably easy for you. When you had to switch to saying the color of the words, your brain had to consciously override the automatic task of reading and switch symbols systems to say the color of the word.
Even though you know the colors, was that harder?
This activity is helping you think quickly, be mentally flexible, and maintain concentration.
Processing skills training consistently helps students become more focused, more efficient, and less fatigued — not because they’re trying harder, but because their brain is processing information more smoothly, with less effort.
Ahmed went all the way through college with good enough grades to get into medical school. He came to us after failing his first semester at med school. Ahmed was dyslexic and like many dyslexic learners, he was very bright, persistent, and able to find ways to gut it out and get through.
When we tested him, we found that his reading was accurate only to a 6th grade level and his processing skills were inconsistent at best.
Ahmed did an 8-week intensive program of processing skills training and Auditory Stimulation and Training with an emphasis on Reading and Spelling.
And then, He successfully returned to medical school for the next semester.
When we look underneath the behavior or the struggles that we see, we almost always find skills that can be developed — not flaws that need to be managed. And when those underlying skills are strengthened, learning takes less effort and kids, teens, adults… can finally show what they’re capable of.
At Stowell Learning Centers, we help children and adults move beyond learning and attention challenges — including dyslexia — by strengthening the underlying skills that make learning easier.
When those skills get stronger, everything changes — reading, writing, focus, confidence, even the stress around school.
If you’re listening and thinking, this sounds like my child, well, you’re not alone.
You can learn more, explore free resources, or connect with one of our learning specialists at stowellcenter.com.
You can also follow us on social media. We’re @stowellcenter on all platforms.
If this episode encouraged you, please like, subscribe, and share it with another parent or educator who needs to know that real change is possible.
