Episode 79: The Freedom Scholar Podcast: Eliminate Learning Disability Accommodations – Kami Wanous

LD Expert Podcast with Jill Stowell
The Freedom Scholar Podcast: Eliminate Learning Disability Accommodations!
Kami Wanous

 

Kami Wanous: Welcome everyone! I am so excited because today we're talking about breaking free of learning disability accommodations. That doesn't mean we just put them aside and deal with whatever we have—it means we're getting to the root of the problem. And that's what I love about Jill Stowell. She is absolutely an expert on helping families and helping kids break through their learning disabilities so that we can handle that area by the root problem—not just saying, "Oh, let's add an accommodation on top."

Those are great and everything, but it's really stressful sometimes when we have a lot of kids doing different things. And then we have to make sure that, oh, we have to find this resource and this thing and some accommodation, rather than getting to the root of the problem. I mean, because really, what do you want for your kids? Do you want them to not be stressed about their own journey? And later on in their life, they don't have to deal with these learning disabilities? That would be so amazing!

You guys, the more and more I really learn about how to overcome learning disabilities, I am so empowered and feel so amazed and hopeful that we don't have to do it like this. This is really something that's just put on us by, you know, it's just what we have—it's just part of who we are. But we can do things that can eliminate that. And that's what Jill is—all about. Because Jill's passion is making sure that everyone knows that you can overcome those learning disabilities. And I absolutely love that. The hope there is so amazing!

So she's going to share with us all about this today. I'm super excited, and she's going to give you a resource to get a lot of information and guides to help you get started along the way. So Jill, thanks so much for joining us today. I'm super excited to have you with us. Can you share a little bit about your background and why you love helping people overcome learning disabilities so much?

Jill Stowell: Wow, thank you, Kami. That was a great introduction to what we do! You know, I started out as a teacher, and I taught all kinds of things—bilingual and regular ed and gifted and special education—which I loved. Learning disabilities, though, were the thing that was so frustrating to me as a public school teacher.

I had all these bright, cool, fun kids who struggled with learning. And my job was to find ways to help them be successful in the classroom, which usually meant giving them extra support or accommodations or something. But it never really addressed the real problem. And so year after year, my kids would get passed along to the next grade, but they still had the challenges.

Eventually, I just felt like that could not be right for these kids who were—you know, they were bright. A lot of times they were in the upper half of the class in terms of intelligence, but in the lower half of the class in terms of performance. And it just didn't seem right.

So I started looking for the people around the country who were doing the research in learning and the brain and attention. And what I found was that everybody had their own little niche. But when you put all that together, what you realize is that there are all these underlying skills that support learning. And if any of those skills are weak or inefficient, it's going to cause learning to be more difficult for you.

It's just been a long journey, and I still love it because it's truly changing lives. And I've been in this business long enough that some of our kids have grown up to be very successful adults and lifelong learners. And that's what we want for our kids.

Kami Wanous: Absolutely! Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that's so true. And hey—we are on the same page. We are raising lifelong learners. That's what we all want, for sure. And giving them the ability to not feel like we're constrained by these learning challenges that we have is so freeing. And it gives them so much confidence, right? To be able to go out and learn whatever they want to learn, whatever they need to learn, whenever they can.

So I love that. Can you share with us a little bit about how does someone go—like, how do we even know if our child has a learning disability or learning challenge?

Jill Stowell: So if your child is really resisting something and you think, I know he's smart enough to do this, but they're just really resisting—they're crying, they're fighting you, they're procrastinating, taking a really, really long time to get it done—those are symptoms.

And attention... now, in a homeschooling situation, where you might be able to be more one-on-one, maybe you don't see the attention quite as much. But certainly in a group—even a small group—kids who are struggling, the very first thing you're going to see is attention. And so it's pretty quick for teachers and doctors to think, Oh, that's attention deficit. They can't pay attention to that.

But the truth is that if you are not processing what you're hearing, or you're not able to make sense out of those symbols on the page, or visually it’s just disorienting and doesn’t feel organized to you, you’re going to struggle to pay attention to it—because the brain isn’t able to quite put it together.

So the things that we often hear are, Oh, he's lazy. He just doesn't want to do it. He procrastinates. He's not interested. He's bored. But when you're thinking those things or seeing those things with your kids, that’s a good time to just kind of say, Hmm, I wonder what's underneath? Because our kids really do want to do well.

Kami Wanous: Yeah, they do. I love that. And it makes so much sense because I always say that you have to understand where the trip wires are—where the little signals are that show you either that they're not ready for this skill yet or that there's something else going on.

And I love how you explained that it’s really not just the brain, you know—or not just attention deficit necessarily. It might be, but it might also be that there's a readiness issue.

I can remember my son staring off into space, or just going, I just... gosh, I really—I don't know. I just can't. I'm so sorry, I can't get this math right now, after I've explained it 20 different ways. Right? And I'm kind of frustrated because I'm like, This is not hard. He should know this. He's super smart.

And then I'm thinking to myself, Gosh, when he said that, I couldn’t imagine somebody being sorry that they don't understand something. Like, that's... no, no, no—stop. We're stopping. That's not it.

And for him, it wasn’t necessarily that he didn’t get it. He just wasn’t ready for that skill. We had just reached the point where he was like, My brain’s not ready for that one yet. Because he got it like a month and a half later or something, you know? Or he just had to kind of process that. And it was so interesting.

But I love that you pointed that out because a lot of times we can think, Oh yeah, laziness, or just lack of motivation. There's always some underlying thing—and it's usually low level of learning due to whatever it is.

Jill Stowell: Right, exactly. Yeah. So I love that. And addressing that root cause is really our specialty.

So we look at learning on a continuum that builds kind of like a ladder. If you think of academic and social skills at the top of the ladder, well, those rungs underneath are all different kinds of processing or learning skills that support being able to work up there at the top.

At the very bottom of the ladder, you have what we call core learning skills. These are the visual and motor skills that allow us to move through space comfortably, to hold a pencil, to move our eyes across the page, to sit in a chair. They're all those skills that develop through movement so that we become comfortable in our own skin and we don’t have to put any attention or energy into how we're going to use our bodies.

So that’s the core learning level. And if there are challenges down there, then you're going to have kids that seem like they have ants in their pants, they're looking all over the place, their handwriting might be really poor or really hard or not spaced well on the page, have trouble just sitting in a chair, organizing their stuff. So a lot of things sit in that core learning level.

Then the next level up on the continuum is what we call processing skills—so auditory and visual processing. Not your hearing or your seeing, but how the brain actually perceives and thinks about the information that comes in through the eyes and the ears.

Then language processing, processing speed, memory, attention, focus—all of those things sit at that processing skills level.

And then the next level up is executive function—so higher-level thinking skills that allow us to reason and problem solve and think about different options, navigate, and manage our own attention and behavior.

So what happens for our students is, when their parents call and say, My child is really struggling with attention in school, or, My child just is struggling to learn to read, or isn’t comprehending, or whatever the symptom is that they're seeing, we do some assessment to take a look at these underlying skills—as well as the academics—and just see what is it that's getting in the way that's keeping this child from working as comfortably and easily as they could at the top.

Because if you have some of those underlying skills that are weak or inefficient, it’s kind of like having wobbly rungs on your ladder. And so it just makes everything harder. It’s not that they can’t do it—because by golly, a lot of them gut it out and really spend hours and hours and sweat blood to do it—but it’s so much harder than it needs to be without that solid foundation.

Kami Wanous: Absolutely. I love this. And just—you know—if you're listening to us on podcast, we pulled up Jill’s Learning Skills Continuum. I absolutely love this. She just explained the first three rungs on the ladder, and I absolutely love this because then you take—you get to the root of the problem—executive function, processing skills, or core learning skills—and then you apply it, right, to the basic academic skills.

And then we go higher than that with content areas and higher learning, refining all of those things. So I love that, because it really shows us where schools focus, which is on the academic and all of those higher learning things, but they don't focus on the core—like how we process things.

And I love that, because it really shows us that we can go back to the beginning. I talk about that a lot with the phases of learning and how we're missing the core phase a lot. And when we just jump into academics and we're doing direct instruction a lot, we’re missing that bottom foundation of our house—or the wobbly rungs, like you said, which I love.

So you guys, that's really, really great. You can get that Learning Skills Continuum graphic in the newsletter that Jill is going to allow us to get. It has all kinds of guides and everything. I'll let her tell you about that in a second, but you will have access to that.

So it’s really, really amazing to watch the different levels of where your kid's at and then know that this is not normally taught in school—so that's why we have to go back and redirect. I love that.

Kami Wanous: So Jill, when you see a kid with, let's say, some processing skills problems, what do you usually do? How do you get kids through that?

Jill Stowell: So it depends on what the issues are, right? But the kinds of things that we're doing to develop those underlying skills don't really look like school in most cases.

If we're working kind of globally on processing skills—and especially a lot of visual kinds of processing skills—a lot of the work that we're doing looks kind of like drills and games. There are different kinds of manipulatives. We use the metronome to really push their processing speed and attention.

But what it’s doing is it's building those skills that now they have the ability to apply. It’s like, Oh—the brain has this. The brain is now ready to apply it.

With auditory processing—which is a huge factor in learning challenges and dyslexia—we do sound therapy. So we do a program. There are a number of sound therapy programs, and we’ve done a number of them. The one that we primarily use now is The Listening Program, developed by Advanced Brain Technologies.

And really what it’s doing is it’s training the brain to process this wide range of sound frequencies. The human brain can process a really wide range of frequencies, but if you're not quickly enough or accurately enough processing those frequencies, then you're going to miss information.

It would be kind of like—if you can imagine—well, this is the best example: it’s like a bad cell phone connection. There’s nothing wrong with your ear, there’s nothing wrong with your phone, but when the signal is kind of coming in and out, you get part of the message, but you don’t get the whole thing.

And that then impacts your ability to pay attention, to comprehend. And when it comes to sounds that we’re missing, it's going to impact your ability to listen when other people are talking. You might misinterpret what they say, miss what they say.

And with reading—it’s a phonics-based language—so if we're not processing all of those sounds, it does impact reading as well, even though I know it seems like it's all visual. But it's not.

So we use sound therapy, which is specially recorded and engineered classical music to stimulate the brain to hear all of those different frequencies in sound. And once the brain can do that—wow—you get so much better of a message. You can pay attention better, you can communicate better.

And then we take that and do active listening training to build the comprehension, the articulation, the reading—all of language—whatever is going on.

Kami Wanous: I love that. That’s such a great example. I love the cell phone example because it’s such a mis-messaging. You’re getting the gist—like, Oh, I got the gist of what you said, but I didn’t get the full message.

Or you’re not communicating properly in a way of what you’re hearing, which in turn creates a problem with output as well, right?

Jill Stowell: Right.

Kami Wanous: So yeah, I love that. That really makes a lot of sense. It's so fascinating. I totally geek out on some of this stuff—it’s super awesome. So in terms of thinking—and I'm just thinking as you're talking—like, I'm thinking to myself as a parent, Gosh, if my child has been struggling so much… how—it seems crazy to think—it seems La La Land to think that he can just all of a sudden not have these… I mean, of course I know it's not all of a sudden, but that at some point he won't have this problem, and he will be able to overcome it. Like, how do you—what are… what—give me an example of somebody that you've worked with that actually has, you know, overcome their learning disability. You know, I know it's every day for you, but—

Jill Stowell: It’s so fun and amazing for me when I think about the kids, because we've been doing this for so long. I was talking about auditory processing, so I'll tell you about Michael.

He—I think they came to us when he was going into eighth grade. His mom was a school administrator, and so, you know, she was carrying around a whole lot of guilt that she couldn't figure out how to help him. She was a great mom, and she was just there for him, you know? But she couldn't change it for him.

And here's this wonderful, smart, nice boy who was literally failing every single subject in school. What we found was that he had an auditory processing problem, and that was really impacting his comprehension. So we worked with him on developing the auditory processing and then putting all of that into comprehension skills—developing those comprehension skills.

He went on to become a straight-A student. And then he was valedictorian of his class. And then he got accepted to Brown Medical School and is now a physician. And this was a kid who was failing in eighth grade—and in fact was going to be kicked out of his private school.

Then once that underlying roadblock of the auditory processing was removed, it opened the door for him to do what he had the potential to do. And so we just have—you know, it's been such a long time—we have thousands of stories like that in all different areas.

Kami Wanous: That's so wonderful. Oh my gosh. And I can totally see—you know, having been a classroom teacher myself—I see those kids that are, you know, really bright, really bright, but they're failing. And you're like, What is the problem here? Just lack of effort? Right? Because we don’t know what's happening.

And it becomes a self-confidence problem, right? Because they think that they can't. And so then we have to—then their level of learning drops, because they're like, Well, if I can't, then what's the point? Right? Then, whatever.

Jill Stowell: Exactly.

Kami Wanous: I don't—I don't like—they sort of secretly say to themselves, Well, I must not be very smart. In fact, I just can't tell you how many parents have actually made the call to us because their child has come home and said, I'm the dumbest one in the class.

I mean—it just—they aren’t. But because they're so smart, that's the only conclusion they can come to, because everyone else can do it. And they should, and they can't.

Jill Stowell: Yeah.

Kami Wanous: Yeah, I hear that all the time from parents as well—from their kids. Yeah, my kid just said that the other day. You know, they just said, I'm just not very smart. And I'm like, Don't say that! That’s making me so sad. So in thinking about that I – I want to just touch on why is it – and you've been doing this for so long – why is it still that we have, you know, I've told you before and if you guys haven't listened to the couple of episodes I did with Dr. Robert Melo on brain balance, listen to that. So after talking with, you know, these amazing experts about this stuff and you've been doing it forever, why is it that we still think that it's something we have to live with forever?

Jill Stowell: That's a really good question. I mean, this is actually 40 years for me—and 40 years ago, I was trying to put this message out there.

It is hard to change something as big as public education, and it's hard to change those big beliefs. And in the schools—I mean, we have to remember—the teachers are dealing with so much, so I really am not ragging on the schools. Their job is to teach all this knowledge and curriculum, and they believe that kids are going to come to them ready to do that.

Unfortunately, research tells us about 30% of students have some skills that are missing or inefficient that are getting in the way of that. And you know, it’s interesting, because the research has been out there for a long time in all different areas—not only that these factors (memory, attention, auditory processing, visual processing) are so critical to learning, but also that the brain can change.

The neuroplasticity research is now pretty old—it’s been around a long time. We know that the brain can change with targeted training. But it still seems to be kind of a mystery to most people that it can. That these things really can essentially be eliminated. And kids can go on and learn easily and comfortably—as they should.

Kami Wanous: I am just absolutely so hopeful. For everyone that I talk to, I’m like, Oh! Oh, she needs Jill! Oh, she needs—I got this. I got this! Right? And I’m like, Oh, this is so great! But it’s so amazing to have that hope.

And then also, I think it’s such an important message for us to get out there. Because in school—and my experience in school, I’m sure yours was the same—was that special education is not equipped to do the things that you do on an individual basis.

Even though they get the most money per student, they actually have the least amount of skills as far as—well, I’m not dragging on the special needs teachers, but the system as a whole is bogged down in paperwork. And so it doesn’t allow for those teachers to get out there and actually get the tools and the skills that they need to be able to help these kids.

It’s just fascinating to me, because it becomes such a part of who they are, that when they get to me in high school, it was—it became just their identity. And it was so sad. Just a lot of apathy around it—Well, whatever, you know?

And the school system is not designed—I’ve talked to parents all the time—so homeschooling is a place where you can do that. Although, you do work with a lot of public schoolers as well, right?

Jill Stowell: We do. We actually work with children and adults. So we just kind of—you know, we have a big population of students: public school, private school, homeschool.

And with our homeschoolers, of course, that's a really great situation because the parents are learning. They're able to help reinforce, or they're even able to just work with us, you know, in kind of a consulting basis and actually provide the therapy for their child.

So, yeah. However we can get it out there, we want to do it.

Kami Wanous: Love it so much. So Jill, how do we actually work with you? How do we get in touch with you? And I know that you're based out of California, but how do we—do you work with people online? Do you work with people in other ways? How do we get in touch with you and get help?

Jill Stowell: So our website is Stowell Learning Center. And if you go there, you can schedule to just talk to someone about your child—it's free.

We work with—of course, locally, we have four centers and we work with students on-site—but we also work with people around the world remotely. And we think it's ideal if someone's going to be a remote student to actually come to Southern California to one of our centers and do the testing, be there for a week so that they can do the assessment, do some intensive training, and we can start to really educate the parent, work with the child, get to see what their learning style is like.

And then they go home and either work remotely or work as what we call a “distance learner,” where the parent is actually working with the child, but we are coaching the parent. That is possible if they don't come out as well. We do remote screenings and things like that.

But, yeah. Ideally we would like kids to come—but it works either way.

Kami Wanous: Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, it's like a—I always talk about the family reset. That is a family reset right there. Getting some new information, really getting down and relearning some things. That is so awesome.

And I know that you have—I talked about it before—the newsletter. And tell us about the things that we can get in the newsletter. Because I know it's not just an email. What do they have access to?

Jill Stowell: Right, so that’s the portal to get into the parent resources section of our website. It’s stowellcenter.com/newsletter. And you’ll get a newsletter that will have podcasts and just resources on it that are helpful to parents.

But once you go into that on our website, then you get into that parent section. And there are all kinds of strategies that you can implement—in reading, math, spelling, language, behavior, attention, organization, studying—whatever.

There’s a lot of strategies. You have access to my book, At Wit's End: A Parent's Guide to Ending the Struggles, Tears, and Turmoil of Learning Disabilities, and lots of guides for helping you recognize: does my child have an auditory problem, or a learning disability, or dyslexia?

And it even includes different accommodations. So there’s all kinds of stuff that we just keep adding to, for parents, to make it easier to understand and work with your child.

Kami Wanous: I love that. It’s not your average newsletter, people! I love this. This is a gateway to a lot of resources and information.

So thank you so much for joining us today, Jill. I'm so happy that we're getting this message out there—to empower parents to really get lifetime help and to really change the perspective of what's possible for your child.

And so I love this. This is such a great, important topic, and thank you for sharing with us today. I'm so happy that we get to get in touch with you and we're good.

I encourage everyone: if you have a child with learning disabilities—or you even think that they might—reach out to Jill and see if that might be something that's going on. You don’t have to deal with the stress and the frustration of trying to, you know, think that they're not smart or deal with trying to find resources for accommodations. You can just completely break free of that—eventually.

So thanks so much, Jill, again. And you guys, this is such great information. I'm super excited about this. And I know that you are going to just have a weight lifted off your shoulders, which is just so beautiful. I feel like that—and we’re not even right there!

So thank you so much, you guys. I will talk to you again next week. Bye bye!

Jill Stowell: Thank you, Kami.