Monday, June 4, 2012

A Great Tailor Cuts Little

One of the great frustrations of dealing with exceptional kids can be their apparent lack of balance. Not literal balance (although that can be a common enough case), but an apparently imbalanced set of aptitudes and abilities. Of course we all have our strengths and weaknesses, an exhausted and exasperated parent sighs, but why are hers so extreme?

This is an illusion. The extreme divergence in an exceptional kid’s skill set is not an imbalance but a striving towards balance. When a physical system is balanced at the cellular level, we call it homeostasis. Exceptional kids are capable of a homeostasis too, but it’s not to be found in the classical educational approach, which strives to remediate their weaknesses through direct instruction. Rather, we need to train our teachers to follow the Taoist maxim:

A great tailor cuts little.


Maybe things are getting a little abstract. Let me give you an example:

I took my first job as a Language Arts and Reading teacher at a private school for exceptional kids in 2001. Fresh out of undergraduate with a degree in Philosophy and literally no experience with, nor ideas about, working with kids with disabilities, I was in over my head. The most glaring problem I could see was that the kids with dyslexia could not read.

This seemed to be something worth investigating further, so that summer I took courses in a Reading Remediation program called Sounds and Syllables. It was a classic “Orton-Gillingham” based program that approached the “dyslexic problem” thus: these kids are not making the sound-symbol connection in written language. They must be trained through direct instruction, in a multisensory manner, to make those connections. And so we “therapists” would methodically take our students through the alphabet, teaching them each phoneme in an auditory, visual, and written manner. And this, we supposed, would teach them to read.

Before I go any further, let me say that we always made progress. These programs do work, and if a student goes diligently through the requisite two to four years of language therapy, he may catch up to grade level and even go on to be a conventional reader.

But she is not supposed to be a conventional reader.

Let me repeat that: she is not supposed to read conventionally.

Recent brain scans of successful dyslexic readers revealed something extraordinary. “Normal” readers learn to read out-loud first, then we “mouth” the words, then we “hear” the words in our heads, and finally the words no longer “make” any sounds in our minds. But on a PET scan, they still do. On a PET scan of a normal reader, reading lights up auditory sections of the brain. This is because, although the words are now “sub-vocal”, we still process written language in much the same way as we do spoken language.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The study looked at two types of dyslexic readers: those who had mastered reading and those who hadn’t. The PET scans of those who had not mastered reading tasks looked highly similar to those of “normal” readers: lots of activity in the auditory parts of the brain. But the scans of dyslexic readers who had become proficient readers showed something entirely different.

Dyslexic adults who had become proficient readers had no activity in their auditory cortices. None. Instead, reading for them activated the temporal and frontal regions of the brain, associated with analytical and nonverbal thought.

They had become proficient readers not by direct instruction of what was “easy” for the rest of us, but by developing those areas in their brains which were capable of reading.

There is a lot of literature out there on this topic. These articles are a good place to start: Oxford Journals and this article by Abigail Marshall.

Think of the implications of these findings. The successful dyslexic readers out there have learned to read in a different manner than the rest of us. Not better, not worse. But different. Visual. Abstract. Logical.

These kids are aware of their shortcomings. We do not need to attack their deficits head-on with intensive remediation to try and get them to think “like us”, in conventional manners. We may have success in doing so in the classroom setting for a time, but they will either revert back to their own ways or spend the rest of their lives trying to read the way they were taught rather than the way that makes sense to them.

The development of these exceptional minds does not need forceful intervention. It needs delicate guidance and gentle encouragement. It needs careful, thoughtful assessment of their strengths and an iron-clad commitment to helping them develop those strengths. Because no matter how much we attack their weaknesses in school, to be successful in life people need to exploit the strengths they’re born with. As teachers, it is our duty to refine and encourage those strengths.

A great tailor cuts little.

A closing thought:

So much of special education is dedicated to remediation of weaknesses and shortcomings. We write stacks of IEPs that explain how we are going to address students’ areas of weakness.

Why don’t we take a different approach?

Why don’t we acknowledge that a lot of these kids are going to struggle in certain areas as adults, too. Why can’t that be okay? As the adults, the mentors, the guides in their lives, can’t we spend our time helping them find a place in the world where their strengths will be of the most advantage?

The idea of an evolutionary niche is that a species develops the traits that will help it best survive in a given environment. As educators, it is our job to help students compare their traits and their environment and find the place where those best intersect. It’s what they’ll be doing for their whole lives, anyway.

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