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You
are here: It's Not How Smart You Are....It's How You Are Smart!
by Lynn O'Brien
Twenty six years ago I was 26 years old and a newspaper featured me in an article titled "Women With a Purpose." I can still remember cringing in reaction to the radical-sounding opening paragraph. Was leaving public school teaching, and completing a masters degree to start a new business really all they were making it out to be? From a conventional perspective, maybe it was, especially for a woman at that time. But I wasn't interested in staying within the frame at that stage of development. I was a passionate educator and I wanted to make a difference for those who learned differently.
Ask any special educator about what got them started in the field and there is most always a good story. Mine is pretty straightforward, for this purpose at least. Born orthopaedically handicapped, my childhood years brought many lessons of how it feels to be different. I resolved at an early age, maybe around eleven years old when my problems were corrected, that I would work with handicapped children and influence them in the positive directions that had been imprinted on me by my parents. If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that we all need to hear good things about ourselves, and I thank my parents to this day for their nourishing words. They helped me grow into a confident woman.
In my undergraduate years I encountered an unheard of bunch of students who had specific learning disabilities, an invisible handicapping condition. Anyone could work with kids with mental retardation or the orthopaedically handicapped, I thought, but these kids represented a sort of frontier for me. No one knew much about them. I was hooked.
For three years I had my own self-contained class of kids with learning disabilities. They taught me a lot. So much in fact that I had to leave public school teaching. My decision to go was fueled in part by the demand for private tutoring and by a principal who repeatedly called me into her office. "Keep those kids in your classroom with your door shut. I do not want them going into the regular classes for any subjects." In years to come, the practice for which I was scolded would be written into public school law (PL 94-142 and IDEA), and come to be understood as mainstreaming and inclusion.
One week after school closed for summer break, I started a one-woman educational center, Specific Diagnostic Studies, Inc. for the purpose of testing and tutoring children with learning disabilities. Within a year, I pulled in three assistant teachers, and began a steady roll which to this day hasn't stopped. Our clientele quickly shifted from those with learning disabilities to general educational needs, and eventually privileged private school students. The primary reason for this is that I employed the diagnostic prescriptive model that is fundamental to educating a child with a learning disability: Find out what a kid needs and teach it. When you know how to determine where the holes are, they're easier to plug. This involves assessment, and discovering a student's cognitive and academic assets and liabilities. In special education jargon, this information becomes the student's blueprint, or Individual Education Plan (IEP). Instruction is then able to focus on the needs of each individual; it becomes more personalized. I am warmed to the soul to see that developing an IEP for each student has become one of six major recommendations from the 1996 Breaking Ranks report, commissioned by the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the Carnegie Foundation. Personalizing education is key to reform. The way I've always known this, is keeping foremost this thought: kids don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Someone recently commented to me "I can't believe you've been in the same job for 26 years." My response was, "I haven't. Every day is so incredibly different. And, it isn't a job to me. This is not work. It's my life." What have been some of the more influential experiences? Teaching another person, one-on-one, of any age, was my initial springboard into appreciating individual differences, learning style, language, processing, the role emotions play, etc. Testing became and remains even more of a passion; it is truly an art and a science. Analyzing and synthesizing lots of pieces to build a case for diagnosing a learning disability, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, giftedness, underachievement, or whatever may be, is a process that is renewed with each new person I test. Working with preschoolers through adults, again in an individualized setting, has taught me an extraordinary amount about human development. Why do some people get stuck in the learning process? And what is it that enable others to learn easily? When is a learning problem a reflection of maturation, and not a neurological misfiring? And what about the epidemic of this decade, ADHD? Is it a reflection of the "net" generation? The questions are many, and the lessons come from many directions. I have a hard time sorting and keeping up. No wonder our kids are disorganized, who isn't? What does that mean anyway? One thing is for certain; anyone in this field has a moral and professional obligation to keep up with the explosion of information that tells us about how people learn. Brain based information is fascinating, enlightening, and contains some answers for us all. In a recent editorial in Education Week (December 18, 1998) entitled "Is the Fuss About Brain Research Justified?", David Sousa contends that learning about how the brain develops, learns, and organizes itself will ultimately help teachers and students work smarter, not harder. I couldn't agree with him more. I'd add that we need to bring parents and those in teacher preparation programs into the loop. Everyone serves to benefit.
It is my experience with testing and knowledge about what comprises intelligence that has led me to a variety of projects that include devising a longitudinal evaluation process for the Smithsonian Early Enrichment Program, designing, administering and supervising a testing program at the post-secondary level for diagnosing learning disabilities, and completing my doctoral dissertation on the effect television has on children's intelligence. It has been an honor to write and appear in a video about learning styles for the National Association of Elementary School Principals, as well as participate in a national PBS presentation on "Critical Issues in American Education." Lecturing at all levels, publishing and managing a diverse staff of forty educators and psychologists has taught me more than I am even conscious of.
It is my conviction that children today learn differently from their teachers and their parents and this has direct bearing on why a majority of students don't test well. In 1990, I did a yearlong research project that examined the relationship between learning preferences, age, gender, and cultural orientation (See On The Beam, Spring 1991 for article). 6000 students in grades 5-12 demonstrated on a test that they preferred a hands-on approach to learning rather than from lecture or talking (the auditory channel), or from reading or writing (the visual modality). The test, the Learning Channel Preference Checklist (LCPC), is a self-rating, 36 item test that provides reliable data about the way an individual learns new information most naturally and effectively. This knowledge is more powerful and carries the potential for more change than anyone realizes, especially as this country becomes more frenetic in trying to address the current issues surrounding educational assessment, accountability, and standards. By 2000, 49 states will administer their own statewide standards test. The scramble is on: how do we prepare students to take the test?
This is a question I have dealt with for many years. In a private learning center, such as Specific Diagnostics where clients are paying private dollars to increase their child's test scores, I have had to provide solutions. In 1990 parents and principals were approaching me in droves to ask what they could do to help their kids, especially middle school kids, get prepared to take tests. Could I put together a test-taking course, they asked? You know, a kind of quick fix that would show them how to get organized and get better test scores? Concurrently, I was testing lots of students and noticing patterns that were somewhat confounding. Why were so many kids looking and acting like they had a learning disability, and yet, my test data said they didn't? These kids demonstrated a collection of behaviors associated with underachievement: waiting until the last minute, not reading much, taking too many breaks, studying with music on, and having a high need to move around. These are only a few behaviors I began to piece together as associated with a learning style that is more naturally based in more right hemispheric processing of information. Students who were struggling with attending to a linear, sequential lecture, or keeping their eyes open when reading a textbook had nothing wrong with their brains or intelligence. But their test scores sure made us think something was wrong. And worst of all, these kids felt stupid and began a downward spiral. When students identify their natural learning style and begin to incorporate new ways of studying that match their style, their grades improve, and so do their test scores.
I wrote Strengthening of Skills (SOS) as an 18 hour program for teaching haptic students how to study. Knowing how regular students benefited from my diagnostic-prescriptive theoretical basis in tutoring, I employed a pre- and post-level test to define the level of skills students came to the program with and what they gained when they left. I also wrote a learning style test to incorporate into SOS which later began standing on its own as the Learning Style Preference Checklist (LCPC). While both pieces taught the unique needs of students who demonstrated alternative-type learning behaviors, SOS and the LCPC work exceptionally well for all students. When a school gives the LCPC to their staff and parents there are even more lessons to be gained.
I propose that the single most important and yet simple thing a teacher or parent can do for students is to give them the knowledge of what their learning style is and how to use it. At the very core of trying to help each person feel, act, and test as intelligent is the need to focus on self knowledge, which means developing intrapersonal intelligence. The bar can be raised, and it will not be due to external forces such as clamoring about standards. Change comes from within and applying what we know about learning style is key. When individuals understand more about themselves, they are able to produce at higher levels. Brain research substantiates that we are all infinitely intelligent and there are lots of ways of being smart. Let's identify learning style as it is relative to the current concept of intelligence. Otherwise, we are wasting the talent of a great majority of this generation.
Visit Dr. O'Brien's website: Specific Diagnostics, http://www.way2go.com
Phone: 301-299-3550
E-mail: specificd@erols.com
Copyright © April 1999 New Horizons for Learning, all rights reserved.
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