All the Brain News That's Fit to Print

by Craig Pohlman, Ph.D., Director of Mind Matters at Southeast Psych 

For anyone with an interest in education, learning, and building success for all students, I highly recommend the new book, The New Science of Teaching and Learning, by Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa. Tracey is a pioneer in the fledgling field of Mind, Brain, and Education Science. In 2008 she convened 26 learning experts to sort the facts from the myths about the brain and learning. Astonishingly, this esteemed group concluded that just a handful of ideas about the brain and learning are actually well-supported by research. The rest are “neuromyths.”

In her book Tracy describes the “facts,” including that human brains are as unique as faces in terms of organization and that brains are dynamic and constantly changed by experience. In other words, each morning we wake with a different brain than the one we had when we went to bed.

Some of the “neuromyths” include that water is brain food (just because the human body is composed of a large amount of water doesn’t mean that chugging agua boosts learning) and that right-brained learners are more creative (the whole right- vs. left-brained thing hasn’t fared so well in the research).

Not only does this book have great content, but it is also a great read. Tracey takes all of this important information and crafts a compelling argument about how we should use science to make better decisions about teaching and learning.

Tracey is a Professor of Education at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador where she directs the Brain, Mind and Educational Development Institute and the Evaluation and Academic Excellence Center. She is also polyglot who is rearing her children to speak multiple languages.

Bottom line- cool book by a cool author.

Craig Pohlman is the author of How Can My Kid Succeed in School? and Revealing Minds, and co-author of Schools for All Kinds of Minds.

Book Signing Cancelled for Tonight Due to Illness

Dr. Pohlman's appearance and book signing at Joseph-Beth Booksellers at Southpark has been cancelled tonight due to illness. Check back soon for information about when it will be rescheduled.

Meet the Author of How Can My Kid Succeed in School

Dr. Craig Pohlman, author of the acclaimed book How Can My Kid Succeed in School? will be speaking this Thursday night, October 22, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers beside Southpark Mall in Charlotte.

The presentation starts at 7pm and will include a presentation, a chance to ask questions, and the opportunity to get your book signed. It's a practical book that is must reading for parents or teachers of any child who is struggling with school.

Many of the Southeast Psych staff will be there, as well. It should be a good night and we hope to see as many of you as possible there.

How Can My Kid Succeed in School? Arrives in Bookstores

Southeast Psych's own Dr. Craig Pohlman's latest book, How Can My Kid Succeed in School? is now in bookstores and, of course, you can order it online at amazon.com. What you will find is a highly practical book for both parents and teachers who want to help a child who is struggling with school.

The book helps adults understand their child's unique strengths and struggles, explains how to gather clues for understanding the child's learning profile, and gives practical strategies for helping each child.

Dr. Pohlman in an internationally-known, well-respected neurodevelopmental psychologist who has conducted or supervised thousands of assessments with struggling learners. This terrific book is a tremendous resource for parents and educators and should be on their must-read list.

You can see Dr. Pohlman in person on Thursday, Oct. 22 at 7pm at Joseph Beth Booksellers at Southpark Mall in Charlotte. He'll be giving a presentation and signing copies of the book. Come out and meet him.

How Can My Kid Succeed in School? Part Four: Improving Listening Skills

by Dr. Craig Pohlman

Editor's note: This is the fourth of a four part series from Dr. Pohlman's new book, How Can My Kid Succeed in School? which is now available at amazon.com and will be in bookstores next week. Today, he shares ideas for parents who want too improve their child's listening skills.

Receptive language is the capacity to understand word sounds, word parts, whole words, sentences, and large chunks such as stories and lectures. It is not the same as reading comprehension. We use receptive language to understand when listening as well as when reading. The act of reading involves a lot of skills related to decoding text, making it a more complex activity than listening. On the other hand, listening is more closely aligned with receptive language in many ways.

If your child has limited receptive language, providing practice with listening skills may be necessary. Since listening doesn’t also require decoding printed text (which may also be problematic for your child), it provides more targeted practice with comprehending word meanings, sentence structures, and extended descriptions and arguments. You can provide listening comprehension practice for your child in a lot of ways, the most obvious being to read to him. You may need to pause after every paragraph or so to pose questions about what you just read, make predictions about what will come next, or contemplate how the material connects to other things (personal experience, other books read, movies, and so on). Audio books also provide great listening experiences; you (or somebody) should know enough about the content to converse with your child about it.

Television is a fact of life for most families, and fortunately it does provide a lot of educational programming about a range of topics. Also, high-quality entertainment shows, sports, and news can challenge your child’s receptive language (much of this content can also be accessed via DVDs or downloaded from the Internet). Many Web sites convey information via audio, but often with visual supports such as photos and diagrams which can help your child make connections (obviously supervision is necessary when kids are online).

Regardless of the form listening practice takes, here are some pointers for getting the most out of audio media for your child:

• Push the edge of the envelope in terms of difficulty. You don’t want to overwhelm your child with material that is too advanced, but you do want to make it a little challenging.

• If possible, leverage your child’s interests. If your child is into sports, suggest watching one of the many shows devoted to analysis of games and player profiles.

• Talk with your child about the material (before, during, and after). Stretch your child’s receptive language by asking questions (you might have to act naïve about the subject), modeling the forming of connections (“You know, this reminds me of . . .”), and asking for a summary (“So what were the main reasons they thought this happened?”).

• Expand expressive language at the same time. Take advantage of opportunities for your child to improve things such as summarizing, describing, explaining, and supporting an opinion.

• Be transparent about what you’re doing. You want your child to better understand his mind, and discussing the rationale behind the tactics you’re using will promote that understanding.

Dr. Pohlman conducts and supervises learning assessments for Southeast Psych and is available to present on learning issues. Feel free to contact him at 704-552-0116 or speakersbureau@southeastpsych.com. His new book is due out in stores Sept. 28th and can be ordered online now. Watch out for a special announcement about Dr. Pohlman's upcoming appearance at Joseph Beth Books in Charlotte.

How Can My Kid Succeed in School? Part Three

by Dr. Craig Pohlman

Editor's note: This is the third of a four part series from Dr. Pohlman's new book, How Can My Kid Succeed in School? which arrives in bookstores in two weeks. Today he talks about two kinds of questions kids ask when learning that may give parents insight into what might be going on with their child.

How-to Questions

Kids often fire some other kinds of questions at parents when doing their homework, and each can provide clues about their learning. Two such question categories are how-to and what’s up? How-to questions relate to the various procedures and rules that kids need to access when doing their homework. Asking these questions is a tip-off that long-term memory isn’t working well, especially if the student can readily use the procedure or rule once prompted (which suggests he understands it). Examples include the following:

• How do I borrow a number?
• How do you spell summary when there’s more than one summary?
• Do you put the period before or after the quotation mark at the end of the sentence?
• How would I solve for n in this problem?

Sometimes, however, how-to questions result from something other than memory problems, such as how well the student can reason through a problem. Applied reasoning refers to the use of logic to solve problems and tackle challenging situations. A student who asks a lot of deep how-to questions, such as, “How would I figure out the amount of water in this canister if this cube is submerged in it?" or “How could I show that climate change is affecting this habitat?” likely has shaky reasoning.

What’s-up Questions

These often reveal shaky understanding of the material and of important concepts. They are often accompanied by complaints such as “I don’t get it!” or pleas such as “Explain this to me.” What’s-up questions take many forms, but they all boil down to a less-than-firm grasp of a concept. A concept is a set of critical features of a group of ideas or objects that define that group, determine group membership, and connect it to other groups. Some of the many concepts taught in school are freedom of speech, integers, and symbiosis. Here are some example questions that relate to concepts:

• What’s the difference between a cold-blooded animal and a warm-blooded animal?
• What does extremism mean?
• Can I just add the tops and bottoms of these two fractions?
• Aren’t a phrase and a clause pretty much the same thing?

Dr. Pohlman conducts and supervises learning assessments for Southeast Psych and is available to present on learning issues. Feel free to contact him at 704-552-0116 or speakersbureau@southeastpsych.com. His new book is due out in stores Sept. 28th and can be pre-ordered online now.

How Can My Kid Succeed in School? Part Two

by Craig Pohlman, Ph.D.

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from “How Can My Kid Succeed in School?” by internationally-recognized psychologist, Dr. Craig Pohlman, who has recently joined Southeast Psych and directs our Assessment Center.

How a kid goes about doing his homework can be very revealing. A lot of parents are dismayed when their child seems to just leap right into tasks without first contemplating the best course of action. Courtney, a sixth grader, fits this bill. Her mother describes her as a “bull in a china shop” when it comes to homework (and incidentally, most other times when a methodical approach is called for as well). When Courtney gets to a math word problem she seems to start scribbling calculations before she even finishes reading it. Sometimes she answers almost all of questions in social studies assignments before realizing that the directions wanted her to do something else. But above all, writing is a disaster. The notion of starting with an outline is totally alien to Courtney, who would much rather just get to writing; as a result, many of her great ideas never make it to the page or get hidden in a disorganized stream of sentences.

Courtney has a weakness in an aspect of her attention called production control, which is like the brain’s dashboard; her mind doesn’t have a reliable speedometer, meaning that she jumps into tasks too quickly, without first coming up with good plans. Dashboards also provide many signals to let you know how well things are working (such as a low fuel light and a door ajar signal), but Courtney’s production control doesn’t monitor her work very effectively. Her mother gets exasperated by all of the “careless” mistakes she makes in her homework. For example, she might miscalculate in math or misspell a word, but when prompted to take a second look, she readily finds these kinds of errors and fixes them.

Tate is a fourth grader and his dad says that homework “takes forever to get done.” The reason? Tate is very susceptible to distractions and daydreaming due to his attention processing control. His dad frequently reels him back in with little reminders like, “stick with it, Tate” or “come on back, dude!” Getting homework done in a reasonable amount of time usually requires staying focused on the task at hand.

Everyone, including adults, experiences difficulty with concentration from time to time. Even if you’re working in a place with few distracting sights and sounds, your thoughts may wander like Tate’s. For some people, processing control does not do a sufficient job of resisting “mind trips” and avoiding distractions. If given a choice between finishing homework and spending time on recreational activities, most kids would choose the latter; but kids with weak processing control are pulled even more strongly than other kids toward fun stuff and away from work.

A kid can have a hard time staying on task for reasons other than weak attention, however. Active working memory is what we use to mentally juggle or manipulate information. Monika frequently gets lost in the middle of homework tasks. As a seventh grader, much of her work involves multiple steps (such as when solving a math problem) or numerous components that have to be attended to simultaneously (such as all the aspects of writing a book report). In other words, she has to handle a lot of moving parts and her parents see her losing track of a lot of them. So she may get lost in the middle of a math computation and complain that she is confused about what to do next.

Dr. Pohlman conducts and supervises learning assessments for Southeast Psych and is available to present on learning issues. Feel free to contact him at 704-552-0116 or speakersbureau@southeastpsych.com. His new book is due out on Sept. 28th.

How Can My Kid Succeed in School? Part One

by Craig Pohlman, Ph.D.

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from “How Can My Kid Succeed in School?” by internationally-recognized psychologist, Dr. Craig Pohlman, who has recently joined Southeast Psych and directs our Assessment Center.

Brady is a 2nd grader who’s having a very hard time learning to read and spell. He’s great at art, enthusiastically listens to stories, and absorbs information he hears (he loves learning about reptiles). He is picking up math skills with no trouble and is a natural when collaborating with peers. Both adults and kids really enjoy being around him, but his reading troubles are starting to deflate him. In 1st grade he dashed out the door every morning to get to school. Now he asks if he has to go, and longs for weekends and vacations.

Cetera is Brady’s classmate, and she also struggles with reading and spelling. Though not quite as social as Brady, she belongs to a very close threesome of friends. She loves sports, especially soccer and basketball. Cetera also is starting to have some trouble with math. Like Brady, she picks up information very nicely when listening, though sometimes she has a hard time making connections with her prior knowledge. Lately, she’s been complaining to her mother about how hard school is for her.

How can Brady and Cetera’s learning problems be conquered? How can their parents and teachers get them to enjoy school again? Figuring out what is causing their reading challenges is the first step. The good news is that their parents and teachers can gather lots of information, analyze it, and then select targeted learning strategies. But they have to know what to look for and how to make sense of what they find.

Like all students, Brady and Cetera leave plenty of clues about their learning. For example, Brady has a hard time coming up with rhyming words. When he reads aloud he drops out word sounds (like reading “block” as “bok”) and inserts letters that shouldn’t be there when he spells (like spelling “candy” as “canku”). Cetera struggles with memory for several types of information, like math facts and prior knowledge.

Brady’s clues add up to the conclusion that word sounds are very confusing to him. He doesn’t clearly process small sounds like /f/ in “leaf,” which means he has a hard time connecting sounds with letters (like /f/ with “f” or “ph” or even “gh”, as in “cough”). In contrast, Cetera processes small word sounds just fine (for instance, she can rhyme and move sounds around to change words). As it turns out, she has a hard time remembering which sounds go with which letters.

By the way, both Brady and Cetera probably would meet criteria for a learning disability (or, more specifically, a reading disability or dyslexia). But labeling them wouldn’t do much good. That would be akin to claiming that a child with stomach pain has something like Abdomen Soreness Disorder- a label that is pretty useless when it comes to a treatment. Labels tend to oversimplify students by not capturing unique characteristics, like the differences between Brady and Cetera. Also, labels don’t convey strengths and interests, like Brady’s affinity for reptiles or Cetera’s listening comprehension.

Brady and Cetera are experiencing unique challenges. Understanding the specifics of those challenges helps identify what they need in order to be more successful readers. For Brady, the key is to bolster his capacity to process word sounds. Cetera, on the other hand, needs drill in matching sounds to letters in order to solidify this information in her memory banks. By working in these specific areas, they can make strides in their reading and feel successful again.

Dr. Pohlman conducts and supervises learning assessments for Southeast Psych and is available to present on learning issues. Feel free to contact him at 704-552-0116 or speakersbureau@southeastpsych.com. His new book is due out on Sept. 28th.