Is it a Reading Disability or a Neurodevelopmental Learning Difference?

The Flatline of Reading Achievement

Y’all (say it like Kelly Clarkson) I’ve been teaching children, teens, and adults to read for over thirty years. I’ve seen reading programs come and go and come back again. Reading Recovery, Read Naturally, Orton-Gillingham, Orton-Gillingham reimagined as Directed Reading, Structured Reading, and in my day (aging myself mightily with this one) Whole Language with Dick and Jane.

Though schools invest billions into reading programs, why aren’t students making gains? As demonstrated by this graph showing reading trends from 1992-2019, reading progress in the US has flatlined and gone down slightly.

https://nces.ed.gov

How is Reading Achievement Measured?

The NAEP is responsible for measuring progress in reading.

What is the NAEP test?

According the the government website, the NAEP test is a common measure of student achievement. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only assessment that measures what U.S. students know and can do in various subjects across the nation, states, and in some urban districts. NAEP is given to a representative sample of students across the country and is often referred to as “the nation’s report card.”

Playing the Blame Game for Underachievement in Reading

There’s a plethora of articles discussing the reasons for underachievement in reading. No one is really sure why scores aren’t going up or what should be done about it, however, I have an idea that may be worth putting out here into cyberspace.

A Classroom Full of High School Students who Couldn’t Read

When my biology students couldn’t read well enough to comprehend their textbooks, I went searching for answers. I ended up sitting in the public library after school perusing the education section. Back in the day (cripes dating myself again!), there wasn’t the internet search bar to type a few keywords into and like magic all your questions were answered.

Image by Christopher Klein from Pixabay

Information back in the day was hard to come by and it took a lot of time to find answers to my one pressing question.

Why can’t my high school students read?

One possible answer came to me in the most unsuspecting book, The Slow Learner in the Classroom by Dr. Newell Kephart. This book was written in the 60s. Our library was woefully out of date, but I didn’t let the yellowed pages deter me. I grabbed the book from the shelf of similar dusty books, sat down, and began to read.

Could reading failure actually be tied to the body rather than just something gone astray in the brain? Novel concept.

A Decision and Brain Fog

I decided I needed to get more training in teaching reading so I drove two hours each way to Fresno State University where I spent two years of my life learning about reading theory and how to teach reading. The fog. Have you heard about the fog in Fresno? You can’t see a darn thing. So many nights after class, I couldn’t find my way to my car let alone the road. The two-hour drive turned into a three- to four- hour white knuckle drive home.

Image by free-photos from Pixabay

The fog that surrounded me crept into my brain as well. The more courses I completed, the more confused I got. Where was Dr. Kephart in my courses? Was there no merit to the physical side of learning to read? When I’d bring this up in class, the blank stares from the other students and my professor intimidated me.

I doubted myself. The peer pressure to conform to accepted reading theory won out. I didn’t ask any more questions for the remainder of my time that weren’t aligned with traditional teaching methodology.

Then my Head Started to Clear

When my first child was born with cognitive and developmental delays, I knew teaching her to read was going to be the most challenging task of my life and yet the most important. If she was going to remain unable to speak, she had to have a way to communicate.

Making a very long story short for the sake of time, my professional role as a reading coach and my personal role as my daughter’s case worker, came together in an unsuspecting yet fascinating way. As my daughter completed each of her occupational therapy sessions focusing on sensory processing, I’d take tidbits from the therapy sessions and try them out on my unsuspecting students during our reading lessons.

I replaced chairs with gym balls, used deep pressure to the hands to help with writing, employed heavy work strategies for students have difficulty focusing, and even placed a couple mats on the floor for a few minutes of core work for those students showing poor postural stability.

My vocabulary changed , and I found myself using words like vestibular, regulation, and proprioception.

My daughter was able to learn thanks to her intensive occupational therapy sessions. My stalled and unresponsive students were nudging forward and ultimately reaching their reading goals, making more progress than they ever made prior to my discovery of sensory processing and neurodevelopmental strategies.

My Reasoning for Why our Readers Aren’t Making Progress

I’ve learned so much in these last thirty years and here’s what I know for sure…our students are stalled because we aren’t paying attention to the sensory processing and neurodevelopmental issues holding them back.

Reading is a team sport, meaning it takes physical and mental skill to read well, just like play excelling in a sport. I use an Energy Expenditure Model to explain how keeping batteries charged throughout the day is an essential part of coaching players.

Let’s say you’re coaching a baseball team, and you don’t know your players very well. How will you coach them effectively? The same goes for the players on your team.

Throughout my years of teaching, patterns emerged. We tend to get hung-up on dyslexia. Dyslexia is only one type of player on your team. There are eight other types and probably even more.

In baseball, we have a lot of different coaches as well. The same is true in schools. For children to be successful readers, we have to call into the game all the coaches. These include the entire support team. Everyone is a reading coach!

Start Observing the Players on Your Team

I’ve developed the Student Profile Observation Tool (SPOT) to help you get to know and observe the different players on your team. Once you’ve gained a fresh perspective from using SPOT, you’ll be a little annoyed with me because you’re going to want to know, “So what do I do now?”

After Observation, Then What?

You take my Power Up! for Literacy course where the nine players on your team are discussed in detail including the coaching activities you’ll want to use with each type of player. This innovative course melds the best of occupational and physical therapy with neuroscience and reading theory. Every player profile is underpinned by research.

After completing the course you’ll be able to SPOT your readers and your coaching will be SPOT on. See what I did there? In education, nothing’s valued more than an acronym that you can’t remember what it means.

Download SPOT

Student Profile Observation Tool

Coaching Your Players to Victory

Had I been able to attend a course years ago like this Power Up! course, I would have been so far ahead of the game. I’m excited to include both my tribal knowledge and solid theory in this course. This is a unique, one-of-a-kind course that improves your coaching skills so your team are winners at the game of reading.

Bottom Line About the Flatline

The body learns ten times faster than the brain and forgets ten times slower (according to a PBS special on the brain). If you want to change the brain, the fastest way is to change the body.

According to Dr. Gupta’s new book, Keeping Sharp, what we do to the body, we do to the brain. I’ve been witnessing this for over thirty years as I’ve challenged students’ brains to wire by creating academic lessons that always include some form of neurodevelopmental movement.

Only by valuing the importance of wiring the brain through the body and viewing reading as a team sport that requires physical and mental agility will the graph of reading achievement begin to rise.

Power Up!

Let’s get our players off the bench and into the game.

Let’s change the way we teach reading so that no student remains on the bench. No matter what your role is in school, see yourself as a reading coach.

Take the Power Up! for Literacy course, implement the activities into your lessons, and let’s start the upward trend. Together, we can change how reading is taught.