Understanding Dyslexia and the Reading Brain in Kids...

MINDSHIFT

Understanding Dyslexia and theReading Brain in Kids

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At a recent talk for special education teachers at the Los Angeles UnifiedSchool District, child development professor Maryanne Wolf urgededucators to say the word dyslexia out loud.

“Don’t ever succumb to the idea that it’s going to develop out ofsomething, or that it’s a disease,” she recalled telling teachers. “Dyslexiais a different brain organization that needs different teaching methods.

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It is never the fault of the child, but rather the responsibility of us whoteach to find methods that work for that child.”

Wolf, who has a dyslexic son, is on a mission to spread the idea of“cerebrodiversity,” the idea that our brains are not uniform and we eachlearn differently. Yet when it comes to school, students with differentbrains can often have lives filled with frustration and anguish as they,and everyone around them, struggle to figure out what is wrong withthem.

Diagnosing Dyslexia

“Oh, she just hasn’t caught up yet,” is what ZantheTaylor recalled her daughter Calliope’s teacherssaying throughout first and second grades. Calliope,now 12, was in the slowest reading group at herBrooklyn private school, but teachers assured Taylor

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that Calliope was very bright and would catch upshortly.

In truth, Calliope wasn’t catching up. As peers beganwhizzing past her in reading, Taylor became moreanxious and worried. Their collective frustrationlevels — both Calliope’s and her parents—soonreached a breaking point, especially after they’d hireda private tutor to help speed up her reading in the fallof second grade.

“She’d have massive tantrums over homework,”Taylor said. Calliope would be happy and fine allafternoon, but when it came time to do homework,she would refuse to begin. “She would scream and cry,then I would scream and cry,” Taylor said. “I oncecrumpled up the whole assignment and yelled, 'Whatare we going to do?' ”

Then one night, after four months of intensive (andexpensive) tutoring, Taylor’s husband, Matthew, wastalking to Calliope’s tutor on the phone when shementioned the word “dyslexia.” A light went on.Taylor recalled that up to that point, everyone hadbeen very careful not to say the word, but the tutorsuggested that it might be time to have Calliopeofficially evaluated in order to receive more targetedinstruction.


An intensive two-day battery of tests provided thedata that Taylor, by this time, already knew: Calliopehad dyslexia. Although she was very bright anddisplayed above-average social skills, without intenseand specific intervention, she would never “catch up”in reading.

Taylor now knows that an overly emotional responseto homework is common in those with dyslexia:Calliope didn't know why she couldn't read either.Now with a diagnosis and intensive intervention,Calliope is entering seventh grade with her peers.She's able to accomplish all the work, although sherequires more time. "I always disliked the words'learning differences,' " Taylor said. "But the more Iget to know about this, the more I think it's true."

This kind of anxiety and frustration can be largelyavoided, said Wolf, who is also director of the Centerfor Reading and Language Research at TuftsUniversity and author of "Proust and the Squid: TheStory and Science of the Reading Brain." She andcolleague Martha Denckla designed a simple test toquickly know whether there is a problem in thereading circuit very early on, as early as kindergartenor first grade. Called the RAN/RAS test (RapidAutomatized Naming/Rapid Alternating Stimulus),


students are timed on how fast they can name letters,numbers, colors and objects.

RAN/RAS or a comparable evaluation is one of thesingle best predictors that there’s something differentin how the brain is putting together letters with theirname, which is like a mini-version of the later readingcircuit. While RAN/RAS cannot diagnose a readingproblem, it does provide educators with a red flag,suggesting that students may need further evaluation.

In "Proust and the Squid," Wolf writes that if she weregiven five minutes with all teachers and parentseverywhere, she’d want them most to know that“learning to read, like Red Sox baseball, is awonderful thing that can go wrong for any number ofreasons.” For students accused of being stubborn ornot working to their potential, often neither is true:Children with dyslexia need immediate and intensiveintervention to connect the pieces of the readingcircuit.

The Science of Reading and Dyslexia

The act of reading itself is anything but natural.Human brains weren’t designed to read: There is no“reading center” of the brain, and there are no“reading genes.” Instead, in order to read, each brain


must fashion new circuits between parts originallydesigned to do other things, like retrieving the namesfor objects. These new circuits must not only combinemany processes from different areas of the brain toform a specialized circuit just for reading -- in orderto become a fluent reader, the circuit also needs torun lightning-fast, nearly automatic.

Wolf has spent her career studying how the brainreads and, in some cases, how it doesn’t. “Because wehave no pre-programmed wiring for reading [in thebrain], we have to do something very different,” Wolfsaid. “What the brain does have -- which is fantastic --is the ability to make new circuits based on newconnections among its already-there parts. So, when Isaid [in the book] we were never born to read, that isthe absolute truth. We weren’t. Each child has to do itby themselves.”

Since each brain must learn to read from scratch, asWolf put it, “many things can happen along the way.”Dyslexia, originally called word-blindness, is aneurobiological condition describing the failure toread words and letters affecting an estimated 10-20percent of schoolchildren, depending on whom youask.

While classified as a “learning disability,” dyslexia is


not a brain disorder or a disease, nor is it flippingletters backward. Often the failure to read is in directopposition to a brain’s cognitive ability, leavingparents and teachers stymied when an otherwiseintelligent child can’t spell words they’ve seen athousand times, or put a sentence together.

Dyslexia, Wolf said, is the result of a brain that’sorganized in a different way. In many children, this isbecause the right hemisphere tries to muscle thestrengths of the left, specifically at tasks that are thedomain of the left, like many language functions.When the reading circuit is being dominated by theright hemisphere, it takes longer for the informationthat goes to both hemispheres to get together.

In the dyslexic brain, there are several major areasthat could develop problematically. (While there is nosingular form of dyslexia, there are several profilesthat appear most prominently.)

* Phoneme awareness, or knowing the soundsthat correspond with letters and words, is theNo. 1 deficiency in the dyslexic brain. “Ourlanguage is made up of 44 sounds called phonemes,”Wolf said. “English is trickier because we havephonemes that can be expressed in different letters,and we have letters that can stand for different


phonemes. It’s an irregular language, and that adds tothe complexity, but the underlying issue for many, butnot all, children is problems in the basicrepresentation of those phonemes.” Wolf said thereare multiple areas of the brain contributing to ourability to represent phonemes, and that many dyslexicchildren have issues with developing phonemes, aswell as knowing which sounds are assigned to whichletters.

* Fluency, or getting the reading circuit towork together quickly, is the second-biggestissue. “Children can have perfectly representedphonemes, but can’t get the phonemes together withthe letters, because there’s a speed-of-processingissue,” Wolf said. “And part of that may well bebecause that right hemisphere is taking a longer timeand trying to do what the left hemisphere usuallydoes, in getting that circuit to work very fast together.That can mean not just the phonemes aren’trepresented very well. It might also mean that lettersaren’t getting represented very well, and that thecircuit is not becoming automatic.”

* Comprehension is the third but no lesscrucial issue to reading. “After making letters andsounds work together, and getting the whole circuit to


work in time, then words have to be connected tomeanings and functions of grammar,” Wolf said. “Ittakes explicit work to get the visual representation,meaning, sound and grammatical function allworking together, and that’s what dyslexic childrenmust do.” Wolf said that often this kind of dyslexiadoesn’t show itself until the child is older, third gradeand up, when a child switches from learning to read toreading to learn.

“Some of our children can read words, but read themlaboriously,” Wolf said. “And by fourth grade they’re amajor failure and have never become fluent.” Many ofthese children are bright and have compensated up tothis point by memorizing words, but have neverlearned to read fast enough to comprehend whatthey’re reading.

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Understanding that these developments are nothingmore than brain differences that can be aided withsystematic and explicit instruction, Wolf said, is a


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large but necessary step for everyone involved:students, parents and teachers. When children findthey’re unable to read or read with much difficulty,they often believe that it's the result of a bad orbroken brain. Some teachers may also unwittinglyhold beliefs that reading happens for all children by akind of osmosis.

Wolf insists that three decades of research has shownthat neither are true, but keeping the truth aboutdyslexia hidden or misunderstood only hurts thestudents, their parents and the educators tryingdesperately to help them.

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MINDSHIFT

Empathy Is Tough to Teach, But IsOne Of the Most Important LifeLessons


(Katy David/TED-Ed)

Dr. Brené Brown has become famous for her speaking and writing aboutvulnerability, worthiness, shame and the other important emotionsrunning underneath daily life all the time. One theme she returns to overand over is the importance of cultivating empathy, a very differentreaction than sympathy.

Dr. Brown says empathy consists of four qualities: the ability to take theperspective of another person, staying away from judgment, recognizingemotion in others, and communicating it. She defines empathy as"feeling with people," and notes that it's a "vulnerable choice" because itrequires a person to tap into something personal that identifies with thestruggle of another.

Children have opportunities to learn empathy from their parents, but


also from their teachers and peers. Reading good literature can be apowerful way to develop empathy, as is studying history or being presentwith a friend on the playground who is having a hard time. Empathy isnot found in many official school standards, but it could be one of themost important qualities to develop in young citizens who will go on tobe successful actors in a complicated world.

Brené Brown on Empathy

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