“Approaches to explaining developmental dyslexia must account for both the difficulties and the enhanced abilities that are typical of people with developmental dyslexia. All the proposed strengths… relate in some way to seeking out the unknown, often at the expense of exploiting known information. A useful framework for tying together these observations is cognitive search, which involves a trade-off between exploration–exploitation.” — Helen Taylor and Martin David Vestergaard In an extraordinary article in Frontiers in Psychology, two Cambridge University scholars have put forth a paradigm-shifting concept of dyslexia that integrates over a century of research from diverse perspectives. It is a tour-de-force that might help society put dyslexia in its proper context. From the paper (the simple term “dyslexia” is substituted for developmental dyslexia […]
Actor Stephen Graham [Premium]
Actor Stephen Graham has been described as one of the most talented actors the United Kingdom has ever seen. Yet, he almost didn’t get a chance at his breakthrough role in Snatch when the director Guy Ritchie, asked whether he had come to read for the part. Stephen had just come along to support his friend who was trying to get the job, but when Guy found out that he was also an actor, he encouraged him to give it a try. Stephen told him that because he was dyslexic, he couldn’t do a cold read. I don’t know whether he knew that Guy Ritchie is also dyslexic – but fortunately for Stephen, Guy asked him to improvise the scene instead and he completely smashed […]
Readers Who Don’t Write
Brock and I were recently talking with our friend, Dr. Nicole Swedberg about how she came to focus in writing for dyslexic students when so many focus almost exclusively on helping students with reading. It was after finishing her advanced degree and training in several top structured literacy programs that she started working with a student who had finished many such programs and was a remediated reader. Although reading was now on grade-level, he couldn’t write! As an older student, too, so much of schooling was funneling into writing, that he was developing secondary problems like anxiety and work avoidance. REMEDIATING THE READING BUT NOT THE WRITING As she soon discovered, this student was the tip of an iceberg. It’s surprisingly common for schools […]
Julia on Dyslexia Screening and NeuroLearning App with Dr. Brock Eide
Impassioned high school student, Julia de Montagnac, interviewed Dr. Brock Eide (Dyslexic Advantage co-founder) about his creation of the Neurolearning Dyslexia Screener. Julia is on a mission to inspire self-esteem in dyslexic elementary school students through art. Check out her website at ColoringConfidence.com Bookmark Please login to bookmark ClosePlease login to access.
Dyslexia as an Evolutionary Advantage
Dyslexia is not a neurological disorder or even an impairment, but rather a concession for having cognitive strengths in exploration, big-picture thinking, creativity, and problem-solving that have contributed to human survival amid changing environments. This insight comes from a new study published in Frontiers in Psychology that finds an association between the learning difference and “an explorative bias.” — Additude Magazine, on the recent paper by Taylor and Westergaard Cambridge scholars Helen Taylor and Martin David Vestergaard are shaking up the world with their article, Developmental Dyslexia: Disorder or Specialization in Exploration? In just a week, the article already had more views that 98% of all Frontiers articles. I’ve begun to a do a deep dive in our Premium magazines, but one of the reasons […]
Question: What about Dyslexia and Reading Comprehension? [Premium]
Q: WHAT ABOUT DYSLEXIA AND READING COMPREHENSION? Answer: For many older and certainly remediated dyslexic people silent reading comprehension may be strong and unimpaired. Students who still struggle significantly with decoding will obviously have trouble with reading comprehension, as might be expected. But after the intensive work of decoding is overcome, reading comprehension weaknesses may become more difficult to understand. Dyslexic students who are partially or perhaps fully remediated may have difficulty with certain types of text, especially if they involve long and uncommon words. Sometimes these readers may only have trouble with college-prep or college-level reading due to additional challenges like the need to understand complex grammar. But students with dyslexia plus some other factor – whether its ADHD, low working memory, and a […]
Creative Productivity [Premium]
“…the progress of civilization, can, in many ways, be charted by the actions of history’s most gifted and talented contributors to the arts, sciences, and all of their areas of human performance…” — Joseph Renzulli, UConn Three Ring Conception of Giftedness In a clarion call for society to recognize the importance of developing creative productivity in young people, Joe Renzulli makes the point that “the most efficient lesson learners are not necessarily those persons who go on to make important contributions in the realm of creativity.” This point is undoubtedly true for many creative dyslexics who have made and are making important creative contributions to the world. He talks about “schoolhouse giftedness” which he also calls “test- taking or lesson-learning giftedness” and “creative […]
Teaching Punctuation [Premium]
Learning punctuation can be difficult for many reasons – the challenges of reading, auditory and visual processing problems, symbol confusion, and working memory overload; but usually teaching punctuation explicitly and in manageable bits using multisensory and memory associations can help students master the rules and patterns. The symbols involved in punctuation are simpler than the range of marks found in math. When students are still learning, use color coding and allow students to work with a cheat sheet that has examples when they carry out their punctuation exercises. Holly at Teachstarter has a number of cute ideas for teaching punctuation. Giving the markers personalities personalizes the symbols making it easier to remember in what contexts the symbols are used and to distinguish them from each […]
Is There a Natural Way to Write for Dyslexics?
Writing is so difficult for people with dyslexia, it’s a reasonable question to ask whether certain types of writing might come more naturally than others. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND PERSONA WRITING As highlighted in Philip Schultz’s example and in his book Comforts of the Abyss, writing with a strong narrative voice, whether it’s your own voice and experiences or someone else’s, is a style of writing that comes naturally to many dyslexic people. It might be because of strong personal and emotional memories and personal responses to learning about the lives of others; it may be that the feelings and imaginings are difficult to get down on paper, but once they are there, the words may become alive to any reader fortunate to read them. […]
Rescued by Ruby: Netflix Movie Based on a True Story
A nice family-friendly movie based on a true story is “Rescued by Ruby”. It’s a story of a high-spirited and difficult-to-train animal shelter dog who met up with a high-spirited and difficult-to-train state policeman (Daniel O’Neil). The two connected on multiple levels to make an against-the-odds rescue of a young boy who was lost for 36 hours after he took a bad fall and was knocked unconscious. Daniel, the policeman, is dyslexic with ADHD and what comes through in the movie is how important it is to have different learners of all types in difficult real world scenarios. By all accounts, Ruby, an Australian shepherd and border collie mix, was intelligent and also difficult to train using standard approaches. She was placed and returned the […]
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in Netflix’s Lincoln Lawyer
“We were shooting and I said: ‘I can not do this’. I was going to quit.” — Manuel Garcia-Rulfo Manuel Garcia-Rulfo had big shoes to fill – following on Matthew McConaughey’s Mickey Haller in Netflix’s remake of The Lincoln Lawyer. English is a second language for him AND he’s dyslexic. But if you were to watch him in the role today – he’s an absolute natural. He brings distinctive differences to the role and he does marvelously. Brock and I have both been enjoying his series and also love that he’s talking about his dyslexia in interviews. García-Rulfo’s dyslexia increased his nervousness. To learn his lines, he resorted to a method taught to him by his grandmother, who was an artist.
“I […]Comforts of the Abyss: New Book from Philip Schultz
“Schultz, founder and director of The Writers Studio, chronicles the challenges he faced as a poet, fiction writer, and teacher that led him to see the aesthetic and psychological value of creating a writing persona. He has long confronted a pervasive inner critic that he calls “the s*bird,” whose “sole agenda is to negate and revoke…—the author discovered that a persona allowed him to distance himself from his material, such as his erratic, self\ destructive father, and his own feelings of shame and fear of failure.” – Kirkus Reviews Philip Schultz has a new book out called Comforts of the Abyss: The Art of Persona Writing where he shares his battle with dark voices in his head and how he transcends it using borrowed […]
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