Teaching Children With Dyslexia

Unfortunately, the label of 'being dyslexic' is often seen as a negative one. One which can produce upset, limitations and hurdles to the students involved .

However, with the right training, teaching and encouragement it can also produce strengths, talents and creative gifts.

What are the effects of dyslexia?
Research suggests that individuals with dyslexia have great difficulties in fluent and/or accurate word identification, often resulting in a slower reading ability, poor concentration, difficulty with spelling and grammar and in some cases trouble with organisation and planning.

A key concern for people with dyslexia is the lack of confidence and the negative effect it can have on a student's self-esteem.

Low self-esteem leads to other challenges such as a lack of motivation, concentration, and self-belief and in some cases, anxiety.

Tips for teaching students with dyslexia:

1. Be Visual: Dyslexics are predominantly visual thinkers, so try to include diagrams, flow charts and pictures wherever possible.

2. Squash Distractions: Think about the level of distraction around the classroom and how you can reduce disruptions and distractions. Working in a quiet, comfortable room, with little to distract the brain, will allow students to focus and therefore improve their concentration.

3. Play to the Strengths: Really think about the positives - creativity, imagination and a hands-on approach; and integrate them into your teaching techniques.

4. Use Mind maps: Mind maps work the way the brain works, which isn't in nice neat lines. Mind maps are a very visual way of teaching, and because the brain best memorises keywords and images, they are ideal for teaching students with dyslexia.

5. Develop Organisational Skills: These will benefit students for the rest of their lives. Use colour-coded folders to separate different subjects or subject topics and encourage them to implement and stick to a daily routine. Schedules are very useful for individuals with dyslexia as they help them know what to expect and what is coming up next.

6. Use the Tools: Use approved specialist software to diversify teaching techniques and encourage willingness to learn. Software such as word and grammar based games; word processors as well as digital voice recording are useful for teaching dyslexic students. Get creative and make it fun, they will respond to new and exciting teaching techniques.

7. Short Term Memory Loss: Students with dyslexia may struggle with short-term memory and concentrating for long periods of time. Be aware that you may have to repeat yourself often and try to break up the lesson with short breaks such as learning games, chats and active learning techniques.

8. Focus on Verbal Reasoning: Don't just hand out sheets of paper for the student to read, as they may struggle to absorb and understand the information. Discuss the topics with them and engage them in conversation; it's a much more effective way of teaching.

Read more on this approach here

Sam and Friends: Visual Thinking - YouTube

Fifty-six years ago today, Sam + Friends, the early live-action puppet TV show by Muppets creator Jim Henson and his eventual wife Jane, made its official debut.

Its characters, all of whom Henson voiced himself, presaged not only modern icons like Kermit and The Muppets, but even some of today’s cultural archetypes. (One of Sam’s friends was named Harry the Hipster.)

This vintage kinescope from the show’s early days offers a rare look at the dawn of a cultural icon and explores visual thinking, particularly in music.

For more on the story of Sam + Friends, see Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, as well as Chapter 2 of the altogether fantastic Kermit book, Before You Leap: A Frog’s Eye View of Life’s Greatest Lessons.

Education: Learning styles debunked

The wide appeal of the idea that some students will learn better when material is presented visually and that others will learn better when the material is presented verbally, or even in some other way, is evident in the vast number of learning-style tests and teaching guides available for purchase and used in schools.

But does scientific research really support the existence of different learning styles, or the hypothesis that people learn better when taught in a way that matches their own unique style?

Unfortunately, the answer is no, according to a major new report published this month in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The report, authored by a team of eminent researchers in the psychology of learning -- Hal Pashler (University of San Diego), Mark McDaniel (Washington University in St. Louis), Doug Rohrer (University of South Florida), and Robert Bjork (University of California, Los Angeles) -- reviews the existing literature on learning styles and finds that although numerous studies have purported to show the existence of different kinds of learners (such as "auditory learners" and "visual learners"), those studies have not used the type of randomized research designs that would make their findings credible.

Nearly all of the studies that purport to provide evidence for learning styles fail to satisfy key criteria for scientific validity. Any experiment designed to test the learning-styles hypothesis would need to classify learners into categories and then randomly assign the learners to use one of several different learning methods, and the participants would need to take the same test at the end of the experiment.

If there is truth to the idea that learning styles and teaching styles should mesh, then learners with a given style, say visual-spatial, should learn better with instruction that meshes with that style. The authors found that of the very large number of studies claiming to support the learning-styles hypothesis, very few used this type of research design. Of those that did, some provided evidence flatly contradictory to this meshing hypothesis, and the few findings in line with the meshing idea did not assess popular learning-style schemes.

No less than 71 different models of learning styles have been proposed over the years. Most have no doubt been created with students' best interests in mind, and to create more suitable environments for learning. But psychological research has not found that people learn differently, at least not in the ways learning-styles proponents claim. Given the lack of scientific evidence, the authors argue that the currently widespread use of learning-style tests and teaching tools is a wasteful use of limited educational resources.

Education: Learning styles debunked

Dyslexia Untied - Visual Dyslexia

Visual Dyslexia
(Also known as dyseidetic, surface dyslexia or dyseidesia) If your subject has visual dyslexia, he can sound out words, but has trouble with words that don't sound out regularly e.g. such as 'who' and 'any'. Subjects with this type of dyslexia have to learn words primarily by sight and will need to 'picture' the word for later recall.

Given a piece of text, they will read very slowly and are better able to spell phonetically without registering that the 'appearance' of the words are wrong e.g. throo, skayt, dotter, etc.

To test for Visual Dyslexia, psychologists will ask the subject to read a number of phonetically regular words (e.g. think, wishing, testing, etc.) and irregular words (e.g. who, they, enough, etc.) This will reveal obvious disparities in their reading, by comparing their abilities to read each group or words.

Visual Dyslexia is completely different from 'Visual Stress' or 'Scotopic sensitivity syndrome' SSS, this is where the letters of words apparently seem to jump around on the page.

Visual Strees is sometimes thought to be treatable by special lenses and coloured overlays, but this requires specialist examination and recommendation by a qualified optometrist. There is also some concerns over the real effectiveness of this approach.