"Learning disabled" are more advanced learners!

I've finally figured out how to bring a learning conundrum I've been working on for some time into one simple answer. What I've learned in the past months, absolutely confirmed yesterday is this: There is almost no one out there to bring the learning methods and content knowledge of tutoring/teaching together with an applied understanding of cognitive and affective aspects of learning. Tutors know content and methods but do not by and large know how to adapt their methods to the thinking of non-conventional learners. Psychologists and educational therapists can work with novel and unique cognitive abilities/responses, but rarely have much idea about how to connect it with academic content and method. This is the small "aha." I CAN do that, often in marvelously simple ways that make great changes in a relatively short amount of time.

The big "aha" is this (and it would be a great presentation especially to associations of parents or networks of those supporting the so-called learning disabled): non-conventional learning is a gateway into the future of education. If I have my way there will be no more learners labeled as "learning disabled". Without romanticizing non-conventional learners, I can attest that the order is wrong. Instead of trying to remediate, rehabilitate, make functional those with Asperger's, and dyscalculia, for instance, I have found that the far more powerful approach is to reach into their thinking and draw it forth (educare-- means "lead out"), honor it, and help the learner translate that thinking, tailor that thinking to meet the demands of tests, schools.

The irony is that these students are much higher order thinkers, and their problem is not that they "don't get it" but rather that they get too much. They are trying to process an extraordinary amount of information at the same time and thus 1) get their wires crossed, 2) take too long (like having too many programs open and running on your laptop-- it eats up serious RAM). This is something an embattled parent with a "developmentally disabled or delayed" child would love to contemplate. They may be on the frontier of a massive shift in learning away from the industrial emphasis on "instilling or installing" into student-products (the learner as manufactured object approach) to one in which learning is about leading out the particular and valuable genius in each child and finding both customized and generalized methods that might effectively do that.

What I am finding in my work with learning "disabled" students is that they are teaching the world how to enter this new era. I worked yesterday with a fifth grader with "dyscalculia" (trouble computing with numbers, sometimes even simple addition and multiplication). I correctly intuited that he was an intuitive/conceptual/contextual thinker on this higher order level. The first thing I did was take him out to the back yard and show him a ripped bit of leaf. I said, "This is how they teach math in schools". "You don't know where this ripped piece comes from or what it does or how it relates to anything else." "We're going to show the leaf and the tree, and you'll see how they relate, and once you have a system in your head you'll be able to more easily compute numbers." I showed him using different circles (flower pots, circular patio table) and string, how the circumference is a little more than 3 times (i.e. pi) the diameter. That got him intrigued. I showed him what addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, looked like on a number line. I helped him to always verbalize what he was doing, slow down, and allow himself the time to ask and answer his own questions in leading himself through a math problem. He did very well, and began catching his mistakes and identifying when he was "crossing wires". He was becoming a self-aware learner, aware of his own cognitive processes and how to identify and adapt them.

So here is my challenge to you, dear reader (and I'll work to assemble this on my end too): Get me a group who really wants to be a part of this shift in awareness, this shift in eras, and I can give a presentation, keynote, lead a workshop on what I'm doing, or simply provide my services to small groups or individuals.

The Inadequacy of Program Approaches to Education

It is time to examine and seriously question another little-examined legacy of industrial education: a misplaced reliance on "programs" and "committees" to get things done, especially during a time of immense transformation and change.  

To give them their dues, programmatic responses to and committee consideration of problems can be helpful in maintaining and incrementally updating progress and support in already-established institutional processes and protocols.  However, I have found few people who believe they yield a benefit greater than the time they waste.  There is a reason for this.  Often very quickly, committees, programs, and even organizations become ends in themselves.  The purpose of a committee, becomes to meet regularly to fulfill the service requirement in the organization or fulfill an obligation  to have met to address a problem (forget whether one actually substantively addresses the problem).  In academia (from personal experience) they can be excruciating exercises in posturing, with almost no practical content and even lesser relevance to executing the functions necessary to ensure learning or education.  

They are, for all their huffing and puffing, extraordinarily inefficient.  This is ironic given their origin within an industrial habit which idolized efficiency, which sought to compartmentalize and break down all complexities into various assignments, specialties, and environments where they could be handled without distraction or context.  Unfortunately, especially in an increasingly interconnected world, that has meant producing many, many little boxes, none of which have a holistic picture or language to communicate effectively with the other boxes, or coordinate with them to take on a complex opportunity/challenge.  Context is becoming ever more important and these organizational forms are just not equipped to deal with changing and complex contexts. 

This has led to a fracturing of the educational system into tribes of classroom practice, school administration, central administration, teacher certification, teacher education, educational research, education reform, education policy, some of which have very little contact or even apparent concern with actual learning.  Each box gets constructed to enact their own abstracted proprietary policies and missions.  We thus have nonsensical results: teacher education with very little integrated and developmental contact with schools or the teaching profession, education policy in which almost no policy-makers actually have any significant recent experience in the field, self-esteem education which gathers no information on what students value, testing which emphasizes lower-level literacy and neglects all the crucial skills of the emerging world-- creativity, analysis, communication, environmental literacy, and so on.  This has to change, and it will not be changed by adding another program or committee.  

I recently went on an informational interview with an organization that does university-school partnerships.  I was struck by how many programs there were, many of them successful in their own ways.  However, I could not help thinking this could be all drastically simplified and the services integrated to increase value and communication and save resources. Many of these programs have the same general mission but work in different locations, for instance.  Often the programs have their own staffs, a throwback to the industrial misperception that specialization = excellence.  Especially in an age of budget cuts, it would seem imperative to do a radical simplification, integration, and translation of what one is trying to develop (not just deliver) in terms of outcomes. 

An effective process of transforming institutions must take into account and actively include those who are being "administered to."  I was pleased to note that one of the charter schools I may be working more closely with, BASE (Bay Area School of Empowerment), had students integrally involved in writing the actual charter.  

Basically, we need to move from a technocracy to a democracy.  Programs should not be ends.  In fact, they should actively attempt to make themselves obsolete, by their very effectiveness in getting the ball rolling, getting people involved, providing training, best practices, skills, and evaluation, so that these things are taken up and the program is no longer necessary.  

I learned this lesson in the late 1980's, when I was working as a math tutor at Ohio State University for a woman who had been in a coma for six weeks (due to a car accident) only a half year earlier.  She had received a D on her first midterm, and many were advising her that she had returned to school too early.  I used some self-developed math diagnostics with her, playing with negative, positives, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, number line movement, and pictures of mathematical relationships.  I found nothing wrong with her and concluded the problem was the teaching and not her brain's ability to process.  I teach dialogically, helping the student to develop a way of speaking to the problem, with me as instructor, and with their own thinking.  I use pictures and number lines to translate between mathematical concepts and verbal language.  This seems to work well with many math phobes.  Anyway, she received a B+ on her second midterm, an A- on her third midterm, and I was excited for her to finish strong in our summary preparations for the final.  Instead, she called me up, and told me my services weren't needed because she believed she "got it."  

It took me a couple of weeks to fully absorb the miracle that had just happened.  I initially felt somewhat betrayed.  All this successful work results in less paid work, less time with my student, whom I am developing a nice learning relationship with, and no opportunity to glory in the credit.  But that is exactly what we need to be headed for as a system and as individuals and organizations-- to create such abundance and skill that our remediation is unnecessary (and then to move on to greater challenges).  Otherwise, we become vested in their dependence and our own lack of growth.  

That woman taught me something that day, and it is something I think we should all stand to remember-- true service means enabling those you guide to succeed so well, that they no longer need you guidance, but can offer their own genius, contribution, and leadership into the world.     

What does the CBEST (CA Basic Ed Skills Test) measure?

Having decided to get directly in involved in California education from the ground up, even with a kind of "top-down" certification and expertise (Ph.D. in Philosophy of Education), I recently took the CBEST.  While waiting outside, I had some fun hearing accounts of those taking the test 16 or 17 times to pass one of the sections.  I'd taken the practice test online and noted how out-of-synch the questions to gauge a truly gifted, excellent teacher.  The title of the test should be "At least we know this teacher has two brain cells to rub together".  Almost every questions is designed around naming and solving (in a fairly simplistic way irrelevant to the emerging real issues of this era) what is in the head of the test maker, rather than developing the learning is in one's own head and that of prospective students.   Our educational system remains firmly industrial, top-down, administratively driven, and obsessed with quantifying fairly irrelevant bits of information that relate more to one's ability to measure ("usefulness" to research and our need to number things) than any real practical need a learner or teacher will face.  

Many of the questions I experienced were of the order.  "This reading selection represents best what type of persuasion....  A) plain folks approach, B) appealing to logic, C) appealing to emotion, D) compare and contrast, etc.  Who cares if you can name the style?!  Can you actually argue from these perspectives?  Do you know their uses and limits?  Like many tests I've studied, including the self-esteem tests I critiqued in my dissertation, the test taker is treated as a dumbed-down puzzle solver and spectator to the "real action" where all the decisions and movement about what counts as knowledge and why is made by someone else.  Classic grid-obsessed, compartmentalized, stratified industrial mentality.  Earth to CBEST.  We are way past the Industrial Era.  How do your questions measure and prepare learners and teachers today to face environmental peril, global challenges, and a complex spaghetti-like world.  

Investing in the Future

It seems one with the present (baby boomer) generation that fiscal austerity after profligate spending means giving 700 billion dollars with no strings attached to institutions who create the financial mess and cutting funding for education, as Arnold Schwarznegger is trying to do in California.  Pay off the lemons and throw out the children.  It's about time this kind of thinking stops.  I'm not a fan of behavior modification techniques, but I'll make exceptions here.  Tough love for the people who have run this country into a ditch, and gratitude love (and increased funding) for those who will lead this country into the future. 

Learning is much more than education

This is what is at stake:  we are at a crucial time in our human evolution, our emotional maturity, our ecological stability, our personal and social health.  Never, perhaps in human history, have we developed such technology and access to knowledge.  Never, perhaps in human history have we been so far behind in our ability to actually organize knowledge, get beyond old ways of understanding learning, and innovate how we construct larger institutions and forms to facilitate learning.  We are being invited to challenge our own individual perceptions and habits in tune with an emerging social intelligence which must simultaneously provide a capacity to fulfill our individual dreams, bring societies together, and create a healthier world.    

Attempts to "solve" this situation from the outside have largely made the problems worse. Policy makers, experts, from all areas tend to prescribe solutions from a position in which they have very little direct day to day contact with the situation on the ground, and even less personal stake in the outcome.  In the education bureaucracy and policy world, recommendations can be made into law affecting the entire nation (as with No Child Left Behind) without ever consulting a teacher or spending a day in a contemporary classroom.   I'm less guilty than others, having spent quite a bit of time in mainly non-traditional educational settings, teaching teachers as an education professor, and analyzing and writing on policy.   However, I am still too far removed from how theory meets practice in the expanded classroom of the internet, slam poetry contests, social media, volunteerism, etc.    

So, I'm going back to school.  I have a Ph.D. in philosophy of education, and I'm going to teach high school and to learn how the best of past knowledge about learning can be integrated with the exciting forms of learning emerging today and extending into the future.  In so doing, I hope to contribute to a movement of learning that is not simply "instilled" in young people, but which is generated by them and made available to a world that sorely needs it to survive and thrive.  This is "reform from the inside".   In these posts I may talk about other kinds of social reform, but mostly education reform which recognizes and develops social media, the ability of young people to initiate and generate their own knowledge, and the emergence of what I call a "social mind" which transcends the limitations of individual cognitive thinking and which requires a new way to understand intelligence and think about learning.  I'll offer examples from my own practice.  I'll make comments on my new re-education, teaching while I get officially certified in California.

I'll have the benefit of foresight, having developed methods and conducted projects ("Learning as a Public Policy Concern") which anticipate new kinds of learning.  I'll narrate the struggles and disconnects from what is being demanded now of education and what is actually needed for the future. I'll be critical and creative in looking to the possible frontiers of learning.  I invite you on the journey.  I will try to post an insight each day or two, depending upon time.  I fell it will be insightful for both of us.  This interesting journey (and perhaps an interesting life) begins with this step moving forward into untold possibilities.