Making Connections- the Basis for Reading Comprehension and Social Skills

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I was excited to read this NYT article entitled “The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction.”  It discusses what many teachers already know and see in their students all the time – that there’s a connection between the ability to appreciate fiction, and the ability to meaningfully connect with other people.  It happens that this summer, I’m offering a course for young adolescents  in reading comprehension and social skills, using the teaching of one to bolster and complement the other. I’m excited about this – I’ve yet to see anyone else offer a course quite like it, and this feels meaningful and important.

I’ve talked a little about reading comprehension in previous posts, and the degree to which it requires executive functioning, self regulation, and the ability to make connections to prior knowledge.

Social skills, and the ability to foster meaningful connections, or even casual sustained relationships, relies on similar skills.  Finding a way to connect with someone, to empathize with them and managing impulses in order to appropriately engage are fundamental to making friends and collaborating with peers.

Indeed, research has shown that students who struggle in reading often have a difficult time in the social arena, for many reasons.

From Stanford University: “Children’s social behavior can promote or undermine their learning, and their academic performance may have implications for their social behavior.”

Scientific American : Fiction Hones Social Skills, helps build empathy.

Sparking Curiosity – amazing math videos that inspire

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There’s nothing like playful curiosity to inspire learning, and I really love this series of videos by Vi Hart.  She has an approach to discussing mathematics that is exciting and presents complicated ideas in a way that ignites curiosity and the desire to explore complicated ideas. Check out this video on triangles.

More of them can be found on her website.

I’d love to know what other resources like this are out there.  What amazing work this woman does!

Gamification : using play and piquing curiosity to access higher order thinking

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Think about what happens when you try at something and fail, and are penalized for it.  Maybe you had that experience with dancing, or art.  Perhaps it was math, or fitting in with a group, or it could have been a host of other activities where you felt incapable of success.

How do you feel about those now? If you were a clumsy dancer, and got called out, how willing are you to try again?  Doing so takes resilience and curiosity in order to override the brain’s visceral fear response – we have to have some way to access the frontal lobe in order to effectively learn.  When our first response to a stimulus is fear, we’re unable to think clearly.  Our sympathetic nervous system takes over – its job is to keep us alive and safe from threats.  When faced with a threat, and survival is key, stimuli don’t get processed by the frontal lobe, and higher order thinking isn’t accessible.

Students with learning differences are likely to receive negative feedback than their peers, and are more likely to fear failure.

So how, given years of learned helplessness and negative messages in the context of learning, can smart kids with challenges overcome their fear and sense of helplessness? How can we get past the triggers?

Of late there’s been a lot of consideration given to the persistence of gamers.  With an 80% failure rate, and an eye on personal best, gamers demonstrate the kind of curiosity and resilience that we long to see in our students.   Continue reading →

Exploring Self-Regulation: What it looks like, and what’s required

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So let’s just say there’s a project looming over your head, and you’re under deadline.  Let’s also say, for the sake of imagining a scenario, that there are six different pieces that are your responsibility to coordinate, and each piece relies upon coordinating with a number of different parties.  Let’s say that on this day, when you’ve had insufficient sleep, and unpleasant encounters with family or co-workers, you’re not at your best.  Have you been in this situation?   How do you manage all this?

There are a lot of ways to handle this kind of scenario.   There’s the ill-advised plunge method, which many people default to using — there’s nothing neurologically sound about locking yourself in front of a target of focus until you reach a stage of completion.   Success in situations like this one requires planning, and a lot of self and task analysis, and self regulation.

So what is self-regulation, and how can we cultivate it in ourselves and others?

Self regulated learning depends upon the ability to use  Continue reading →

Read naturally? Not really. How Poor Self Regulation and ADHD can get in the way of Reading Comprehension

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… In a nutshell, these really all do go together.  What does it take to extract meaning from a text?  The ability to make connections, to organize, to determine what’s important.  What do you give kids who can’t do that naturally? Tools.  And a lot of them.

First, a little bit of background:

Did you know there is a gene which is responsible for our ability to speak?  FOXP2 is believed to have evolved about 100,000 years ago.  Discovered in 2009, and it’s ability to act as conductor for a number of neurological functions is at the root of our uniquely human ability to express thoughts as spoken language.  Speech evolved organically in humans, and the ability to express and comprehend spoken language is hardwired into most of us at a biological level.

We’re not born with the ability read the way we are to speak; it’s learned through direct instruction which allows us to construct neurological channels.

In the beginning stages, children learn phonemic awareness,  and the alphabetic principle which allow them to unlock words by putting sounds together.  Children are generally considered to be successful readers if they can follow these procedures at the end of second grade.

And then?

Third grade hits, and life becomes far more interesting.   Continue reading →

Dyslexie Could Make a Difference

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Sometimes the most sublime solutions are the most simple.

Reading interventions for dyslexia is a long, arduous process during which the teacher breaks language down to its smallest components (see a description of the Orton Gillingham method here). It’s a dry and detail oriented process, and amazingly effective when done well. It takes a tremendous amount of time and practice to build up fluency; now there’s a possible stop gap measure for those interim months.

While dyslexia is a nuanced condition that goes beyond visual processing, having a font that anchors the letters in orientation could potentially eliminate one of the strands causing struggles in reading.

For dyslexics, letters often appear to be floating in space, or else they can look inverted or flipped around. Intervention is still critical, but this small tool has been shown to texts more accessible for this population.

Scientific American article can be viewed here, in the Dislexie font.

What will you do with your 70,000 thoughts today? Keeping the diamonds in the rough.

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Boredom is the number one reason cited for dropping out of school.  Boredom, by itself, is stressful, and can be rooted in poor comprehension.  Academic content presented in tenth grade is built on the concepts presented in fourth grade.  Early intervention makes all the difference; if a child is a year behind at a young age, it’s much easier to help them.

Executive functions are a complex set of cognitive processes that together, control the mechanisms that are required to effectively learn new material, self regulate and engage in prosocial behavior. <a href=”"> Read More…Their importance cannot possibly be overstated in the context of academic and social realms; indeed, the degree to which an individual possesses these is a greater determiner than intelligence when it comes to long term success.  What’s impacted by executive functioning?  Better executive functioning leads to better interpersonal skills and relationships, higher salaries, and greater opportunity overall.
Executive functioning takes place in the prefrontal cortex.  Located right behind your forehead, this part of the brain is responsible for the higher level thinking that we tend to associate with being human.  Each of us has 70, 000 thoughts per day; we receive input from  When information or procedures become meaningful, fluent, and integrated, it’s because the prefrontal cortex was engaged and attending, and is able to process the input appropriately.  The frontal lobe is sent information when a number of conditions are met, and the emotional circuitry is largely responsible for sorting through the piles to determine what content is sent to the higher thinking circuits, and what’s treated as either noise to ignore, or stressful, threatening input that activates the stress circuit.  It doesn’t matter how old you are, or what kind of diagnosis you do or don’t have; if you’re performing under stressful conditions – including boredom, or exposure to bullying, or illness, or expectations which are impossible to meet – you may not be able to access your higher order thinking skills to effectively perform.

The logical next question is:  How can we cultivate these higher order thinking skills?  How do we work with our neural circuitry to enhance our students’ – and our own – capacity to perform and learn?

There are so many ways to address this question, and most of the best practices have a mindful component to them.  The Hawn Foundation does an excellent job bringing mindful practices to young people, and there are other resources as well which I’ll explore in future posts.