Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Craig Pohlman, Ph.D., directs learning assessment and consultation services at Southeast Psych in Charlotte, North Carolina. Pohlman is a highly regarded expert in learning and in improving the success of struggling students. He has conducted or supervised several thousand assessments of children with learning difficulties. Pohlman routinely authors articles and conducts workshops for parents, educators, and clinicians. He is the author of Revealing Minds from Jossey-Bass.

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How Can My Kid Succeed in School?

How Can My Kid Succeed in School? gives parents and teachers easy-to-follow steps for helping children and adolescents who are struggling in the classroom. In this indispensable resource, Dr. Craig Pohlman outlines how to reveal a child's learning profile, an inventory of the child's unique strengths and weaknesses. Throughout the book, Pohlman offers specific guidelines for selecting the learning strategies that best fit a child's learning profile. He also shows how parents and teachers can collaborate with clinicians to get the most out of an assessment and to help improve the child's chances for success.

Praise for How Can My Kid Succeed in School?

"Parents and teachers alike will find [this] book enlightening, reassuring, and incredibly helpful in guiding struggling learners towards success?full of clear examples and strategies, presented in language all will understand." ?Tim Barrier, head of school, Stanley British Primary School, Denver, Colorado

"For all you parents like me who struggle to assist your child with learning issues, here is a well-written and easily digestible book that helps you understand their challenges and map a plan for success." ?Jonathan Page, parent of 8- and 10-year-old boys

Aus dem Klappentext

How Can My Kid Succeed in School?

How Can My Kid Succeed in School? gives parents and teachers easy-to-follow steps for helping children and adolescents who are struggling in the classroom. In this indispensable resource, Dr. Craig Pohlman outlines how to reveal a child's learning profile, an inventory of the child's unique strengths and weaknesses. Throughout the book, Pohlman offers specific guidelines for selecting the learning strategies that best fit a child's learning profile. He also shows how parents and teachers can collaborate with clinicians to get the most out of an assessment and to help improve the child's chances for success.

Praise for How Can My Kid Succeed in School?

Parents and teachers alike will find [this] book enlightening, reassuring, and incredibly helpful in guiding struggling learners towards success?full of clear examples and strategies, presented in language all will understand. --Tim Barrier, head of school, Stanley British Primary School, Denver, Colorado

For all you parents like me who struggle to assist your child with learning issues, here is a well-written and easily digestible book that helps you understand their challenges and map a plan for success. --Jonathan Page, parent of 8- and 10-year-old boys

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How Can My Kid Succeed in School What Parents and Teachers Can Do to Conquer Learning Problems

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

An education is not confined by school walls. So much learning happens at home, from memorizing multiplication tables to reviewing spelling words to writing book reports to studying for biology exams. So a great deal can be learned about learning at home. Parents can discover a lot about their child's profile as long as they know what to look for.

This chapter focuses on what parents can observe about learning and is structured around specific settings and opportunities:

Homework time. For many families, this time can be difficult for everyone as kids struggle to get through academic work that pushes against their learning weaknesses. The good news is that because students are grappling with such tasks, homework provides numerous windows into a child's profile.

Review of work samples. A collection of student work (such as writing or math) is a treasure trove of clues as long as you know how to sift them out.

Free time. What a kid does at play, at meal time, during conversations, and while completing (or trying to complete) chores around the house can all provide tip-offs about learning strengths and weaknesses.

We'll also take a look at the issue of organization, not just because so many parents are concerned about how their child organizes his work and materials, but also because organization can be a touchstone for a kid's profile.

Most of the chapter's sections include a table listing clues that can be gathered, along with possible connections with a child's learning profile. These tables can serve as quick references for interpreting what you are seeing. Along the way we'll meet more kids like Brady and Cetera, students whose particular learning profiles make aspects of school really challenging. The chapter concludes with the "bottom line," a few parting thoughts related to learning about your child's learning. We'll kick off with some "starting pointers," or initial thoughts to help you frame your thinking during this journey of revealing your child's strengths and weaknesses.

Starting Pointers

1. Always keep your eyes open to potential clues about your child's learning. Even when a kid is not doing schoolwork, he may be doing or saying something that can be a window into a strength or weakness.

2. At the outset, focus just on gathering clues. Spend time simply observing (or listening, or reviewing work), even though you may be tempted to try to figure out what's happening. This urge is natural and expected, because you desperately want to help your child, but you'll gather more and better clues if your mind is relatively free of biases. Once you have pulled together different kinds of information from various settings, you can start trying to make sense of it (the next section describes the thought process for interpreting clues). You can use the Profile Worksheet (provided in Appendix One) to organize your clues. This worksheet includes a column for trouble signs and another for positive signs. The information offered in this chapter will help you place clues in the proper rows for the different neurodevelopmental functions. After placing several clues on the worksheet, you should begin to see patterns emerge, such as difficulties with attention or strengths with memory.

3. Find a basis for comparison. All students' skills and abilities progress through time (that's the nature of development), so knowing approximately where a student is on a continuum, using other kids as anchor points, is important. For example, you might observe that your second grader prints with a heavy hand (which can be a tip-off about something called graphomotor function, the coordination of movements necessary for controlling a pencil), but you'll need to have a sense of how other second graders handle a pencil in order to say whether the heavy printing is out of the ordinary. Sources of comparison include older siblings (reflect back on how they handled similar tasks), friends, classmates, and teachers. You don't need to study standards and grade-level expectations to do this! You just need to have some general markers for reality checks.

4. Take a good look at contrasts in performance. One of the most useful kinds of clues you can find is a difference between two of a kid's skills or abilities, because such a difference often reveals a strength on one hand and a weakness on the other. For instance, Nabia is a ninth grader who is having a terrible time with tests. A review of her errors shows that she has particular trouble on open-ended and fill-in-the-blank questions, which require her to pull information out of her memory banks with little help. In contrast, she is far more successful with recognition questions (such as multiple choice), which provide a prompt or cue. This is an important difference to note for Nabia, because it is probably telling us that she can store information in her long-term memory (which is why she can answer recognition questions) but struggles with retrieving it (which is why free-recall questions are pitfalls for her). Later I point out other types of contrasts to look for and discuss what they might mean.

5. Make extra effort to look for strengths, because slipping into the trap of focusing on weaknesses is so easy. Bear in mind that a strength isn't always an off-the-charts talent. Sometimes highlighting a neurodevelopmental function that is operating just as it should is important; for a student who has had a lot of bad experiences with school, hearing that something is working OK may be very good news. Also, some strengths are relative to a student's weaknesses. Nabia's overall long-term memory, for example, might be weak relative to that of other ninth graders, but she should probably know that her ability to store information is a strength relative to her ability to retrieve it.

6. By "peeking behind" weaknesses, you may uncover strengths. This book describes many things to look for that will allow you to go below the surface of a learning problem. Many times an unknown asset emerges that had been blanketed by a weakness. Felix is another ninth grader whose parents worry about his study skills. Like Nabia, Felix is able to store material in his long-term memory; the catch is that his attention gets in the way. His attention processing control is unreliable, meaning that he glosses over details and is easily distracted; but when he locks onto material, he can remember it very well.

Deciphering the Clues

Before we get into the different clues about learning that you can find at home, let's preview how you'll make sense of them. Again, you should devote time just to gathering information and not jump to conclusions. Once you've taken a look at your child in different settings and doing various kinds of work, think of the deciphering process as like sorting cards. You'll have a bunch of clues, each of which is like a card. In fact, some people might find it helpful to write each piece of information on an index card and then lay them out on a table in categories representing neurodevelopmental areas.

The process is about taking the information you've gathered and organizing it into a framework that allows you to look at patterns. Figure 1.1. lists (on the left side) a lot of observations that were made about a kid's writing that were then sorted into three neurodevelopmental areas (on the right side). Once the sorting process is complete, the evidence of a child's strengths and weaknesses is laid out. The following sections contain tables that display possible connections between clues. These tables (as well as the Atlas of Neurodevelopmental Terms provided in Appendix Three) will help you sort your cards, so to speak.

Making Discoveries During Homework Time

Many parents of struggling students describe homework time as a challenging, frustrating experience for the entire family: the kid is forced to do work he has a very hard time with (rather than playing or doing more enjoyable things), the parent feels like a drill sergeant, siblings may be caught in the crossfire, and everyone feels like their worst qualities are exposed. In the face of these uphill battles, being an objective observer of clues is critical. Many things can be done to make homework time more productive and calm, but the first step is to get a handle on the underlying problems. (The next chapter includes strategies for homework time based on the neurodevelopmental functions that might be involved.)

The good news is that homework is a great opportunity to find clues about learning, not only because the student is grappling with academic tasks but also because homework time has some key differences from the classroom setting: the student is alone, he doesn't have the support of a teacher readily available, and the time may be more concentrated on work (whereas classroom time is consumed by transitions, giving instructions, cleaning up materials, and so on). Here we'll cover both what to watch for during homework time and clues you can pick up on by listening.

Handling a Pencil

You can start making important observations about your child's profile the moment he picks up a pencil. For a lot of students, handwriting is a huge barrier to academic productivity. Pencil control, legibility, hand fatigue, and handwriting speed can all prevent good ideas and knowledge from making it onto the paper. The way your child holds a pencil is the first clue to graphomotor function. The best way to hold a pencil is with what is called a tripod grip, formed by the thumb and middle fingers (which make most of the movements to form letters) and the forefinger (which regulates pressure against the paper), with the pencil at about a forty-five-degree angle to the writing surface.

Pencil grips can go awry in a lot of ways, such as wrapping the thumb around the forefinger and middle finger, so that the forefinger is not stabilizing the pencil, or excessively hooking the wrist. Figure 1.2 shows photographs of pencil grips, including a tripod grip and three troublesome grips. When we write, the nerves in the hand and wrist send signals back to the brain about where the pencil is in the letter formation process. If these signals are weak or get crossed, then relying heavily on sight to monitor the pencil tip may be necessary. So if your child really needs to watch what the tip of his pencil is doing, that could be a trouble sign. Later in this chapter we'll cover a set of clues related to what handwritten work looks like.

Planning and Organizing

How a kid goes about doing his homework can be very revealing. A lot of parents are dismayed when their child seems to leap right into tasks without first contemplating the best course of action. Courtney, a sixth grader, fits this bill. Her mother describes her as a "bull in a china shop" when it comes to homework (and incidentally, most other times when a methodical approach is called for as well). When Courtney gets to a math word problem, she seems to start scribbling calculations before she even finishes reading it. Sometimes she answers almost all of the questions in social studies assignments before realizing that the directions wanted her to do something else. But above all, her writing is a disaster. The notion of starting with an outline is totally alien to Courtney, who would much rather just get to writing; as a result, many of her great ideas never make it to the page or get hidden in a disorganized stream of sentences.

Courtney has a weakness in an aspect of her attention called production control, which is like the brain's dashboard; her mind doesn't have a reliable speedometer, meaning that she jumps into tasks too quickly, without first coming up with good plans. Dashboards also provide many signals (such as a low-fuel light and a door-ajar signal) to let you know how well things are working, but Courtney's production control doesn't monitor her work very effectively. Her mother gets exasperated by all of the "careless" mistakes she makes in her homework. For example, she might miscalculate in math or misspell a word, but when prompted to take a second look, she readily finds these kinds of errors and fixes them.

Staying on Task

Tate is a fourth grader and his dad says that homework "takes forever to get done." The reason? Tate is very susceptible to distractions and daydreaming due to his attention processing control. His dad frequently reels him back in with little reminders like "Stick with it, Tate" or "Come on back, dude!" Getting homework done in a reasonable amount of time usually requires great effort to stay focused on the task at hand.

Everyone, including adults, experiences difficulty with concentration from time to time. Even if you're working in a place with few distracting sights and sounds, your thoughts may wander like Tate's. For some people, processing control does not do a sufficient job of resisting "mind trips" and avoiding distractions. If given a choice between finishing homework and spending time on recreational activities, most kids would choose the latter; but kids with weak processing control are pulled even more strongly than other kids toward fun stuff and away from work.

A kid can have a hard time staying on task for reasons other than weak attention, however. Active working memory is what we use to mentally juggle or manipulate information.

Monika frequently gets lost in the middle of homework tasks. As a seventh grader, much of her work involves multiple steps (such as when solving a math problem) or numerous components that have to be attended to simultaneously (such as all the aspects of writing a book report). In other words, she has to handle a lot of moving parts, and her parents see her losing track of a lot of them. So she may get lost in the middle of a math computation and complain that she is confused about what to do next.

Keeping the Energy Up

Thinking, like physical activity, requires energy. Homework can really tap into a kid's mental fuel tank, which may be drained after a long day of school. So, showing a little "brain drain" during homework is natural; but a pattern of excessive fatigue, night in and night out, may signal problems with mental energy, a third aspect of attention. The most taxing academic work is writing, because it requires so many types of thinking (such as vocabulary, spelling, and idea generation) for a sustained period. Therefore, a good time to observe how well a kid's mental energy is holding up is during written work. Also, a kid who is extremely drawn to fun activities, which aren't nearly as draining as homework, may have unreliable mental energy.

Information Literacy

Most parents would agree that their child's education experience is much different than their own was. One of the biggest differences is how technology is now folded into academics. Practically every classroom and most homes have at least one computer. Students use computers for all types of school activities, including word processing their writing, building slide show presentations, and playing learning games (such as for math facts or phonics). With most computers connected to the Internet, students have the capacity to access an incredible volume and variety of content. Information literacy, or the skills used to access (with search engines) and evaluate digital information, has emerged as an academic skill that is as important as the traditional skill areas of reading, writing, and mathematics.

Information literacy can be undermined by neurodevelopmental weaknesses just like the traditional skills can. Closely watching how a kid engages with digital information can provide more clues about his learning. Several procedures go into using a search engine, for example, such as inputting information in different fields, setting options, and reviewing output pages. Trouble recalling how to use all of a search engine's features may suggest a long-term memory weakness.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from How Can My Kid Succeed in School What Parents and Teachers Can Do to Conquer Learning Problemsby Craig Pohlman Copyright © 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission.
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