Teaching Strategies Archive
A Mind at a Time, Mel Levine, M. D.
America's top learning expert shows how every child can succeed. How? By recognizing strengths! This is an important book that should be read by many. Dr. Levine forces us to look past the labels and see the unique strengths and talents in kids whom many see as disabled or dysfunctional or lazy or bad.
Different minds learn differently. Some students are strong in certain areas and some are strong in others, but no one is equally capable in all. Yet most schools still cling to a one-size-fits-all education philosophy. As a result, many children struggle because their learning patterns don't fit the way they are being taught...
Dr. Levine is a professor of pediatrics at the UNC Medical School, the director of the university's Clinical Center for the Study of Development and Learning, and the founder and cochair of All Kinds of Minds, a nonprofit institute that develops products and programs to help parents, teachers, clinicians, and children deal with differences in learning.
In this book, he shows parents and those who care for children how to identify these individual learning patterns, explaining how they can strengthen a child's abilities and either bypass or overcome the child's weaknesses, producing positive results instead of repeated frustration and failure. Consistent progress can result when we understand that not every child can do equally well in every type of learning and begin to pay more attention to individual learning patterns -- and individual minds -- so that we can maximize children's success and gratification in life. (back cover)
Here are some excerpts ...
... sometimes you fix a weakness by pursuing strengths.
... report cards are notoriously poor at predicting how your child will eventually do in a career.
... sometimes hidden talents remain forever hidden and go to waste... parents and teachers have to be on a constant, diligent quest for buried treasure within children.
Emotions and neurodevelopmental functions are like a two-way street: emotional problems may weaken the functions and weakened functions can cause emotional turmoil.
... a child's educational track record profoundly affects motivation, as kids ... who have failed over and over again in the past, may be sapped of motivation and sink even further into failure. Success, on the other hand, has a way of breeding more success.
Suddenly, more and more kids are becoming night people. What used to be the downtime of the day has now become for so many children the most stimulating and distracting interlude.
I think having nothing to do is plenty to do. I always admire kids who can entertain themselves for hours on end; that is an important strength, often the forerunner of creativity and resourcefulness.
Each kid unrolls an original mural of mind traits. The challenge is to understand his or her special wiring and its implications for parenting, counseling, and educating.
It is common for kids with attentional problems to succeed with big ideas but have trouble dealing with the little but critical details.
Writing is often a seemingly insurmountable threat to kids with attention problems, as it takes strong attention controls to conduct the orchestra needed to express thoughts on paper. You have to slow down, plan, organize your thinking, pace yourself, watch what you're putting on paper and pay attention to all kinds of small details all at once (such as punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and use of grammar). These demands can be tough for those with weak attention controls Writing is one of the largest orchestras a kid's mind has to conduct.
Using a computer for writing has been good for April; she likes to type fast and then go back and correct her mistakes, which are pointed out to her by the computer's word processing program.
There is a clear relationship in all of us between the quality and quantity of sleep and performance in school or at work the next day. Dr. Levine says that many kids with attentional problems have sleep problems and suffer from battle fatigue during the day. Sleep arousal imbalance can take its toll rendering student behavior and productivity erratic and unpredictable.
... some children with a sleep-arousal imbalance may turn out to be the next generation of night people. They may compose cello sonatas at 2 AM, work the night shift at the BMW plant, or host an all-night radio rock show Regrettably, during childhood, tomorrow's night owls are condemned to attend school with all the day kids. We don't yet offer night schools for night children.
... the very same kids who suffer lack of attention control are often remarkable people in their own right, displaying refreshingly unorthodox pathways of thought. I believe these children are challenging types of human variation rather than deviation, so parents [and teachers] should never believe that their child with attention deficits is necessarily abnormal or pathological. ... There's more that's right than wrong with most of these kids. What a crime to assume simply that all of these kids are damaged goods and therefore are destined always to be defective... many of them turn out to be extraordinary adults. We just have to help get them there.
Discovering a place for your kind of mind, a place where your profile can thrive, almost always works wonders. Sadly, vocational schools ... are not as prevalent as they once were. This shortage discriminates against great minds with mechanical aptitudes.
... it's always good practice to start strengthening a function in a subject matter about which a child feels some passion.
Many children who are thought to be lazy are experiencing trouble generating and sustaining their mental effort. We should stop accusing them and start understanding helping them develop ways of controlling their mental effort.
As they glare at the surface of a desk, some kids are overtaken with the paralyzing sensation that the effort demanded exceeds their brain's fuel reserves.
Sadly, there are some individuals who go through life operating like a photographer whose camera has no viewfinder. They keep snapping their shutters without having any sense at all of how their photos will turn out.
Students should acquire the experience that there is more than one option for handling every situation.
... babies who have trouble sleeping at night are prone to develop attention problems when they reach school age. They never quite get programmed early on for the optimal balance between sleep and wakefulness.
Learn about 14 attention controls!
If you call someone bad long enough, he is apt to turn bad.
In many respects, the opposite of impulsivity is good problem-solving skills.
Inattention is a distress signal, informing us that all is not well within that child or between her and her environment.
Vastly more extensive and strenuous use of memory is required for school success than is needed in virtually any career you can name.
Learn about short-term, active working, and long-term memory.
About fairness: ... I believe that to treat all children the same way is to treat them unequally. Different kids have different learning needs; they have a right to have their needs met. ... it is possible to treat and teach students as individuals. That doesn't mean that a class of twenty-seven kids needs to have twenty-seven lesson plans, but it does mean teachers can be flexible in their methods of instruction and their ways of evaluating kids' learning.
Here's one mother's description of her child when she gets home from school: "She acts as if she has just returned from the battlefield. Often she wants to go right to sleep; either that or she wants to cry. It's like her ego's been badly injured during the battle to be successful in class."
Active working memory craves peace of mind. Anxiety infects it like a computer virus. If you're feeling sad and preoccupied, there may not be room for much else in your mind's working memory.
When a student is not concentrating, ideas slide right off his mental counter space.
... it is possible to have good active working memory in subjects but not such good active working memory in others. ... It's easiest to concentrate on and store things you find exciting, but it is also the case someone gets interested in things that come together in his brain most readily, making the most sense in his kind of mind.
It may be that we don't forget things, but that we forget where we put them.
When called on in class, a student has approximately three seconds to respond. If he takes longer than that, the academic atmospheric pressure rises steeply (along with his blood pressure).
If we went out on the street dressed the way we talk, we should be arrested for indecent exposure. ~ James Thurber
A poem ... begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness ... It finds the thought, and the thought finds the words. ~ Robert Frost
Some kids are verbal geysers.
Arnold demonstrated something we see all the time: kids with language problems who look as if they have attention deficits. In truth they are tuning out because it is so hard for them to understand. ... It's as if his mind shuts off and goes off when he's immersed in words and sentences. Note: I have seen this so many times: TOO MANY WORDS. I have actually seen adolescents cover their ears to protect their brains from an onslaught of words which literally hurt their ears.
Learn about the six levels of language.
