Drs. Brock & Fernette Eide on the Unique Advantages of the Dyslexic Brain

Debbie:

Hey Brock and Fernette, welcome to the podcast.

Brock and Fernette Eide:

Hi, Debbie. Thanks. Thanks for having us.

Debbie:

As I was saying before I hit record, I kind of can’t believe that you haven’t been on the show before now. Obviously, your work in the space of dyslexia has been, you know, game changing and has just made such an impact over the past decade plus around the world with your book, The Dyslexic Advantage and the research and just the way you’ve reframed the conversation about dyslexia. So I would actually love to make sure my audience really kind of understands your why and how you came to this work. Would you guys mind just giving us a little bit of a brief origin story about how you came to be doing this?

Brock Eide:

Okay. So our work in dyslexia really came out of our own personal experience. And it started about 25 years ago now when our own children started having learning challenges. So Fernette and I were junior faculty at the University of Chicago and we’re not planning on pursuing learning disorders as a specialty. I was doing work in medical ethics and Fernette was doing work in neurology. And our children had started having difficulties that we were having a hard time understanding and a long road sort of led us to recognize that the kind of approaches that were being taken to figure out why kids were different and why they learned in different ways seemed to be overly restrictive and sort of not taking advantage of the kinds of information that was available to understand learning and diversity and difference. And so over the course of a few years, we gradually migrated in our own practices to working more and more with people with learning differences. And then we decided to join together and do that as a specialty a little over 20 years ago together. 

Fernette Eide:

And I’d like to add that we also recognize the strengths that were present in our child and children and just recognize that the nature of health and medicine is such that they focus on what they think is the weakness and it didn’t really register the fullness of the child. And I think that feeling when we were young, it just grew and grew. And I think over time, I think we talked about everything and from a neurologist, had a different perspective. My dad also was a rehabilitation neurologist and just sort of not capitalizing on the strengths that were there at the beginning just seemed like kind of a big miss. So that’s how our clinic evolved. 

Brock Eide:

Yeah. And I think as we started our clinic, one of the big advantages that turned out later was that because there were two of us, we had to figure out something for both of us to do when we were seeing patients and families. So one of us would go in with the child and or the person being examined, and the other would sit out with the family or the spouse and talk over. So we ended up getting these really extensive histories and they involved the history of the person that we were testing, but also the family. And we started hearing the same stories over and over again out in the room where we were talking with the families in the same way that we were seeing the same patterns again and again in the testing room. And the stories we were hearing weren’t just stories of problems or challenges or things, but they were always sort of, know, grandma or grandpa started out slow in school, but, you know, by the end they ended up becoming an engineer and architect, or they became a machinist and opened up their own shop and ended up opening a whole string of those, or we kept hearing these tales again and again. And there were so many commonalities in them that that really got us thinking about the fact that we were seeing something where the challenges and the strengths might be connected. So we started going in, this is probably almost about 20 years ago now looking in the literature and medical literature for evidence that there might be a connection between the challenges and the strengths, particularly in dyslexia where these patterns were the most prominent. And that led to the publication of the first edition of The Dyslexic Advantage in 2011. 

Fernette Eide:

Our book starts off with this metaphor: if you look at a telescope the wrong way, then things look, you know, very, you know, it’s a flip in perspective, whether something looks very small or something looks very big. And that aspect of the lenses being really different and how you actually see a human child was kind of how we built the practice. 

Debbie:

I just want to say like talking about strengths the way that you did and really looking at these kids through that lens. you guys were true trailblazers in this space because it, you know, when the first edition came out, that is not the lens through which neurodivergence learning disabilities was being perceived at all. And so I really think of the Dyslexic Advantage as being really a definitive book and changing the conversation. And I’m sure that’s why it just resonated globally. And so much has changed, right? In the neurodivergent space. I launched till eight and a half years ago to start this conversation about parents raising these kind of complex neurodivergent kids and shift it for parents and it’s changed so much even in that time. I would love to get a sense of why, not why, I would love to get a sense of the urgency or the desire to really update the dyslexic advantage in terms of what has shifted, like what are some of the biggest things that you’re like, we gotta get in there and update this book.

Brock Eide:

You know, I think for us the biggest thing was that we were seeing all of this research that was being accumulated that really supported the thesis of the first book and that wasn’t being recognized within the dyslexia community because it was really coming from other kinds of researchers. It was coming from people primarily that were researching creativity and people also that were researching really fundamental areas that had to do with memory. And so that was just off everybody’s radar, but it was right on target in terms of the mind strengths framework. And in the first book, we talked about the four mind strengths, material reasoning, which is 3D spatial reasoning, interconnected reasoning, which is basically seeing connections and relationships between concepts and ideas and systems, narrative reasoning, which is seeing things in terms of stories, cases, and examples, rather than in terms of formulas or algorithms. And then dynamic reasoning, which is kind of reasoning across time, mental time travel, seeing how processes change over time, making predictions, dealing with changing situations. And we talked a little bit about mechanism in the first book, but there was a lot that was still unknown. And with the strength, the spatial reasoning strength in particular, we talked in the first book about something called grid cells, which was basically research that came out of England and Norway that suggested that within the part of the brain that deals with experience-based memories, memories are organized of space like a matrix, like a big jungle gym in the brain. 

And it works almost like a three-dimensional GPS where there are cells that are called grid cells that kind of make this matrix. And then there are cells that are called place cells, which sort of highlight different locations within that matrix where certain things have happened or been experienced. And this system allows you to really recreate experience in your mind of spatial things. And you can use it also to imagine spatial things. The interesting thing for us over the next few years was, they found that you can use the same kind of grid cell place cell system to map concepts. How just is something? How fair is something? How beautiful is something? How long is something? How big is something? All of these things use the same kind of comparative matrix system. And the important thing is that you use it to simulate, to recreate experience, to experience things in the same kind of modality that it was initially experienced. So it’s kind of like analog reasoning, where you’re reasoning about sizes by thinking about shapes and positions, and you’re reasoning about concepts by thinking about cases and examples. And the brain uses a system for time. It uses it for concepts. And all of the mind strengths actually turned out to be related to the same way of processing experience using these sorts of systems that are related to memory for personal experience. And so that was why we really wanted to update the book, is to talk about the fact that it really looked now like dyslexia is a specialization in this kind of experience based memory.

Debbie:

So fascinating. So I’m wondering if we could even just so we’re all on the same page. I’ve certainly done episodes about dyslexia before, but just maybe even expanding the definition of what it is, because in reading your book and even just hearing your response to that last question, there are so many aspects to the dyslexic brain I found fascinating and these different ways of processing, you know, and experiencing things and capturing information and these strengths, it really is incredible when you start getting into it. So for someone listening who’s like, well, it’s just having trouble reading or this kind of very simple definition, how do you kind of define dyslexia?

Brock Eide:

So one of the things that we approached differently was we started thinking instead of trying to define dyslexia, we tried to define what dyslexic minds were like. And so instead of starting with an abstract conception of a disorder of reading and then trying to characterize the reading disorder, we tried to look at people who are experiencing this reading disorder and then think about all the different things that characterized their thinking and processing of information. So not just their reading, but just how they did all sorts of things. And so we’ve come up with a different kind of definition because of that. So you write the traditional definition of dyslexia, the one that’s been adopted by the International Dyslexia Association and other organizations focuses on difficulties decoding and encoding. So breaking down words into their component sounds, figuring out how to sound them out, translating sounds back into letters for spelling it. It does a couple things right it focuses on Discrepancy that is a difference in the ability with which kids are able to learn to read compared with their Ability to do higher level reasoning and other sorts of things And it does other things that are wrong It has kind of an excessive focus on the sound processing system or phonological awareness, which is certainly a key component of dyslexia, but it’s not the central part of it. When we approach dyslexia from the other direction and think about what characterizes people with dyslexia, it’s looking from a scientific standpoint, like the lowest level differences actually involve variations in the way that messages are communicated from cell to cell in the brain. And we don’t need to go into that in great detail, but the bottom line is that it looks like in people who are dyslexic, they process signals with a little broader range. So they have problems with very fine detail perception. But the flip side of that is that they have great strengths in holistic big picture perception. So there’s this kind of trade-off between detail and big picture. As a result of the detailed challenges, you get all the things that are traditionally associated with dyslexia, like problems with decoding and spelling and reading fluency. But you also get other issues that are related to the same kind of difficulties with detailed processing. So problems automating a lot of basic skills. So kids with dyslexia typically will have problems with handwriting, with written mechanics, with math facts. So the majority of kids have problems with all those things, not all dyslexic kids, but most do. And those difficulties are due to this general problem with detail and with automaticity, not just the phonological processing system. The interesting thing is this bias toward holistic big picture thinking, this bias and shift towards conscious memory instead of automatic memory that results because kids are not as good at automating things. Those are the things that lead to the strengths. And there’s a whole big story about how that happens that we tell in the book. But in our definition of dyslexia, we see all of these things as connected. We see a bias towards big picture rather than fine detail processing that leads to both challenges and strengths. And we think that that part is very important to capture because people are missing out on the significance of what it means when you have a bright child who’s having difficulty reading. It doesn’t mean that this is a child who’s just defective in a local area, but it means this is a child with all kinds of promise in other areas that we should be looking at and developing. 

Fernette Eide:

And there are a lot of things, for instance, in language where you will see a student who will make errors when reading aloud, but actually be very strong at comprehending the passage if read silently. So there are aspects in language. But then they’re also similar with other kinds of processes where you can have mistakes with simple two-dimensional pattern matches, but be able to grasp three-dimensional rotational tests that are really quite difficult. so understanding from the very beginning, there were these discrepancies between highs and lows. One thing was weak. Another thing was really high. And understanding that that’s the picture from the beginning. And in fact, some of these processes, like Brock mentioned, that may be weak at automaticity and rote memorization may actually be driving the creative side to come up with new ideas and workarounds that other people hadn’t even thought of before.

Debbie:

Gosh, it’s so fascinating. I’m wondering about some of the challenge factors that you described in the book and these discrepancies like visual processing, working memory, processing speed. I didn’t know that I knew or connected the processing speed was related to or often a challenge that came with dyslexia. Is it just like any other sort of neural divergence in that dyslexic students may have different varying levels of discrepancies with these different challenges, or is it kind of like a checklist to get identified as dyslexic? You have to have challenges in these different domains.

Brock Eide:

Now there’s a huge degree of diversity and variation. In the revised version of the book, we use the image of a mountain, in particular, Mount Rainier, which is very close to where we live here in Seattle, and this kind of 3D conical mountain. And the fact that your experience on the mountain, just like your experience with dyslexia, depends on multiple dimensions of difference. So with dyslexia, depending on what your processing speed is, depending on what your working memory is, depending on what your phonological processing and your phonemic awareness and your speed of naming and multiple other factors actually, your actual clinical appearance and the things that you struggle with are going to be different. And those things all occur within the context of overall language skills, overall intelligence and 

personality differences, things that you’re interested in, the things that you like to focus on, the things that you find engaging, your executive functioning, your attention, all of those things. Temperament. temperament. All of those things are going to impact the expression of your personal differences related to dyslexia. So there’s a huge spectrum of appearances of people with dyslexia. And, you know, when we first organized a conference for people with dyslexia back in 2012, we had brilliant, amazing dyslexic people who came and they all were blown away by how many things they had in common. But sometimes they were also blown away by how different they could be. We had one gentleman who was a brilliant businessman, but he was very kind of nonverbal. He was a real imagery guy who could just see things in his mind and then know what to do. We had another guy who was an attorney who was very verbal and very creative. And they sort of looked at each other and kind of wondered how they had the same sort of thing. But over time, you could sort of see both the commonalities and the diversity. And that’s really what we deal with with the Slikes as a broad range of commonalities, but also a broad range of diversities.

Debbie:

Yeah. I’m wondering, you know, a lot of the listeners of this show are raising twice exceptional kids, which is, you know, more and more understood, I feel like in recent years, and certainly was back when I was raising a little 2E child. And I’m just wondering, has that impacted your work, this kind of deeper understanding of the way that people can have multiple exceptionalities?

Fernette Eide:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, in our clinic, too, I think things spread by word of mouth. We had some highly gifted and then profoundly gifted kids or families that ended up referring fellow friends of the families. And so we were able to see some really spectacularly gifted individuals in our clinic and be able to see both the frustrations that occur in conventional classrooms and the difficulty of fits, but also how they could really flourish with the right combinations and families that support them and things like that. So yeah, I think it’s a, you know, we were also at one point in time on the board of SENG, also addressing social emotional aspects of gifted and talented. So I think that that also helped inform our…you know, we also had kids that we could see if all the emphasis was on what they couldn’t do, pencil skills and processing speed. But they didn’t see, you know, an encyclopedic knowledge of, you know, African art or something like that, how important it was to the child and as well as to, you know, education. 

Brock Eide:

I think really for us, the fact that our clinic was so enriched with twice exceptional kids really helped open the window to this whole field because it raised it in such a stark manner that even we could not ignore it. And it was actually the twice exceptional kids that sort of led to our first contribution to the field of dyslexia was the notion of stealth dyslexia, which is often now called resilient dyslexia. But this notion that dyslexia and the gifted often presents in a different way than the typical sort of checklists define dyslexia. We were seeing kids that were reading with good comprehension, very complex books, silently, and they were told that they couldn’t possibly be dyslexic because of that, and yet their spelling was atrocious, oftentimes completely unreadable, their decoding was non-existent. If you gave them words that they would handle without difficulty in a passage, they couldn’t identify them when they were seeing them in isolation because they were using context. And this entire ability to infer meaning from a reading passage because of the context, because of your very strong abilities to read holistically and the very strong degrees of background knowledge that these kids have was obscuring the fact that they really were dyslexic and struggling at the low level in their processing and led them to fly beneath the radar of detection was how we came up with the stealth name. Looking at twice exceptional kids is a wonderful laboratory in a way for understanding learning because it’s learning painted in such large letters that it just makes certain things really obvious. 

Fernette Eide: 

And yet there are a lot of people who miss it. You know, mean, but for us, it was striking. it’s a, when you see that, you know, you know that there’s an asset and sometimes these need to be protected, you know, when they go out into the world and other people don’t recognize it or actually feel, you know, kind of challenged by it.

Brock Eide:

Yeah, I shouldn’t obscure the fact that a lot of parents have frustrating experience by me talking about how obvious it is. But to us, the phenomenon of a child who conceptually at age 12 was doing college level classes in astrophysics and yet couldn’t read aloud from a where’s spot type book was just one of the most interesting phenomena to us as scientists and as physicians. And it’s still amazing to me that people can look at that and try to deny the existence of dyslexic challenges and not be fascinated by these amazing minds that show this really interesting pattern. And we feel just incredibly privileged to be able to work with this group of people for the last 20 or 25 years now. It’s been the most interesting as well as most fulfilling things that we could possibly do. 

Fernette Eide:

Yeah, I would say great families. And a lot of times the kids were so bright that they just needed to be put in contact with the right information. You needed to explain it. And a lot of times you could see that realization just taking place because bam, that’s what they needed. But you can go a long time with people to give you bad information and exterior the wrong way. You know, obviously that’s why the whole field needs to broaden because it’s not, you know, you need to look for it. I think also learning differences, we had a number of situations where the parents adopted the child, the parents were so different from the child, but they wanted to understand. And that was really helpful because, you know, some of these differences are so counterintuitive to how you may have learned that, that you just need to be put in contact with the right information. The child needs to understand themselves. And that was what the satisfying aspect of our clinic was. And then now, because we’re 20 years later, so just to these seven-year-olds grow up to be 27-year-olds is just kind of really neat.

Debbie:

Yeah, yeah, that’s very cool. And that’s something I really appreciated about your book too, is it is so it’s very readable. Like you share so many stories of people that you’ve worked with and just kind of case studies, but in a way that really helps us understand the strengths and, and what this can look like over a lifetime. So I appreciated that. I actually want to pivot to strengths. One of the quotes that jumped out at me in your book was actually a quote from Thomas West who wrote Thinking Like Einstein. And it was that “dyslexia is so common at MIT that it’s locally known as the MIT disease.” So that jumped out at me just because we know the students at MIT and the incredible strengths that they have and the things that they’re working on and studying. So I’d love it if you could spend just a few minutes. We certainly can’t use, you have chapters and chapters in your book on these mind strengths, but maybe just give us a little bit of an insight into the material reasoning, the interconnected reasoning, narrative reasoning, dynamic reasoning. Maybe pick one or two of those and give an example of what that strength looks like and how it might show up.

Brock Eide:

Sure. So material reasoning is really reasoning about objects in three dimensional space. So three dimensional spatial reasoning can also think of as, and we talked a little bit earlier about the way that this is accomplished in the brain with this kind of grid system that mirrors three dimensional space. This can be used for all sorts of things. So anything that you can imagine existing in a real or imaginary space. And I think one of the things that we really tried to stress this time in the revised edition of the book is that all of the mind strengths deal with mental simulations. So it’s replaying things in the mind. It’s recreating experiences. It’s taking little bits of things that you’ve experienced in the past and recombining those in interesting ways to create understanding, to create imagination, to create new ways of recombining things together. With spatial reasoning, you can do physics with it, you can do design with it, you can do planning a scene for a movie with it, anything that you can think of in terms of three dimensional space is assisted with this kind of three dimensional spatial reasoning. So, you know, it’s useful in just about anything that you can think of. Strength for interconnected reasoning is the ability to see connections between things, the ability to see relationships, but it’s also the ability to look from different perspectives and see things, you know, the same thing from a different perspective and connect perspectives into a broader, more holistic, big picture view. It’s characterized again by a sort of top-down understanding, a big picture understanding as opposed to a bottom-up detailed understanding. The ability to see analogies and metaphors, how one thing is like another thing, comparing concepts, seeing how things are joined together. 

So in the book, we talked about a naturalist, John Muir Laws, who talked about going out and sitting in a natural environment and just absorbing everything that was going on around him and just kind of intuiting all the connections between things, between the things he was hearing and the things that he was seeing and the things that he was feeling. You know, nature is a great example of a big connected system. And we talked about the man who first sort of proposed that the entire environment that the world exists in forms a big kind of system that’s balanced and kind of resetting and keeps existing in harmony with itself. You notice all the systematic aspects between the chemistry in the air and the chemistry in the oceans and all of the different processes going on. And so if you look at a lot of these big understandings of how systems of things work, and this is kind of the connection with MIT where they really teach systems reasoning based in large part on the work of a guy named Robert Wiener who is also dyslexic himself. And they think in systems based on how things are connected together and how one thing is going to impact another. Narrative reasoning, again, is reasoning about that has a kind of a flavor of a story. So it’s reasoning that uses story based elements like narrative, like character, like motivation, like time. And it’s thinking through examples, through cases, rather than through isolated principles or abstractions or definitions or formulas. And using stories can be done in all sorts of applications. You can tell stories as a counselor, as a salesman, as a teacher, as a person who’s involved in actually selling stories and making movies or music or poetry or any other kind of thing. You can use stories as an attorney in a courtroom to try to persuade people as a minister. So all of these kinds of ways of communicating information through story, through cases and examples, rather than breaking things down into abstractions. And then dynamic reasoning is really the ability to see how things change over time by mentally simulating how processes carried over and over in a certain kind of way, going forward in time or going backward in time will play out. And that’s really useful kind of in the short term when you’re involved in a situation where there’s a lot of variables that are changing rapidly and you can’t just sort of like sit down and take out a piece of paper and write down, you know, all the pluses on one side and the minuses on the other side and then try to come up with a formula that expresses what you think is going to happen. But it really is taking all of the experiences that you’re experiencing right now and then imaginatively traveling forward or backward in time and seeing where you’re going and where you came from that way. All of these processes involve this process of mental simulation, which is basically taking experience and using it imaginatively and creatively to understand the world. rather than just doing abstractions.

I think this is really important for people with kids to understand. And it explains why dyslexia is sort of a late blooming talent field. Because everything is based on experience. It takes a while to accumulate experience. And to get enough raw materials to reason in this way, you have to go out and encounter the world and have some experience underneath your belt, notice for thousands of years, you know, we have, you know, 10 year old, chest prodigies or musical prodigies, but we don’t have 10 year old prodigies in political science or government, because, know, some things are based on formulas. They’re based on rules. Other things are based on experience and using experience to project and dyslexic people really thrive in those areas that require thinking based on experience. 

Fernette Eide:

And I’d also like to say that it’s really common when you’ve got these gifts that Brock talks about to both underestimate what these students, these twice exceptional students can do, as well as overestimate some of the kinds of quantity of homework and things like that. And that’s the dilemma is because often conceptual thinking is way far ahead you know, problem solving may be much higher than say decoding or math facts or things like that. And that’s the thing. It’s the paradox because the high highs are really brilliant. And if you don’t recognize that, then you’re trapping the student into feeling, you know, they don’t, you know, they’re already failing and it’s only the third grade kind of thing, you know. And, you know, a lot of parents will notice, you know, the offhand remark, the persistence that a child will spend on things that they’re fascinated by or just have a passion for. And those things are really important for keys to what their talents are. It’s like it’s a diamond in the rough. You can see it. It’s unusual. They love it. And it may be years ahead of where they are as a child.

Debbie:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, first of all, I’m going to thank you, Brock, for walking us through those strengths. And that was very generous of you to kind of share that with us. And I want listeners to know that there are really detailed explanations of the strengths of the new research with regards to that strength. And also what some of the trade-offs are because they come with the awareness of those strengths. There are some trade-offs that it’s good for the dyslexic person to understand about themselves, but it is such a reframe. It’s so inspiring and not in this kind of superpower way, which there’s often a lot of pushback that ADHD is a superpower, this is my superpower, but these are genuine, incredible strengths and to really understand them, I think can be so empowering for us as parents raising kids with these learning disabilities and for our kids themselves to kind of really know themselves. I wonder if we could just spend a few minutes talking about the dyslexic self identity. So towards the end of the book, you wrote that there are two reasons to believe that dyslexia will be an important part of a dyslexic person’s self concept, whether they embrace it or not, but first is that the cognitive differences create these distinctive strengths and challenges that you’re talking about. And that also being dyslexic has been shown to have a lot of effects and really impact the self image of a dyslexic person. So could you talk a little bit about that self identity piece? It’s something we talk a lot about here at Tilt.

Brock Eide:

Yeah, I think it’s really important for people with dyslexia to embrace their dyslexic identity because it’s the only thing that provides context for understanding the trade-offs, for understanding the challenges that you experience. simply to try to incorporate incapacity in certain things, you know, skills that other people find easy without understanding as it’s a trade off puts you automatically in that deficit model and that model of thinking that you’re just deficient in some way, as opposed to the fact that your settings are just adjusted to a different optimization. You know, it’s not a fault in your radio that you’re listening to one channel versus another channel. It’s just a matter of tuning it to a different frequency. And people with dyslexia are tuned in a different way. They’re tuned to be optimized for a different set of functions. And it makes much, much more sense rather than trying to adapt yourself to a set of expectations and a set of standards that were not created with you in mind or with your processing in mind and saying, know, this is how I should be makes much more sense to understand how you really are and what you’re optimized for, and then try to become the best version of that that you can be. And that’s really our entire message with the Dyslexic Advantage and our entire reason for writing the book was to get people thinking about how to optimize what they are rather than trying to become something entirely different.

Debbie:

So one of the things I heard you say, I don’t if it was in your book or another interview I heard with you, you mentioned that 20% of students are dyslexic. And you said that a third of the population learns better in the ways that dyslexic people learn. And that jumped out at me. And just kind of reading through your book and thinking as you’re talking about the way that you talk about learning and how the typical approaches, right, this rote memorization and then regurgitating facts, doesn’t really serve dyslexic students. And, you know, I’m thinking it doesn’t really serve any students. So I’m wondering if you have thoughts for parents who are raising kids with dyslexia who want to be advocating in schools, thoughts for them on how and what they should be pushing for to kind of not just serve their own kids, but how can we kind of get everybody involved that this is, there’s so much here that we can do that would actually support most students in the way that they are learning and approaching education.

Fernette Eide:

I think you get information, as much information as you can. I mean, I think there’s, it’s a challenging area because if your child is very different from you, you know, a lot of the solutions for them may be not your solutions. And so there’s a little bit of humility that needs to come into play when you’re, when you’re trying to understand your child first. But it’s just kind of like, you put a, make sure you’ve got your, your own mask on first before you do your child. And then the next step is a teacher. So first make sure that you get the information that you need to. Sometimes it’s other parents, sometimes it’s a professional, so you understand what the issues are. And a powerful advocate, you’ve got to try not to lose your temper, is what I would say, because it’s a huge emotional issue. And you can see the consequences of a bad match in school. And yet, you know, the teacher often has an impossible task and they may not get it, I would say, too. They may not understand what you see or what you’ve learned about and know how to translate that in the classroom. So in some cases, it’s helpful, you know, to really have someone else to have a sounding board about, know, to who walks the walk that you’re going through. And I think things like your tilt parenting, it’s just a great idea when you hear stories and you hear strategies. It’s really helpful. But the thing is, the school, the teacher, they all want your student to be successful. And so it’s a really delicate business because often you need to kind of, it’s not uncommon. See, when we actually had to advocate in the schools for our children, it’s not uncommon that they may say, you may say, this is what my student needs. We had an assessment, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they may only you know, say, we’ll give you half or something like that. The half won’t really help them, you know. You’ve got to understand negotiation skills. You’ve got to try to find things that are win-win. And once they actually try things or try things out and see how they go, because sometimes a student, you know, when they start experiencing success, I mean, it’s contagious, you know. The teacher’s happy, you’re happy, everyone’s happy, you know. And, you know, it just might be that you have to solve the problem solve a little bit. Look for accommodations. Give your students some practice with accommodations at home before starting them in the classroom and things like that. But it’s negotiation skills and it’s a challenging thing for many parents because it’s so tied up with high stakes. 

Brock Eide:

I would also suggest that one of the things that limits the ability of schools to kind of flexibly accommodate kids with these divergent learning styles is that they don’t really have a strong grasp of what the alternatives are for learning and thinking and reasoning. And if parents really want to educate themselves in a way that can help them explain their child to the school, then look in the chapters in our book, for example, on education at the end, the chapter where we talk with Dr. Helen Taylor about specialization in exploration, the chapters where we talk about kind of automatic versus conscious learning, the different kinds of memory styles that characterize dyslexia. If you can become conversant in those and really explain to people the difference between experience-based forms of learning and kind of formula-based rote types of learning. Then you can explain what kinds of educational experiences are going to be really useful for your child. You can explain ways of demonstrating what they know that fit better with their manner of thinking than doing an abstract essay, for example. You can start to have a real dialogue and say, you know, my child is really geared much more to learning by doing and experiencing things rather than memorizing lists of things. They’re really good at convergence, at divergent reasoning, at coming up with different alternatives, different possibilities for things. They’re very imaginative and creative rather than focusing on really detailed things that are taken out of a larger context. You know, they’re good at thinking about how things connect and how things relate to each other rather than really focusing on just the attributes or characteristics of one single thing in isolation. And the more you really understand about this learning specialization, the more you can really engage productively with the school to say, know, what we really want to be doing with our child is building them up in these areas that they’re good at and seeing how we can kind of adapt the education to kind of fit that a little bit better. Not trying to get them out of doing things, but trying to get them into things that are better fit.

Debbie:

So good. Thank you for that. And I’m just going to mention for listeners, I’m going to post in the show notes an episode I did on advocacy, in which we do talk a lot about it being a negotiation. When you’re working with schools, my friend relates it to being a used car salesman, like we’re going to make a deal. We’re just going to have to keep working until we get there. And I will also have a link to the episode I did with Micki Boas, who wrote a book called One in Five that really kind of chronicles her story of advocating for her student with dyslexia in a public school system. So, okay, so I’m wrapping up here. So the book is called The Dyslexic Advantage, Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain. It’s revised and updated. And my last question, and I’m gonna let you go, for a listener of this show who is early on in their journey, maybe they’ve just discovered their child has learning disabilities or they’re undergoing testing. What would you really want them to take away from this and to know moving forward?

Fernette Eide:

I would join our community dyslexicadvantage.org and also check out the free Mind Strengths Inventory at neurolearning.com. 

Brock Eide:

Yeah, and I would think, you know, just from a big picture perspective that they should view the whole process as one of understanding, first of all, you know, figuring out who your child is meant to be. It’s so often couched in terms of, you let’s find out what’s wrong and what the, you know, what the list of things that we need to fix are. And that’s just the wrong way to look at it for the vast majority of these kids. What you’re really looking to do is to see what their settings are, to see what, you know, how their brain works, how they learn best, what they do best. And then work with that to make them the best version of what they are that you possibly can.

Debbie:

So good. Thank you. Thank you so much. I so appreciated this conversation. As usual, I went a little long here, but I just am really grateful for the work that you do in the world for your contributions to this community and to people everywhere navigating learning disabilities. So thank you so much for everything you shared. And yeah, I just appreciate it.

Brock and Fernette Eide:

Thanks, Debbie. Yeah, thanks for having us.