Schools for All Kinds of Minds

In May 2002, I found myself staring at the cover of Fortune magazine. The lead article was “Overcoming Dyslexia” and inside was my story. The author noticed a strange and common theme as she talked to the world’s most successful CEOs and other high achievers. Many of us seemed pretty hopeless as kids, labeled dyslexic or “learning disabled.” Yet, all of us have been enormously successful in our careers. Our different ways of learning, thinking and seeing the world have energized America’s entertainment industry, launched successful companies and brands, won Nobel Prizes and Olympic medals, and designed diverse creations, from famous works of art to Nerf balls. As Dr. Sally Shaywitz of Yale University said in that article, “Dyslexics are overrepresented in the top ranks of people who are unusually insightful, who bring a new perspective, who think out of the box” (Morris, 2002, p. 56).

The recognition of my learning differences came early. I failed second grade and spent part of my third grade year in a class of children regarded as “mentally retarded,” which goes to show how little was known of individual learning differences at that time. My school years were distinguished by invitations to leave practically every high school in Los Angeles. My parents painfully watched their child struggle to learn and tried everything they could think of to help me read, hoping my self-confidence would not completely disappear. My teachers were also frustrated. They worked hard, but too few people understood dyslexia or ADD in those days. A well meaning educator told my mother to enroll me in trade school so I could become a carpet layer.

Learning differences are far more prevalent than most people think. About one in seven kids struggle in school because of known “disabilities,” and that translates into millions of kids. Without help, the outlook is often grim. Many of these kids will be branded as intellectually inferior, and never get close to realizing their full capabilities—a major loss to themselves, their families, and our country.

I was fortunate to have parents who knew I was capable of so much more and convinced me that once I was out of school, I would succeed. I got through college because my dyslexia and ADHD fostered risk taking, problem solving, and resilience. I somehow figured out my own strategies to deal with my learning difference. I also learned that I saw things others didn’t. Working on a collaborative project with fellow students at USC’s Marshall School of Business gave me the idea that led to Kinko’s. As the group’s “gopher,” I had to make copies in the library’s reserved book room. The long lines and inconvenience triggered my entrepreneurial instincts.

For over a decade, the Orfalea Foundations have encouraged parents and schools to see all children as distinct learners with unique profiles of strengths and weaknesses. We’ve also worked tirelessly to change the public perception of specific learning conditions like dyslexia and ADD. We know that a struggle with learning does not mean you’re disabled; it means you learn differently. The goal of my autobiography, Copy This (Workman Publishing, 2005), was to provide hope and optimism to kids and their families who are feeling as frustrated in their classrooms as I did in mine.

My wife Natalie and I hold this fundamental belief: When faced with a child who learns in very different ways, you first work to discover and emphasize strengths. As I’ve learned first hand, it is your strengths that are the foundation of a successful adult life. I’ve learned to love how my mind works and firmly believe it is the reason for the success I’ve enjoyed.

This book describes an approach that will help school leaders transform our schools into learning centers for all kinds of students. The key to this approach is helping educators really understand how to prevent students from needless struggle, while building on their strengths and assets. Science and brain research are helping us all understand how people vary in their learning. All Kinds of Minds has put this knowledge into programs and resources for teachers, parents, and students. The result is a better understanding of how each of us learns and an approach to teaching that provides hope and optimism for all students, building confidence that they can learn and faith that their schools can help them.

Our world faces increasingly complex challenges every day. Yes, we need our students to graduate with the 21st century skills and knowledge that will keep our economies sound, our democracies stable, and our communities thriving. But more than ever, America needs the kinds of minds that generate new perspectives, seek solutions, and discover emerging opportunities. Those are the minds of many of the students in your schools today who, at first glance, look a lot like the struggling student I was in school. I invite you to take a second look at the individuals who walk through your school doors. Join us in helping as many kids as possible become more aware of their unique talents and more confident in their learning abilities—and help us rescue the wonderful potential that may otherwise be lost.

Millions of students will struggle in school today. Just as they do every day.

In classrooms in your school, these students will feel discouraged, misunderstood, and alone. Not because they can’t learn, but because the way they learn doesn’t align with the way they are taught.

Thousands of teachers will struggle today. Just as they do every day.

In your school and district, these teachers will feel discouraged, inadequate, and alone. Not because they can’t teach, but because they have not been able to target their teaching strategies to the varied learning profiles of their students.

Too many of our schools are unequipped for the diversity in learning that unfolds in classrooms. District policies are hampered by traditional notions of ability and unvarying approaches to meeting the high standards of curriculum, instruction, and required annual standardized testing. Educators often lack the know-how that’s emerging from the latest research on the mind, brain, and learning to adequately respond to individual student needs.

When students are taught in a way that is incompatible with how they learn, the natural strengths of their minds are neglected. This failure to reach a student’s abilities is too often portrayed as a deficiency of the individual, resulting in low self-esteem, high levels of anxiety, and disengagement with learning and school. Or we point to the inadequacy of the teacher and local schools, driving many promising educators from a profession that needs their dedication and commitment at this unprecedented time for education in our nation.

Without effective and nurturing intervention, both student and teacher may give up on school—and learning—altogether. The resulting loss of productive individuals who contribute to our society is unfathomable.

My career in education began in 1975 as a teacher of “exceptional needs” students. These were individuals who had struggled mightily in their previous classrooms or had been considered to have handicaps to such an extent that new special education classrooms were the first stop for their free and appropriate education.

Every year, children and adolescents came through my door accompanied by data and numerous other descriptors designed to help them obtain an array of special support and to help me figure out the kind of instruction they needed.

Gregory, at age twelve, had not spoken words, leading me to begin to design alternative communication strategies. This provided a starting point, but our journey together as teacher and student progressed successfully when I concentrated on finding answers to one simple question: I wonder how he learns?

What I loved about that challenging period of my teaching career was that this simple question drove everything I did in the classroom. I became an astute observer of each of my students, looking for clues as to what made them tick when they were successful at something and how they were different at home than in a school environment. Paula never spoke in the classroom and led me to believe that she was nonverbal, but she answered the phone when I had to call her home. James understood humor—from the physical play of clowns to the more sophisticated wordplay of jokes—revealing a level of conceptual understanding I may have missed by simply looking at his work or relying on his expressive language weakness. Shack could not do simple mathematical procedures in a workbook but could point out recurring mathematical patterns found with numbers and shapes in the physical world.

I sought a variety of perspectives, always hoping someone might see something that I missed. I thought of myself as a combination ethnographer and archeologist. I was pulling pieces from my “dig” into a child’s life and trying to understand a new culture of learning so I could create the right script for very unique roles that each student and I as teacher would play in our educational journey. The only way I knew to approach this unfamiliar range of learning differences was to think about using science in its richest sense—embracing wonder, a culture of inquiry, the quest for rich data and evidence-based practice. It worked. Searches yielded observable phenomena leading to patterns that led to insights into how students’ minds worked.

I was not to become an expert in a subject matter area during my education career (although I have developed a strong background in literature and social sciences). But I did become a “learner” expert, developing the know-how and tools to figure out how to successfully reach some of the most complex and puzzling students who attended the schools where I worked.

I lead All Kinds of Minds to continue this work on a large scale. I am driven by a belief that our nation will not achieve the results we desire in stopping the persistent and chronic underperformance and disengagement of so many students unless we build expertise in our education workforce to better understand the variety of ways students learn. Currently this knowledge about learning and its normal variation is primarily the domain of the clinical and scientific communities. While there have been recent efforts to broadly communicate the benefits brain research can bring to learning,1 it is unacceptable that we have not figured out how to move this body of knowledge into the world of education.

That is what All Kinds of Minds does. Since 1995, this organization, working with renowned learning expert Dr. Mel Levine, has translated the latest research from multiple disciplines into a framework to understand learning and its variations. We have shared that knowledge and how to use it to target specific teaching strategies to learners with thousands of educators through our programs and resources. With twenty-three independent studies to date that have investigated what happens when educators use this approach, we’ve gathered evidence that more students, teachers, and schools are finding success in the core business of education: learning for all kinds of minds. (See Appendix C: The Effects of the Schools Attuned® Program: A Snapshot of Research Results.)

All Kinds of Minds seeks to work with others who realize that by harnessing these new insights from the sciences on how people learn to the tools, processes, and strategies used by expert practitioners, we can make two critical contributions to education. First, we will prevent needless struggles in school for thousands of students hoping to find success at learning and life. Second, we will be the leaders who seize the opportunity to do what many national voices are suggesting America must do: create the future of learning. There is a growing and powerful argument that we must transform the educational landscape from a world of schooling to a world of learning. Educators in today’s schools need to have learning expertise in addition to content knowledge. They need this expertise not only to reach the students slipping through the cracks in schools today but to transition into the new roles that will emerge as the teaching profession becomes a learning profession in this twenty-first century.

Getting from here to there requires that those of us in current education leadership positions—principals, district administrators, coaches, mentors, and teacher leaders—reshape our role to that of a “learning leader.” It is a role that requires a dual focus of school leadership, nurturing the student and teacher struggling within today’s classroom while laying the building blocks for a new way of education that creates the personalized, customized learning journeys students and parents are beginning to demand. Learning leaders model the characteristics of this role for their faculty and make creating the conditions for teacher learning on behalf of student learning a high priority.

This book introduces an approach that today’s school leaders, in a new role as learning leader, can use to help greater numbers of students find success while shifting education to a learner-centric enterprise. I refer to it as the All Kinds of Minds model, which involves these components:

• Expertise in the science of learning, based on the understanding of eight constructs that form the mind’s ingredients for learning and the belief that differences are variation, not deviation
• Evidence gathered from multiple sources, including using a phenomenological approach as part of the data necessary to understand how specific students learn
• A problem solving model that uncovers the complexity and richness of how a child learns, identifying learning assets as well as weaknesses and discovering passions and affinities that can drive scholarship, careers, and other life choices.
• A set of five core beliefs about how all students are treated
• A commitment to align school and educational practices and policies to the way students learn and vary in their learning

How do you get started? The first step is to continue reading. Chapter One provides a larger context supporting the need for the approach presented throughout this book. Chapters Two and Three will help you introduce your faculty to an overview of the science of learning developed from findings from neuroscience, cognitive science, and behavioral science. The research has been translated into insights to help generate understanding about how the adults and students in your school are wired to learn. These findings are synthesized into neurodevelopmental knowledge that creates an overarching framework for diagnosis and informing instruction. The strategies, tactics, and examples described in Chapters Four through Seven demonstrate how to apply these insights so that the adults in your school have a better understanding of themselves as learners and can then use the approach to make personalized and successful learning plans a reality for those students that your school and district have always had trouble reaching.

We’ve designed this book to help you at a very beginning stage of implementing this approach. Specifically, you’ll find ideas throughout the book for the following:

• Acquiring and processing new information. Sidebars are included throughout each chapter, and professional development activities conclude each of the chapters. These items are intended to help learning leaders process the concepts presented, reflect on their own practice, and discover alignment with the All Kinds of Minds philosophy and approach. Once you become familiar with the questions and activities, you can consider how to utilize them in your educational setting.

• Embedding this approach to learning practices into your existing professional development structures. We assume you have existing professional learning communities, Critical Friends or Lesson Study groups, and other well-established processes around professional development in your school. (If not, that is a critical success factor to put into place before any school-level professional development can start.) The content of this book can easily be part of a formal book study, particularly when supplemented by other resources that provide deeper engagement with the neurodevelopmental constructs. Or, specific activities could be selected to assist faculty in reflecting on their own learning profiles as well as educational practices and school. By using these tools, you will assess the alignment of your current environment with the All Kinds of Minds approach.
• Testing strategies with selected students who are struggling to learn. Help teachers try applying strategies with students in your school who are struggling. Consider using the ideas in Chapters Four and Five as an additional component to your Response to Intervention program. Chapters include real-life stories of how this approach has been used by educators as well as a detailed look at how the learning framework and assessment approach is used to improve writing instruction and evaluation. With this basic foundation, faculty can acquire a deeper insight about individual learning needs and become more adept at understanding and managing learning challenges and opportunities. The result? Over time, with continued pursuit, you will have a school filled with both learning experts and subject matter scholars.

• Continued learning and advocacy. As you read through this book, make a personal commitment to embrace the “small wins” approach by identifying your first few actions. Share what you learn with colleagues. Go to the All Kinds of Minds Web site, www.allkindsofminds.org (see Appendix E for a list of resources available on the Web site). In addition to a multitude of resources, you’ll find ways to stay abreast of our growing knowledge base and to connect to other people who are energized by using this approach to support teachers as they help students who learn differently find success.

We hope that because you are reading this book, you are willing to be part of this powerful movement to bring the science of learning to the art of teaching, rescuing those students who are struggling to learn right now while transforming education for generations to come. Leaders know that what matters in learning is what happens in class, in those moments when teacher meets students. Such leaders—like you—find themselves waiting for the larger transformation to learning-driven schools while pursuing the many daily small wins that address the urgency of the struggling student.

Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College in New York City, stated this eloquently when he wrote that “today’s reformers have one foot in the old world and one in the new, inchoate world of education. Experimenting and pushing, they must sustain our schools until they can be replaced by the ones we need for the future.”2 While the large, systemic change desired may be beyond our immediate grasp, learning leaders who embrace a science of learning to show that it is indeed possible to match pedagogy to a student’s learning profile will achieve something equally important for our times. They will save the lives of the far too many children we continue to lose in the industrial era, factory-inspired model of today’s schools.

Today’s school leaders, willing to work with a foot in each world, are in the best position to harness bring the energy of these pioneering new ideas from the science of learning to the realities of classrooms. They can better meet the needs of today’s students so vulnerable to school failure while accelerating this transformation. We’re inspired by the exciting visions for student learning that so many of you are generating. All Kinds of Minds hopes to harness your genius and enthusiasm and share your stories through our Web site to spark a much larger dialogue that can move the nation from an education agenda to a learning agenda.

We are well aware of the enormously challenging work of changing school culture and practices and are not so naïve to think that picking up a new book is sufficient support for leaders engaged in these efforts. This book is not about leadership nor is it a detailed approach for a school improvement effort. Rather, it is a framework to help all learners—teachers and students—understand how they learn and how they can learn better. It’s a critical first step to discovering how to personalize learning. To that end, this book is intended to provide some starting points for this dialogue for the future, as well as some immediate actions you can take to use this knowledge about learning with some of the different kinds of minds in your school.

We invite you to use the information and strategies in this book to bring success to all the learners in your school—teachers and students—and add to the growing portraits of possibility for educational change.

—Mary-Dean Barringer, CEO, All Kinds of Minds