Learning Differences Across the Lifespan

Mike:
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Cindy Lopez:
Welcome. My name is Cindy Lopez, the host of this CHC podcast, Voices of Compassion. We hope you find a little courage, feel connected and experience compassion every time you listen. Today’s episode is proudly sponsored by Adobe, and we’re so thankful for their support of this Voices of Compassion podcast.

We often think of learning differences as challenges faced in school, but the reality is that learning differences impact people throughout their lives with implications far beyond the classroom, like home relationships, work and family, just to name a few. So it’s important to learn strategies and skills that apply throughout the lifespan. And today we welcome Dr. Nicole Ofiesh, Director of the Schwab Learning Center at CHC, as she shares pro tips developed throughout her decades of leveraging neurodiversity and settings from kindergarten to college and from classroom to corporate. Welcome Dr. Ofiesh. Thank you, Cindy. It’s nice to be back for another podcast episode of CHC’s Voices of Compassion. I think we all at CHC have a lot of compassion and empathy for the individuals that we work with, and I’m looking forward to talking about learning differences across the lifespan today Yeah. Thanks so much for being with us today, and as Nicole noted, she has been a guest on our podcast in the past.  So Nicole, what do we mean when we talk about learning differences or learning disabilities, which we also refer to as LD so our listeners just know that we might refer to it as LD as we continue our conversation, but let’s define that before we start talking about the impact of that throughout our lives.

Dr. Nicole Ofiesh:
I think that’s a really great question. A lot of people use the term learning differences to soften the term disability, but the way I refer to learning differences is an umbrella term that captures all the different types of conditions that can impact learning. So that might be autism spectrum disorder. It might be generalized anxiety disorder. It might be a specific learning disability such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, or learning disability not otherwise specified. It could be ADHD, which contrary to what many people think is not actually a learning disability. It’s a separate category of a learning difference. So learning differences is an umbrella term for all the conditions that can impact learning at school and work, and a learning disability is a specific condition that falls under the umbrella term of learning differences.

I think that’s important because we hear the term a lot, learning differences. We hear learning disabilities and I heard from you first, um, the term learner variation and so basically just pointing to the fact that we do all learn differently. Our brains are all wired differently. And so, to our listeners, you might hear that LD is referred to in different ways. So thank you Nicole for just explaining that. I think that’s helpful. So now let’s talk about how learning differences impact development – so whether it’s cognitive or social or emotional, how is that all impacted?

Dr. Nicole Ofiesh:
Well, learning differences are first typically recognized when a child enters preschool or kindergarten. We think of it often as something that impacts the way a person thinks and learns, but it can also be something that impacts their social development. For example, if someone with dyslexia because of the way their brain is hardwired cognitively is having trouble learning, and they’re watching the rest of their peers successfully learn to read, and they’re the one or two people in the class who are not figuring out the c-a-t is cat and they’re watching everybody else succeed at what seems like a relatively simply learning skill that’s gonna impact their social development right then and there. They’re going to feel a lack of sense of belonging or community. The whole concept of learning is something that brings us into our first understanding of community and belonging, and if you are not learning with the rest of your community in the same way that often has an impact on how you socially interact and your confidence in a social situation – that in turn can cause anxiety or stress or depression depending on this level and severity of what the learning difference is. Even if something along the lines of autism spectrum disorder, which manifests typically socially first opposed to cognitively, then you’re going to see, the social development and emotional development probably precede any issues with cognitive development. So the answer to your question is, you know, those three areas: cognition, social development, emotional development definitely intersect. And the one that shows up the most or first depends on the nature of the learning difference, and also the nature of the school environment, right? Because we always wanna remember that the environment really dictates whether or not a child can thrive and succeed and ameliorate the differences. I always like to point out that it’s best not to point the finger at the child first and really think about how we can sculpt the environment around the child to help them succeed.

Cindy Lopez:
Yeah, that’s so important, and thank you for also noting that those areas of development, cognition, social emotional development all overlap and intersect, and for our listeners that’s what we do at CHC. Our expertise is around the intersection of learning and mental health.

So you alluded to this, Nicole, when you said that typically we start to see learning differences in younger children, preschool as they start school, and I think we typically consider learning differences, LD as a childhood disorder as well as a school based disorder. Is that really accurate?

Dr. Nicole Ofiesh:
I don’t think that’s accurate. I think we see it first because kids don’t go to work. The first 18 years of child’s life is school and home life and maybe being on the athletic field in one way or another, or in an art class or wherever their gifts and talents might lie, but we certainly, for obvious reasons, don’t see it in the working world. And who knows, right? If this was back, uh, hundreds and hundreds of years ago where half the children in society went to school and half the children in society went to work, I mean, who knows? We could conceivably be calling it a working disability, right who knows? The point I’m trying to make is that I think we call the term learning disability, a learning disability because we see it manifest predominantly at school where children don’t have choices about what they do and how they articulate their strengths and gifts. There’s a structured curriculum that’s dictated by the state, and we expect students to all be moving towards common goals, unlike college and work, where you get to begin to choose, uh, how to articulate your strengths and gifts and lessen the demands of what’s hard for a person to do. So you know, your actual question is it a school-based disorder? I think we see it at school, but it’s actually life-long. So the term learning disorder presents a lot of myths around what the condition is. It shows up at home. It shows up as soon as a child or an adult wakes up in the morning and does everything to get through their day.

Cindy Lopez:
Yeah, so, so given that it occurs throughout one’s life, and it looks different depending on where you are as you noted. When you’re in school, elementary school, middle school, high school where you’re, you know, trying to work on a prescribed curriculum, it might be more challenging. You might see more issues arise, but as you grow, and become an adult and go into college and become part of the workplace as Nicole said, you get to choose and so you’re choosing hopefully things, you know, that you feel good about. So what do learning differences look like across the lifespan?

The answer to that question depends on the nature of the learning difference. So let’s talk specifically about a condition such as dyslexia, just for an example. So in elementary school it will show up a difficulty with sound symbol correspondence or remembering what words look like. Having challenges, actually learning how to read or how to write, and spell. It depends on the nature of the dyslexia. We know through a lot of research being done all over the country in the world right now, that there are different kinds of dyslexia.

Dr. Nicole Ofiesh:
So it shows up in the elementary age, in the elementary schools as really with that initial construct of reading, cause that’s what we’re teaching in elementary school, right? We’re teaching actually what is the basic skill of reading? How does one read? Middle school now assumes that students have cracked the code on how to read. So middle school is all about reading for comprehension. The text gets longer, it gets denser, and we’re really teaching students to read for comprehension and read for meaning. So if a student hasn’t learned how to read fluently, we’re really going to see that around fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth grade, where the demands of reading and the support is not about how to crack the code anymore. It’s about how to use reading to comprehend. Then we move into the high school and young adult years, and it is now presumed that a person has cracked the code in reading. They know how to read for comprehension, and it’s all about the application of reading to use in skills. So what does that mean? We assume that they know how to read. We assume they know how to read for meaning, and now you have to just do something with that knowledge. So it’s about applying reading for higher order thinking and applying it to concepts. Reading actually becomes a very big assumption to do projects, to do research papers. So it’s no longer taught in terms of decoding or comprehension. You’re supposed to be reading fast, you’re supposed to be reading for comprehension, and it’s all about the application taxonomy, and that too happens as an adult, right? So now you’re in the workforce. Nobody’s thinking about teaching you how to read or how to read faster. It’s just if you’ve got 50, 60 emails in your inbox, you’re expected to read them, and you’re expected to read all the lines, all the details, and remember it. So that’s how it plays out across the lifespan, right? If you are an individual with dyslexia and you’ve even cracked the code, but you’re a slower reader and now you’re in the workforce, it will still have an impact on your ability to do your job effectively, efficiently, depending on how well you’ve learned to shore up that area. So what do you use? Are you using text to speech? Are you using speech to text? So how well are you using the resources in your life to really help do the demands of the job or get through high school?

Mike:
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It’s interesting, you know, just taking dyslexia as example, how different it is throughout one’s life and you and I having worked with kids with dyslexia over the years, school’s really challenging for them. So, teaching them in a specific way is important and making sure that they have some strategies and tools that they can use. As we look at the lifespan, it seems like that young adult, the high school and college ages are important to prepare our youth for what’s gonna happen across the lifespan, you know, as they work with their learning differences. And I know that’s what you focus on in your work at the Schwab Learning Center. Why do you think this is such a significant stage and what should students and those who support them focus on in that kind of high school, college age range?

Dr. Nicole Ofiesh:
In the high school and college age ranges, individuals with learning differences need to understand how to shore up the areas that need to be strengthened, but also to become very familiar with what they’re good at. What are they innately good at? What are their strengths and gifts? Because more often than not, those are not reflected on their report card. They may or may not be recognized by the teachers, mentors, and adults in those students’ lives, and students unfortunately perceive their report card to be a mirror of their self-worth. They can be very bright, they can be very gifted. They can be very talented, but if their report cards are one that depicts peaks and valleys and it limits their opportunities for internships or college admissions where they could very well succeed, anyone that listens to that should be thinking, “wow, that’s unfortunate.” That’s unfortunate that this person has this potential, but the peaks and valleys on their report card or their test scores are limiting their opportunity to demonstrate what they know and can do in society and the various opportunities. So part of our work at the Schwab Learning Center, and I would invite all of us, regardless of where we are, who work with these students, to remind ourselves that it’s so important to help them understand what they’re good at and where the disconnect between society and their strengths is. I think we really have to break it down and demystify that, and our youth are smart enough to understand that. If we don’t acknowledge it as the adults in their lives, then it becomes this elephant in the living room or the secret that no one wants to talk about or even worse, the internal chaos that the student is constantly feeling in an environment that’s telling them everything’s fine. You’re really smart. We just need to do this.

What we seek to do at the Schwab Learning Center is say, you know, “what’s on your report card is really not an reflection of what I see your strengths and gifts are.” So we’re gonna work with you using technology, learning strategies and all kinds of wellness, cause wellness is a big part of it. How well do you sleep? How well do you manage your time? When do you exercise? You know, what is your diet like? Really looking at the individual’s whole life and helping them to support the articulation of their strengths and gifts, while we are really saying to them, society may not recognize this while you’re in school, but we see it, and this is how you can navigate your life forward and teach them, and show them, and invite them to have multiple opportunities to demonstrate their strengths and gifts. So by the time they’re done with high school and by the time they’re done with college, they are very confident, and they understand their learning difference, and they understand how it plays out in real life, and they can move forward with confidence.

Cindy Lopez:
So, we mentioned the Schwab Learning Center at CHC and Nicole and her colleagues, a team of learning specialists comprise the Schwab Learning Center at CHC and work to really support high school and college students in school and life. And so, Nicole, as you work with those high school and college students, I’m wondering what are some of the specific strategies and tools that you use at the Schwab Learning Center that might be good for our listeners to hear about?

Dr. Nicole Ofiesh:
All of the strategies and tools that we use are designed to help students function across the lifespan. So rather than working with students in one-on-one weekly sessions with our learning specialists that focus on how am I going to get through this computer science class or this engineering class, or whatever it may be, those are two big classes, for example, that our students often struggle with. Rather than just focus on, this is what I think you need to do to get through this class, we offer recommendations for technology, learning strategies, how to best use accommodations that they may or may not be using, who they should collaborate with, what conversations they should be having with their therapist, if they have one, with their medical doctor, if there are other medical conditions with other healthcare providers, conversations they should be having with, not just their disability advisor if they’re in college or a disability coordinator if they’re in high school, but also all the other teachers in their lives. So we really focus on four or five important areas: technology, collaboration, learning strategies, accommodations and the fifth would be wellness. And we support them in this area and everything we do, even if they come to us and say, “we need help in this specific class, we say, “yep, but look how this is going to play out across the lifespan for you.” The same issue that you’re having here might play out at work. It might play out in your personal life. It might play out on a date. You never know, right? So we really make it friendly and familiar so that we can generalize the strategies across the lifespan.

Cindy Lopez:
So, I think we all know that there’s still a lot of stigma around learning differences, and I think that’s because of the barriers to learning that can occur, but is there an upside? What strengths are also part of that LD experience?

Dr. Nicole Ofiesh:
So we know from research that approximately two thirds of individuals with dyslexia and ADHD demonstrate specific strengths to a statistically, typically higher degree than those without those conditions. Some people call it in the research literature, wider neuronal tuning, but it’s basically the ability to quickly scan a landscape and pick up details that others miss and make connections that others don’t make as quickly as everybody else. The interesting thing about that is in the research on dyslexia that shows for adults, the more you focus on teaching them how to read and get better readers, that actually diminishes.

So, I’m not saying we shouldn’t teach how to read, but it just goes to show you that the brain is hardwired to doing other things other than focusing on c-a-t, right? They’re busy taking in the whole landscape and making connections that others don’t see. This happens both visually auditorily and conceptually in their thinking. Other strengths that we see are thinking in pictures and thinking in pictures actually happens much quicker than thinking in words. So we know that a lot of individuals process information in their minds in pictures. And it takes longer to articulate that for them in words, but they are absolutely processing at a much faster speed than those around them. They’re slowed down by the need to apply language to those thoughts, that’s often called narrative reasoning. You see that in exceptional storytelling. There are also visual spatial strengths that some individuals demonstrate where they actually have the ability to rotate pictures and ideas in their mind in a three dimensional way. You think of the letters P, B, D, Q. One of the biggest struggles to straight, right? Well, actually it’s those same individuals who have trouble keeping that shape in a constant form to remember which letter it is. Those are the ones who are always turning visually ideas around in their head in a three dimensional way, and can see things that others without that what we would call a weakness, but in the right context, it’s an incredible strength, right?

One of the things we do at the Schwab Learning Center is harness the research in these areas. We use the research by doctors Brock and Fernette Eide, and we give our students the mind strength survey and help them to look at where their outstanding strengths may lie. Again, not every person with a learning disability has these, but the research is showing us that a good two-thirds, 75 to 80% do have these strengths, but let me mention a little bit about stigma. Stigma is a societal concept, right? It’s because for so many years, disability has been talked about in hushed voices is what I like to say. So we wanna diminish the hushed voices. As long as we make learning differences, learning disabilities, a negative stigma based clinical issue, that has to be fixed in order for the person to be quote, “better,” we’re going to have stigma. So we’ve gotta remove stigma, and to me the way to remove stigma is to really help individuals and their families and the communities to understand that there is no normal. Todd Rose talks about, The End of Average. There is no average, there is no normal. And a one size fits all curriculum is by necessity in public schools what we have to do, but it does not provide us the opportunity to really celebrate individual differences. And the more we can find ways to teach our students about their gifts and talents and the fact that the reality is there is learner variability in the human condition, then we’re starting to move the needle in society about how we conceptualize a learning difference or a learning disability.

Cindy Lopez:
Yes. Thank you. That’s so important I think for people to hear around strengths and around how we can kind of lose that idea of normal and stop comparing ourselves and our children to what society tells us the norm is. As we wrap up our time today. I’m just wondering, what do you hope people remember from listening to our conversation today?

Dr. Nicole Ofiesh:
I would say three things: one disability is not in the person, it’s in the environment.

The second is that we need to demystify for individual students why they are struggling and what the disconnect is between why they are struggling and who they are.

Dr. Nicole Ofiesh:
The third thing brings us back to the whole point of these podcasts, which is Voices of Compassion. We have to have compassion and empathy for what these students are experiencing on a day to day existence, and honor and respect that and give them voice. Give them voice, recognize their voice, and allow them to offer ideas about what works for them. Those were my three hopeful takeaways.

Cindy Lopez:
Thank you, Nicole for joining us today and sharing some really valuable and important information about learning differences over the lifespan and how we can really support our students in significant ways and to our listeners thank you for joining us. I want to mention one more time, the Schwab Learning Center at CHC. Nicole talked about many of the things that they do at the Schwab Learning Center. Please feel free to reach. You can email slc@chconline.org. You can call 650-617-3800, and you can also find more information online. You can go to CHC online and select the Schwab Learning Center. So, please take advantage of those resources that we have at CHC, including the Schwab Learning Center. Thank you again, and to our listeners, thank you for joining us. Visit us online at podcasts.chconline.org. Make sure to subscribe to Voices of Compassion so you never miss an episode, and we’d love it if you’d leave us a rating and review. Have a question? Send us an email or a voice memo at podcasts@chconline.org. We’re here for you when you need us.