Dys-lexia Seminars

Blog piece March 2012

To say that I am computer illiterate is an understatement. In fact I have an enormous fear of laptops and the things they do, that is based in my huge, historic fear of failure, of stuffing up and not being good enough.

In reality it is not the laptop I am afraid of, but rather my capacity to stuff-up when using it. Hence I avoid it whenever possible – and hence I have neither visited nor added to my blog in at least two years. Hardly useful, but that’s how it is - and just to get on to my blog tonight has taken me over an hour!

I have always known that my thinking on any topic develops like a staircase – a flat area for a distance, then an abrupt riser, where the product of my observations and thinking suddenly breakthrough. And I’ve just had another riser. Admittedly this 12 inch riser comes hot on the heels of a 45 mile long flat area, but it is better than nothing.

Over the last five years I have been touring New Zealand and parts of Australia presenting seminars to teachers, parents and kids, under the banner of DYSLEXIA DISMANTLED. So far, around 410 presentations. It has suddenly dawned on me that these have been slowly evolving into a three-part series.

The first part comes from my observations of children over 35 years operating as an educational psychologist, and involves identifying what it is that makes these children different from others, understanding how that works, and building a useful pictorial model to work with.

The second part involves examining the implications of this in terms of the individual child’s academic performance, their behaviour, and their (resulting) self-concept.

The third part is the complex process of applying the learnings of the first two, in terms of what we need to do to work with these children in a more useful way. That involves identifying what we should stop doing, and what we should do differently to allow these children to engage, and to find more success in school.

In the seminars each of these parts takes about two hours in their briefest form, meaning that we can do two hour seminars, four hour, or whole day presentations to get the basic ideas across. Schools commonly request a second, whole day workshop once that have had an initial exposure and directly experienced the positive impact across the school.

As the response to these seminars causes me to look closer at the ‘problem’ of dys-lexia, more and more I am convinced that dys-lexia is actively caused by the way in which we teach in our schools, (see my comments on putting petrol into diesel engines in earlier blogs), and that it is initially more an issue of what we need to stop doing, rather than what we need to learn to do – although this is surely a challenge as well.

For those who may be interested; I am not employed by any organization, nor do I belong to any group. Now that I have stopped paying my annual fees, I am officially not a ‘psychologist’ any more either.

With no organization behind me I rely on other people to arrange my speaking engagements in their home area. Thus, if you are interested in a seminar or workshop in your school, town or area, please email me directly. I may ask you to consider inviting other schools etc in your area to also have seminars, in order to make the travel factor affordable. A week’s work in any part of NZ or Australia generally makes it a viable exercise.(laughton.king@win.co.nz).

Cheers,

Laughton