Dyslexia, which affects an estimated 15 to 20% of learners, often leads to the frustrating advice of waiting and seeing from educational professionals. Russell Van Brocklen, a dyslexia researcher and advocate, challenges this complacency by presenting actionable solutions for parents and educators. His innovative approach, grounded in structured literacy methods, aims to transform the educational experience for dyslexic students, evidenced by his program that has successfully elevated students from middle school writing levels to college readiness in a remarkably short time. Multi-sensory routines surpass conventional worksheets, enabling observable progress before the next report card arrives.
Takeaways:
Dyslexia affects a significant portion of learners, often leading to delayed intervention and support.
Russell Van Brocklen utilizes structured literacy methods to effectively assist dyslexic students.
His innovative program has demonstrated remarkable improvements in writing skills for dyslexic teens in a short time.
Understanding the neurological differences in dyslexia is crucial for effective teaching and learning strategies.
A focus on multisensory routines can yield better results than traditional methods like worksheets.
Engaging students in topics they are passionate about greatly enhances their learning outcomes.
Chapters:
00:07 - Introduction to Dyslexia and Its Challenges
07:57 - The Journey of Overcoming Dyslexia
23:31 - The Case of Casey: A Unique Learning Journey
28:01 - Understanding Dyslexia and Effective Learning Strategies
Hello. Welcome back to the Education on Far podcast. Today I'm delighted to be chatting to Russell Van Broecklen from dyslexia classes.
Dyslexia touches as many as 15 to 20% of learners, yet most families still hear let's wait and see. Now Russell flips that script.
As a New York State Senate funded dyslexia researcher and severely dyslexic himself, he translates structured literacy methods proven most effective for struggling readers into bite size actions parents can use. Today, his inaugural programme lifted dyslexic teens from 8th grade to freshman college writing in one 45 minute class A day.
Following his podcast, our hope is that you will leave knowing exactly why multi sensory routines beat generic worksheets and how to start seeing progress before the next report card. Hello, my name is Mark Taylor and welcome to the Education on Far podcast. The place for creative and inspiring learning from around the world.
Listen to teachers, parents and mentors share how they are supporting children to live their best authentic life and are proving to be a guiding light to us all. Hi Russell, thank you so much for joining us here on the Education on Far podcast.
We've talked about dyslexia a few times in various different formats, but I think having someone to chat about what the real solutions are in a way that can be placing piece together that people can just go, this is the way I can explain it, this is the way you can understand it and here's the way that you can make life much easier for yourself.
I'm not sure we've had that complete 360 version, so I'm delighted to have you on and really interested about how, how we're going to get to the root of this matter.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Thanks for having me.
Mark Taylor:
So tell us a little bit about your journey to this point. You've obviously got dyslexia classes as a way of really helping people, but there must be a journey before that came into fruition.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Oh yeah, you're not going to believe what happened. This is the last thing I was supposed to be doing with my life. I was supposed to be a bureaucrat for the New York State government.
But what happened was it was the late 90s, I was finishing up college and I wanted to know how laws were created. Not some class I wanted to know. So I signed up for the New York State assembly internship program.
Problem was I showed up and I said, here's my neuropsychological evaluation. I have the reading and writing skill of a six year old, so I couldn't do the internship.
So that Immediately went up to the Speaker's office and he said, you are going to accommodate this kid. You are going to figure out how to do it and I don't care what it costs. So they literally got a committee together.
They pulled me out of the Legislative office building and brought me over to the Capitol and into majority leaders program and council's office that ran the assembly day to day. And I saw immediately why they did it. They had three administrative assistants that could help me out and they treated me like a graduate student.
Then for the academic portion instead of the big paper, I gave an hours long presentation with an hours long Q and A session, which is standard accommodation for me back then.
They wrapped all that up, put it recommended grade of 3.67 on a 4.0 scale and a minus and sent it back to the political science department of the State University of New York center at Buffalo who looked at these crazy accommodations and said, we don't like this, so we're lowering your grade. What do you think they lowered it to?
Mark Taylor:
I suspect it's much more than it should have been.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Take a wild guess. Let's say D. Nope, they flunked me.
Mark Taylor:
Wow.
Russell Van Brocklen:
15 Credits of EV it's still there 29 years later. Only time in the history of the program.
So at that point I did what every other dyslexic, the thousands and tens of thousands before me who went through this discrimination and I said, I'm going to solve dyslexia. And I actually did. The method was rather interesting.
I asked my professors where I could go in grad school to force myself to learn to read and write. And they said, well, if you like politics, it's easy. Law school. So I went to audit, two law school classes.
And what they do in law school in America, if you don't know the answer to what they're asking, they use the Socratic method. They literally embarrass, ask you questions you can't answer to embarrass you publicly until you eventually adapt. That didn't happen to me.
Second day in Contracts, the professor called on me. He was a professor longer than I was alive at that point. And then I responded back to him harshly. He was attacking me. So I decided to attack him.
We're going back and forth, he's looking completely bewildered. 5 Minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. He's never even heard of anything like this.
Finally threw up his arm, said Russell, you couldn't be any more correct. In the interest of time, I have to move on to the next case. I learned to Read within a month. I learned to write within a couple of years.
Then I went back to the New York State Senate and I said, I want you to fund my dyslexia research program. I solved dyslexia. And they said, well, we don't generally do that.
So they sent me off to the Education Department, which was not pleased to see me because my Senator Rand was the majority leader. So they're like, where's this out of? I said, buffalo.
They said, fine, we want a SUNY Distinguished professor in Psychology, that's their top, top rank to evaluate this. If you can't do that and get a positive feedback, you're done. So I said, no problem. I go out and I found out that there's two.
One just happened to be the psychologist that gave me the evaluation, started this mess. Her name was Dr. Irene Halicka. So I sat down with her over three days, over 20 hours, and she wrote back.
And what she essentially said was, I evaluated him years ago. His base reading writing is, I confirmed, about the sixth grade level.
When he turned down his system, he jumped from the first grade level to writing above average of entering graduate students. And essentially what's happening is going from the part of the brain that doesn't work to the one that does. Here's the five pages explaining it.
Well, that got their attention and they were kind of shocked to see it. So then they said, you have to go and connect this to current research. The only person in western New York that made any sense was Dr. James Collins.
He wrote a book called Strategies for Struggling Writers with three default strategies of copying, visualization, narrative, million and a half dollar Grant from the U.S. education Department. I was supposed to take years. I got his approval in less than two weeks, noticing I'm doing well in grad school.
So then I go back and now the state's completely bewildered. But I got 15,000 from the university wide competition. That's why it was such a tight deadline. First student we worked with, her name was Mikayla.
We took her. Just so everybody knows, I'm dealing with super motivated, massively intelligent, dyslexic high school juniors and seniors.
Think 16 to 18 year olds, they're reading and writing at the seventh, eighth grade level, I think 12 to 13. We jumped. We gave her the test for entering graduate students, the Graduate Records Exam, Analytical Writing Assessment.
She scored in the zero percentile. Five months later, she scored in the 50th percentile. Dr. Hilicka is doing the evaluation.
The next student we jumped up to the 70th percentile and his writing was worse. The transfer was complete.
I got the funding from the Senate for a multi year study in a public school in the Park Central School District right outside of Albany, New York, our state Capitol. These are highly motivated, highly intelligent high school juniors and seniors writing at the middle school level.
They were generally scoring in the zero percentile on the graduate records exam and the pre test one class period today for the school year, they increased to the 30th to 70th percentile of entering graduate students. They all went out of college. They all graduated GPAs, a 2.5 to 3.6 and a 4.0 scale cost to New York State taxpayers of under $900.
Compared to Landmark College, which was the best US dyslexic college at the time. We were 3x more successful for less than 1% of the cost. We were under at 900. They're over 100,000. And that's how I got started.
Mark Taylor:
Wow. It's an amazing story.
And I think the biggest thing is the perseverance and the knowledge that you knew what you wanted and how you were going to do that while following the steps that were put in front of you. Like, say each time you come up to a barrier, someone saying, no, it needs to look like this, or you need to find this solution.
Or like, say, find that person that needs to support you. That takes a certain type of person, doesn't it? Rather than just, oh, I'm just gonna. I'm just doing school in inverted commas.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Yeah. Well, the more interesting part came when I presented this in New York City at the International Dyslexia Association Manhattan branch.
I got two reactions. First one, I have to admit, I went down there cocky. I thought I solved dyslexia. I was wrong.
So I walk in, the senior professors come to me and they said, two of your students scored in the 70th percentile, approximately from the middle school level in the last year. We don't care. We want the Craft of Research. And I was like, the craft of what? The Craft of Research.
the University of Chicago in:
And I said, absolutely not. They said, come back when it does. So I came back eight years later. And what they wanted was the biggest issue that I've gotten.
After just training teachers for the past 15 years is that you have these kids coming in, in elementary school, they're young, they're writing essentially randomly placed misspelled words. And what we need to do is to show them how to write basic sentences with decent grammar and correct spelling and also to improve the reading.
That's, that's the main problem I'm presented with. So what I'd like to do is to walk you through and show you exactly how to do this in the next 10 minutes.
Mark Taylor:
Sounds perfect. And I think I was literally just going to say, in terms of what is dyslexia? And you just explained it brilliantly there.
Because I think it's a word for people who aren't dyslexic. They know it's something about jumbled letters and like, say, grammar and that kind of thing.
But unless you've experienced it yourself, I think it's quite hard to, to sort of get your. Get.
Get your head around what that is from an internal point of view to, like you say, then actually putting it onto the page or being able to display it in the way that you mentioned. So, yes, please tell us about that.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Well, actually, let me first show you what dyslexia is. This is the top book in the field. It's called overcoming dyslexia by Dr. Sally Shaywitz from Yale. This is dyslexia.
Do you see how the back part of your brain has this massive neural activity right here? See how the dyslexic has next to nothing?
Mark Taylor:
Yeah.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Now do you see how the front part. Yes. So the back part of your brain has this massive neural activity. The back part of the dyslexic brain has next to nothing.
But the front part of the dyslexic brain is about two and a half times overactive.
Mark Taylor:
Amazing. Yes. To see it. Okay. Is interesting.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Right. So let's just kind of just go over. Before I show you the solution, let me show you why the conflict? Why there's conflict. I want you just.
Your audience knows how far did you go in your education?
Mark Taylor:
So I, I did schooling, which in the UK you do your GCSEs, you then go and do A levels and then you go on to university or college. I'm a musician, so I went and did A, A BMOs as a music student at Trinity College of Music. So I've got my, got my degree on a music pathway.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay. Now, I want you to imagine any point since middle school if you did two things.
If you planned your studying properly, gave yourself enough time, set it up, the Correct way. And number two, you worked really hard. You either did really well or just absolutely amazing. Somewhere between those two. Does that sound about right?
Mark Taylor:
Yep, absolutely.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay. And then if you didn't do one of those two things, things go off the cliff, you start doing them, you're fine.
Mark Taylor:
Yes, exactly that. Yeah, it needs that focus on both sides of that coin.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, so let's again go back to the first, pretty much five years old through the first couple years of university. This is where we're at, this back part of the brain.
So for the dyslectic, I want you to imagine back when you were really young and you're being described, you know, basic grammar rules. Do you remember if the teacher had to explain it four to five times, they started getting annoyed.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, absolutely.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, so enter most part of our educational system. Again, we're dealing with this part of the brain. As you notice, the dyslexic has next to nothing going on.
Yeah, we do extremely well in the front part of the brain, which is generally grad school. It's really unfair. As you noticed, I did really well in grad school.
Okay, so what we have to do in order to solve this basic how to get dyslexics to stop writing a bunch of randomly place misspelled words. Because that's what teachers describe.
We have to stop working on the back part of the brain and we have to move it forward to the front part where we have two and a half times the neural activity. And according to Yale, the front part of the brain deals with two things. Word analysis followed by articulation. Does that make sense?
Mark Taylor:
Yep.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, so do you personally know any dyslexic student, any time in your life who is writing randomly placed misspelled words in elementary or middle school?
Mark Taylor:
Yes.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay. To protect their identity, I need a made up name. What's their made up name?
Mark Taylor:
Steve.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Steve. Tell me about how old Steve was and tell me what his specialty was. His area of extreme interest and ability.
Mark Taylor:
So he would have probably been about 8 years old, something like that. Heavily into sports, specifically football.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay. And we're talking about European football. In the United States we call it soccer. Exactly.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah.
Russell Van Brocklen:
But we're going to call it by its proper name, football. Okay, so, all right, so. And was Steve writing a bunch of randomly placed misspelled words?
Mark Taylor:
Yes.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay. And how did, how did the educational fix this or did they fix it?
Mark Taylor:
I would say they didn't fix it in as much as it was just you still had to take part in class with a little bit of extra support. But everything carried on like the river kept going and he had to sort of do the best he could with a little bit of extra support on the side.
Russell Van Brocklen:
But.
Mark Taylor:
But was always therefore struggling from that point of view. He never felt like he was then able to. To be inadvertent. Inadvertent commas. Kind of the same as the rest of the class, for example.
Russell Van Brocklen:
So year after year it was still a mess.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, are you ready to learn how to solve this in 10 minutes?
Mark Taylor:
Absolutely.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, first thing that you're going to do is you're going to. I'm going to. Let's just assume you were teaching this eight year old Steve.
First thing you're going to do is you're going to pull out a laptop computer. Not an iPad, not an iPhone, certainly not handwriting. A real laptop computer with a keyboard. And you're going to type out hero plus sign.
What are we talking about? And then Steve's going to copy that. And teachers, I hear it all the time. The kids aren't supposed to copy.
Professor James Collins Strategies for struggling Writers. Three default strategies of writing, copying, visualization and narrative. It's okay. So he types it out until it's correct. Please note.
I said until it's correct. Then we're going to replace hero for Steve. So we got Steve plus sign. What are we talking about?
Then we're going to go to a list of 10 things that Steve really, really likes and 10 things he really, really dislikes. The first thing he really, really likes is football. So we got Steve plus sign. What are we talking about?
And we're going to swap out what are we talking about for football. Now we got Steve plus sign football. See how we got there?
Mark Taylor:
Yep.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, now when you played music, this is because this is a critical point. Now you know how absolutely precise you have to be.
Mark Taylor:
Absolutely.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Exactly.
Mark Taylor:
Definitely.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, so I'm going to about. I'm going to ask you two questions that I ask seven year olds. These are not trick questions. They're the simplest questions you'll ever be asked.
If you follow them exactly, this will work. If not, you're going to get incredibly confused and then you'll have an epiphany on what dyslexia really is.
Do you think I can fool you with two of the simplest questions you'll ever be asked?
Mark Taylor:
I'm thinking you probably can, but let's give it a go.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, Just, just remember you have to answer them exact. We got Steve plus sign, football. Now we have to replace the plus sign for a Word. Here's my question. Does Steve like or dislike football?
Mark Taylor:
Like.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay. You're one of the few peoples that got that correct. Now I'm going to ask you the hard question.
Put that into the sentence and give me a three word sentence.
Mark Taylor:
Steve likes football.
Russell Van Brocklen:
But that's not what I asked. Do I have you somewhat confused?
Mark Taylor:
Yes.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, let's try this again. We have Steve, plus sign football. Here's my question. Does Steve like or dislike football?
Mark Taylor:
He likes football.
Russell Van Brocklen:
But that's not what I asked. Do I have you completely confused right now?
Mark Taylor:
You do.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, are you ready for your epiphany and what dyslexia really is?
Mark Taylor:
Yes, please.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, let's go back to the science. Here's the problem. You're dealing with this part of the brain. Steve has nothing going on back there.
So when I asked, does Steve like or dislike football? The first time you said like, which is exactly correct.
But then when you put it into the sentence, you automatically added the s to make it a proper sentence. Steve has nothing going on back here. He doesn't know how to add the S. He would have just said, steve, like football.
Mark Taylor:
Got you.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, now here's the issue. You could remember when I asked if you, when you were young, if the teacher had explained something four or five times, they'd get annoyed.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah.
Russell Van Brocklen:
You could explain this to Steve a thousand times. It's not going to. It's just not going to compute. There's nothing going on back here. So how do we fix that?
Well, if you're in the United States, I'm gonna give you an example. In New York City, there's a school called the Windward School. They have a 98% success rate.
You send Steve to them, he stays with them for four to five years and they come back as educated as the best private schools anywhere in the world for 75,000 a year for four to five years. And that's just tuition. So unless if you have an extra half a million dollars sitting around, this isn't going to work. So how do we fix that?
Well, we have the overactive front part of the brain. According to Yale, that deals with word analysis followed by articulation. So let's apply word analysis. We have Steve, like football.
How do we get him to add the S? We use word analysis. I asked Steve, read what you wrote out loud. Steve like football. Then I would ask Steve, does that sound generally correct?
Read it again out loud and does that sound generally correct? He will do that and say, no, it doesn't sound generally correct. And I'll say, steve, fix it. Steve likes football.
And then we practice that for the other 9 likes and 10 dislikes and yes, this is massively repetitive. Do you see how that's a simple form of word analysis?
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, absolutely.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, now we have to go because reason one, we need to give a simple articulation. Give me a simple reason of why Steve likes football.
Mark Taylor:
Running around.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Steve likes football because he likes to run around. Do you see how that's a simple form of articulation?
Mark Taylor:
Yes.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, so now we move things from back here where nothing's going on essentially to the front part where we have two and a half times the neural activity. But we now have two problems. The grammar is hideous and the spelling is probably atrocious. This is not hard to fix.
What we do is we first tell Steve to read what he wrote out loud and does it sound generally correct and to keep going until the whole sentence sounds generally correct.
This gets rid of the horrendous grammar mistakes, and now you're left with some little grammar issues, maybe some medium ones which teachers are trained to deal with. All right, they can handle that. The spelling's the next issue. People think this is so hard to fix. It's not.
We simply tell Steve to drop a period and then to tell him every time he makes a mistake, any spelling mistake, he has to retype the entire sentence and which will happen about three to 13 times. Each time he'll say, I'm not going to make that mistake. I'm not going to make that mistake. And he keeps making it until he doesn't.
Once he has it fixed, we go on to the next sentence and we do the same thing for the other 9 likes and 10 dislikes until everything is done properly. Then we keep exactly what he wrote and we add a second reason and we connect that with the glue word end.
And we do the same thing for the 10 likes and 10 dislikes. Then we keep those those same two reasons, and then we add a third reason. Okay. And we make sure the 10 likes and 10 dislikes.
How long does this take for a 9 year old working at home in 10 to 15 minute sessions? That's what most parents do. A couple of times. That'll take about five months. Okay.
If the kid is in middle school, you're probably talking about a couple of weeks. If they're in high school. I've had kids do this within a day or two.
The older you are, the quicker you pick it up, which is the exact opposite of the top way rich people deal with this, which is the Orton Gillingham approach. So that is. Here's the other thing. Not only has his spelling improved and his grammar, but his reading has as well.
Because if you can write it, you can read it. If you can write it, you can read it. See how that works?
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, it definitely makes a lot of sense.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Well, but that's only part three of the model. Now to move up for part one, what you need to understand is that this is why most educational programs fail. And this is not just for dyslexia.
This also works for ADD and ADHD kids. The next example I'm going to give you, I just want everybody to know I have never seen this before. Casey. I will never see this again.
None of the hundreds of teachers I've taught will ever see this. This is a one off edge case to make a critical point. I met Casey at the end of fifth grade. She was 10 years old, turned 11 over the summertime.
She was reading and writing at the second grade level. Casey was from a lower middle class family in the midwestern United States. She was really interested in Theodore Roosevelt.
So I assigned her this little book, the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. All 1,000 pages or 900 pages. This book won the Pulitzer.
According to teachers, that's at the 10th grade to first year college level, depending on who you ask. Think about 15 to 18. Casey's reading like she's seven. Nobody suggested this to her, Nobody asked her to do this. She wanted to do reading first.
So I gave her a simple process. She went up to her room and shut her door for three hours a night for the next six months. Most of the days during the summertime.
At the end of that point, she could flip to this random page, pick some random word and she would tell you literally the dictionary definition. She jumped eight grade levels in six months and I worked with her for 15 minutes a week.
Mark Taylor:
Wow.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Well, that's not the point. The point is here, my setup, why I'm spending so much time is when her mom said, is that just for a book she likes?
What if it's something she doesn't like? So I gave her a book she hated. Took her three months, and here's why I'm spending all this time on this.
I asked Casey, the most motivated kid I've worked with, what happens when you went from a book that you loved to one you hated? What did that do to your motivation? She said it knocked it down about 50%.
You talk to any dyslexic, ADD or ADHD kid if you step outside their speciality you're down 75 to 90%. So you're. So during the intervention period, if you want to use this system, you have to focus on their speciality during the intervention period.
Next, if you ask any dyslexic, ADD or ADHD person in their speciality, in their area of extreme interest and ability, do they have ideas flying around their head at light speed? Key question. But with little to no organization, they're going to say yes.
So what we have to do is force the dyslexic brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. Let me put that into English.
And to give you an example, I want you to imagine if Bill Gates came to you and said, you know, here's a million dollars for the next couple of weeks, we'll clear your schedule. What I need you to do is to go in and write a high school level paper on this question. You can hack ask for no help.
Civil rights movement of the:
Would that be a hard paper for you to write?
Mark Taylor:
Absolutely.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay. Why would it be hard?
Mark Taylor:
I think it would be hard if you hadn't done anything like it before. I think you have the option and you have the material available. But for finding that and being able to articulate it in a way I think would.
Would make me think it was hard certainly to begin with.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Well, no, we're looking for a 9th or 10th grade level paper.
Mark Taylor:
Okay, then yes, I could. We'd be okay.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Yeah, you would just go into the library, look up the books and then just answer the question. You would. It's just work. Yeah, that's because this was asked you in a way that made sense. Big picture. Eventually getting down to the details.
Do you remember that's how you were generally instructed in school?
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.
Russell Van Brocklen:
For a dyslexic, that's like grabbing fog. There's nothing to hold on to. We need to flip that script to start off with a very specific point and then eventually go out.
So we would ask what personally compelled Martin Luther King to want to give his famous speech. We know exactly where to look. We go into his biography, look at that time period and then we'd get an answer.
That answer turns into a question, which gives us an answer, which turns into question, which gives us the answer that forces the dyslexic brain to organize itself using writing as a measurable output. And Then we do word analysis followed by articulation. Now for parents, they ask me, does this actually work?
I'm about ready to finish writing a book called if you write, you can read. And in that one, the student and parent that I work with, her name is Kimberly. She's a homeschooling mom in the state of Ohio with some college.
Nothing like your education with some college. And she taught five of her kids. One is dyslexic.
th of:
Sorry, writing at the 4th percentile. He was 10 years old in 5th grade. So I worked with her for half an hour a week. For the next eight months.
She worked with Reed for an hour and a half a week, three half hour sessions on average. Most parents do 10 to 15 minute sessions.
Over the summer, his friends came to him and said, reid, we want you in school with us publicly, to come to us, you know, in public school, to be with us socially. Even if Kimberly doubled what he did, he would still be placed in special education away from his friends. Unhappy kid. That didn't happen.
His reading went from the 11th percentile to the 64th. His writing went from the 4th percentile to the 65th. His grammar jumped to the 97th percentile.
As of April of this year,:
Mark Taylor:
That's incredible, isn't it?
And is it, is it also, I completely understand, like you say, the different parts of the brain, is it that you, what you're doing is just literally transferring it from one part to the other or the connections in the way that you're then thinking changing as well. I'm just curious. From a musician's point of view, I talk quite a lot about that. In terms of new coordination, new things that happen.
We start by literally, like you said, grabbing anything not able to move your right hand in relation to your right foot or vice versa, and that kind of thing and the repetition and like you say, the questions in them and the going over the same thing starts to make those connections happen.
Is it working in the same way or is it literally just moving like say one part of the brain to, to the other in terms of Being able to get those results you mentioned.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Well, part one, again, I'm just going from Yale's research. The front part's two and a half times overactive. So that's literally word analysis followed by articulation in the student speciality.
Okay, now, just so you know, when Reid went into normal school, he's outside of his speciality, but he was fine because we brought him to grade level. So first of all, it's just doing the front part of the brain, the way the brain was designed to learn word analysis followed by articulation.
The second issue was, remember when I asked if you ask any dyslexic ADD or dyslexic student or ADHD in your speciality, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed but with little to no organization, they're going to say yes. So the secret is the force. The dyslexic brain organizes itself by using writing as a measurable output.
That's why we start from the specific and slowly keep question, answer, question, answer, go out in a linear way that forces that organization. And that combined with doing word analysis followed by articulation in their speciality, is what gets this accelerated learning.
Mark Taylor:
And I guess, do you get to the point where the real understanding of the process then spills over into other aspects of their life as well to help them in that organization and understanding? If I approach different things in this way, that's going to help me in other aspects?
Russell Van Brocklen:
It absolutely does.
But what I just showed you is great if you're dealing with a problem in elementary school, but I want you to imagine Steve as he went on to middle school, high school, and college there. The biggest issue is how to rewrite advanced paragraphs.
And in that, what I want to now show you is how to extend word analysis followed by articulation. But to write an advanced body paragraph, where I think I'll probably show you something that could improve your writing.
Mark Taylor:
Great.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, so let me just ask you this question. If you had to go back, if somebody.
We did another Bill Gates, mythical, you know, made up experiment, but if you had to go back and repeat your A levels, how do you think you would do compared to the current students?
Mark Taylor:
I think I would probably do the current students now or me back when I was 18.
Russell Van Brocklen:
You're going back. Literally, we're putting you back in the classroom and you're devoting your time to this full time.
But you're now an educated adult and they're still teenagers. How do you think they'll do? You think that they can. Do you think you do well against that?
Mark Taylor:
My initial thought is that, yes, with that experience, then, yes, I think I'd hold my own.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Well, yeah, it would be completely unfair because you not only finished them, you went on to university, and now you've been a trained. You've been working as an educator for decades. You can't fight that experience. You go back there and wash the floor with them.
All right, why am I spending that time on this? Because what I want you to understand is what I'm about to show you is, should also improve your writing as well.
I even had lawyers tell me this helped them. All right.
And this is again, what I'm about to show you when I'm basing this on is a critical point from the book, the Craft of Research, which most people outside of doctoral candidates don't know this process. All right, so I'm going to give you now an advanced version of word analysis followed by articulation.
So, and when I do this, this is going to be completely look like it's coming out of left field. In America, that's what we call coming out of nowhere, which a lot of dyslexic solutions are. It'll make sense very rapidly.
The first thing that we need to do is we're going to start off with universal themes and movie reviews. This will make sense very shortly. So I need you to answer three questions.
First of all, you need to tell me a movie that you know intimately, that you think is one of the best, best of all times that everybody in the UK has seen. What's the name of that movie?
Mark Taylor:
Let's go with Star Wars.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, which one? The Empire Strikes Back, generally considered the best one of the entire series. Now, I'm going to ask you a difficult question.
I need you to reduce the entire movie of Empire Strikes Back to a one word universal thing that best represents it.
Mark Taylor:
Oh, good question. One word universal theme that best represents.
Russell Van Brocklen:
The entire movie, unique to your perspective. And this is not an easy question.
Mark Taylor:
Studious.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Studious. Okay, now see how long that took you.
Mark Taylor:
Yes.
Russell Van Brocklen:
If, if I were to go into a high school near you where you have a dyslexic actually doing A levels, how long do you think it would have taken them?
Mark Taylor:
A lot longer.
Russell Van Brocklen:
No, they would have done it almost instantly. Okay, let's go back to the science. You are now playing in the front part of the brain.
Mark Taylor:
Got you.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, you're now playing in my sandbox.
There are advantages to being dyslexic, and this is where this tends to Shock educators, remember, our gift doesn't tend to show up until grad school, where you're entirely focused on one area. And only the best go to grad school in that area. Master's, PhD. Doesn't matter.
So this is where there are extreme, profound advantages to being dyslexic. So we have studious. All right. Now, how would. How do we write a proper movie review?
What we would do is we would ask, you would tell me which ones you think are the primary actors that matter. The primary characters would ask, how did the actor do the actors do with the Universal theme of studious? How did the director do?
How did the screenwriter do? And then you'd write your review. That way people would decide they want to see the movie or not. If they want to see it.
You have enhanced their experience because they know what to look for and from whom. But you haven't destroyed their experience by saying, this happened, this happened, and this happened. Sound familiar?
Mark Taylor:
Yep.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Here's the problem. The universal theme of Studious is a broad brush. Okay?
ings to everybody. But in the:
So we have to do something about that. So the next thing I'm going to do is we're going to discuss high school Shakespeare for a moment. Why?
Because Shakespeare was the most effective person in English writing history for communicating a message ever. That's just a general opinion in academia. So I want you to think back to high school, to any Shakespeare play. There'd be a hero.
The hero want to do something based on one or more universal themes.
Then there'd be an ultimate villain, a person, a concept, a character, some universal things, some combination of that that would try to fight the hero from keeping them from doing what they wanted to do. They would have conflict in Act 1, go crazy in Act 2, and resolve in Act 3. Sound familiar?
Mark Taylor:
Certainly does.
Russell Van Brocklen:
So we're going to simplify that. And now what I'm going to show you is how to teach a dyslexic not only to learn to read, but also have to write advanced body paragraphs.
We're doing an advanced form of word analysis followed by articulation. So let's just say we're going to do. The kid's really interested in A Pyre Strikes Back. Can you see how from an academic point of View.
We could write an essay on that in middle school, on high school, and even in college, and possibly even graduate school.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to identify the hero.
Now, just so you know, at dyslexia classes, we have courses that show students how to do at once they can do the basic sentences, how to do a basic body paragraph. I'm assuming we've already done that. Okay, so we're going to have the student write out as many paragraphs and what the hero wants to do as possible.
Then they're going to take. For each sentence, you're going to pull out the most important word and we're going to have them type the most important word as a list.
Now we're going to have what I like to call the come to an understanding if I can help these kids or not. Because here's the critical question I'm going to ask you, and this is incredibly serious.
The front part of the brain, according to Yale, that massive overactivity. Let's see if I can get that in there. The front part of the brain is two and a half times overactive. It deals with word analysis.
So here's my question for you. If you don't know exactly what the word, what the definition is of a word, exactly, how can you apply word analysis.
Mark Taylor:
If you don't know Definitely.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Exactly two, like you literally have it memorized. If you don't know exactly what it means, how can you use word analysis at an advanced level?
Mark Taylor:
I guess you can't.
Russell Van Brocklen:
You can't. So this is where I. This is where I tell the schools you have to partner with the parents.
Now I'm just going to tell you what, how I get kids to do this if they don't, most of the time I tell them, we're in your specialty, we're doing what you care about. We're going from the specific to the general. I need you to do this or I can't help you. Works with most dyslexics. For those who won't. Now, from the.
When I went. When we went and did the sentences, what they really dislike. I always tell the parents to pick a chore, the one thing the kids absolutely detest.
So when you were 10, tell me the chore, you just freaking hated putting out the rubbish, taking out the trash. Okay, so imagine, and I think you didn't like it because it's smelly, stinky and all that sort of stuff.
Mark Taylor:
Exactly. I like being clean and actually having to deal with that was not my favorite thing.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, so if you're not about to do what I ask. Did you have your parents, did you have any siblings?
Mark Taylor:
Yes, two sisters.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay. Your parents would have one of your siblings literally go over and dump the trash on the floor, and you would have to clean it up and take it out.
Then they would go out, bring it back in, and have another sister dump it on the floor and have you take it out again. Have you go to each house on the street and take out their trash. How long are your parents going to have you do this?
Until you decide to do the work they assigned you.
Mark Taylor:
You'd assume it'd be relatively quickly.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Exactly. So that. And just so you know, parents videotape that, and I end up. They send me a copy, and the kids face it's priceless. We laugh at it.
Ten years later, they're still laughing at it. Okay, so that's how we get the kids to do this if louds fail.
So what we do is we'll have them type out, pull out each of the most important words, and then they're going to go to Oxford English or Merriam Webster's. You pick the top online dictionary. You go there, they find out their exact definition that they pick.
Then they type out that word, and they type out the definition for all the most important words. Then they pick the one that they think is the best, most important word from that. Just like we had in your.
In your original example for your movie review. It's a very broad brush. We now have to really, really focus on making it much more specific. So then we go into the thesaurus and we take.
We put that word in, and because that's now our base universal thing, we put that into the thesaurus. You can do 5 synonyms, 10 synonyms, the whole level, multiple levels.
With Casey, after we got done with her book and we're moving on to the next level, I said, go with thesaurus size of word. She did over 200 words in less than 10 minutes. Knew what everyone meant. She didn't have to look up anything. She said, this is the best one.
And this is why she could have defended that in college. Okay, so you go and you do that. You're looking for the word that best represents what's inside the student's head.
Once you find that, that's now our specific universal thing. It's not perfect, but it's much closer. So now we can laser focus and then come up with the ultimate villain. I tend to start off with characters.
I eventually move on to concepts. And then we put those three together, we form a basic sentence. Do you see how that's an advanced form of word analysis?
Mark Taylor:
Yeah.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay, don't worry, we're almost done. Now we're going to do advanced articulation. So then what we do is we ask you to come up with three really good reasons.
For each reason, you're going to reduce that to a unit, a simple universal thing. Then we're going to go to the script of the. Of the Empire Strikes Back. I'm looking.
You're going to take that basic universal thing and find a sentence that deals exactly with that at the beginning of the script and one near the end. Then we're going to take those two quotes and put them together as our data. Now, as an educator, this is key.
If every paragraph has two quotes, by the very definition, can this not be a BS paper? No, that's the key point. Most Gen Ed students don't write two sentence. Two quotes in each paragraph.
From those two quotes, we're then going to create our topic sentence. Now, have you ever noticed in university or in when you're doing your A levels that when you had your topic sentence and your data, it didn't.
It wasn't very smooth. The transition was kind of abrupt.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Have you ever thought of applying a warrant to a body paragraph?
Mark Taylor:
No.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay. A warrant comes from the craft of research. And so outside of a PhD candidates, people don't know this. It is one of their key points.
And what it does is to connect your topic sentence with your data. You answer a how and a why question. So once you do that. Now in our paid course, we had a few more steps, but that's essentially what it is.
A university professor seeing that you're using a warrant, they automatically think, wow, this is most likely at the college level, if not more advanced. It's exactly what they're looking for. And by the way, if you don't use it now, you will be arrested. That's a joke.
But you see how that's an advanced form of word analysis followed by articulation to do the main part of an advanced paragraph.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, yeah.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Now that's helpful. But have you ever noticed that we're kind of having a bit of a problem with artificial intelligence and jobs?
Mark Taylor:
Yes.
Russell Van Brocklen:
For intellectual work, definitely. Okay, so just so you know, what has changed? I'm just going to give you an example of one US company.
What they do is they create reports independently and sell it to the top institutions in the world. Just what AI was supposed to put out of business, they're moving faster than that.
udget for the entire year for:
So the question is, how do we connect what I just showed you so that you can be relevant in the, in the age of AI to be a knowledge, a knowledge worker?
The number one thing that I found, because I'm one of Those people, when ChatGPT came out with its 200 Pro plan in December of 24, I bought it that day. I'm one of those people that does literally more than 10 times the amount of work a normal person would do in any unit of time.
You need to know exactly what good looks like with what the answer is. And then when you see that it's not there, how to fix it, then it's just a matter of showing you how to do artificial intelligence.
So how do we connect that with these kids so they can actually get a job? Because in the US what's happening is about 40% of the kids coming out of college. I'm 52, they're 23. So I'm their kids.
They are literally underemployed, which means they're getting jobs that they didn't need college for. 60% Are getting real jobs.
So do you remember way back when I told you when we were going to start off with a very specific question, when we're doing Martin Luther King, what personally compelled him to do a famous speech, then we would have an answer, then we'd find a question and then an answer. That is exactly the skill set that you need to develop during your education. Because once.
Because the biggest issue that we're finding is the solution to how to do AI is exactly what's in the book the Craft of Research, I showed you a simple and advanced form of context. The next major issue is a problem statement.
How do you come up with a problem that actually needs to be solved, where the solution will be well worth the economics, time and resources put into it? What is that?
How we find that out is we have that question answer, and with that answer, we come up with another question, other answer, and we go deeper and deeper and deeper into that, and then eventually we start off on the other end. So let me give you a quick example. The most advanced student I'm working with now, his name is Grayson.
Grayson wants to get his PhD work at NASA, our Space Administration to terraform Mars, which is a big part of also what the European Space Agency is working on. We have to get Grayson to publish in a peer reviewed journal.
And by that I mean we need to get his article passed a desk review so it's not rejected for some technical reason. And then it'll be rejected by a reviewer. Absolutely. Then we're going to connect him up. I.
There's a board member that I met at, who's one board member, one of the top 10 technical universities in the United States. We'll connect him up with the right professor and Grayson will go in and say this is I've been rejected by a reviewer.
I need to work with you to finish up this article and get it published so I can get my job at NASA. How old do you think Grayson is?
Mark Taylor:
I'm gonna go 10.
Russell Van Brocklen:
That's exactly how old he is. He's on the young side. So his parents are working with him now to teach. They pulled him out of school because he's too advanced.
They're showing him how to do this. So what we. He's currently reading at the 12th grade level and his context is in the third year college level.
So I'm slowly increasing that and I'm building up customized things so he knows what's going on in Mars very deeply.
Then when he's done with that, I have him read the document once, read it a second time, circling anything that he's confused on, and then third read through, he's trying to answer his own questions. And then when he's done and he can't answer the questions, I then use that to go to the next step.
Then with the AI, found out where the hole is in his field and there's one gaping one. So we're moving his that process with him through this, through where the hole is until they eventually meet, which will take years.
Okay, but once we do that, he will then have his problem statement. He will then know how to replicate that in the future just at a much more accelerated rate because he's already done it one time.
And then we just have to show them how to come up with a solution, which for this particular article is rather apparent. And then we go through that process.
Now I want you to imagine if, imagine the professor was from the top science school in the uk, which I believe is Cambridge. And here's a student coming in who is not desk rejected, but rejected by a senior reviewer. And these are things they need to work on.
I think you might find that they'd be more interested in Grayson than people who just crush their A levels.
Mark Taylor:
Absolutely.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Because it's so that's what that, that's most kids, we're not doing that far.
We're having them go to like a senior research project for a senior thesis in college or at least a college level paper where the reader learns something substantial. Not a university professor, but somebody with general interest. But that's where we tend to leave students.
Mark Taylor:
Amazing. And I think what you've done there is you've been able to really paint a great picture of, of what learning should be about generally as well.
Like say doing it based on what people are interested in, taking them deep into something and then knowing what the next steps are.
And like I say that that essence of officially failing when it doesn't work out, first of all because it's never going to work out because you've got so much to learn and you need support and you need to move on to steps. But to be able to see that and also have the idea of what that, what that end game is, what your solution is.
And like I say to then open that next question to find the next one and then all of a sudden your, your educational journey, your professional journey and actually having the skill set that you need to take you into a world as you've, as you just sort of said, which we don't know what that is, whether it's space related, whether it's, it's knowledge related, it's job related, but you're really set up for life in a way that like I say, compared to just literally drifting through the education system is like chalk and cheese.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Well, yeah, but the main thing is remember what the professor said when I presented New York City in oh six they want the craft of research before the kids go to college. Nobody touches. Not the best private schools in the United States go near this. I start teaching context at age nine.
Mark Taylor:
Thank you so much, Russell.
It's been really fascinating and illuminating in terms of like you say, to be able to sort of understand and to be able to put that and articulate that in such a way.
And I think there'll be so many people out there who 1 feel like there's like you say that solution to be able to do it and understand what those steps are and be able to help so many people. So tell people where you'd like them to go and find out more and how it is that you're able to help them individually.
Russell Van Brocklen:
Okay. For, for most people you can just go to dyslexiaclasses.com that's with an S dyslexiaclasses.com there's a form there that says download free guide.
Click on it, answer three questions and set up a time to talk to me. All right. For parents, if you want to know how we can help you directly, just go to schoolskool.com type in dyslexia classes.
We have a parent course there. We also have one for teachers. Our parent one is taught by Angela.
She's a certified elementary school teacher in the state of Texas with a two year master's degree, 11 years of experience. She has brought her son August through this and she's there each week to answer questions.
The problem with most things in my field is they're insanely expensive. So we had to lower the price to $147 to make it affordable for most families.
And it's a month time month and you can stay with us for, you know, we start off with basic sentences.
We go all the way to submitting an article for, for a peer reviewed journal and Angela's there to walk you through each to answer your questions each week for an hour.
Mark Taylor:
Fantastic. Russell, thank you so much. Indeed.
I really appreciate your time and your enthusiasm and all the work that you're doing to support all these young people and indeed their families.
