Change: A Message from Lars

After twelve years, I have left The Reading Clinic. Leaving was difficult, but I really do believe that change can be good. It’s important to acknowledge that one chapter of my life is over and use it to grow and move forward. I will always hold my experience at The Reading Clinic as an essential part of who I am. I sincerely hope that the people of today’s Reading Clinic with whom I collaborated—Ann, Kristin, Sharon, Allison, Jonathan, Aymen, Carolina, Andrea, Diana, Debra, Elisa, and Kent—will continue to think of me as a part of the important work you do.

If it weren’t for The Reading Clinic, I am not sure I would have found the purpose of my life. Twelve years ago, I had been working in restaurant management for a long time. I had begun to realize that it wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I had little idea of what I did want to do. At the time, Ann was a waitress at Boulevard Restaurant in San Francisco, where I was a floor manager. I confided in her, and she told me about her day job. She was a tutor with Lindamood-Bell. What’s more, she was planning to open her own learning center with two other Lindamood-Bell employees.

After expounding on the rewards and joys of working with children, she told me that she thought I would be good at it, and that I might even think about working for her. I did, and became The Reading Clinic’s first employee. Working with kids was not always easy, even though Ann made it look like it was. But from the beginning, I knew this was finally the right profession for me, and one I could see myself doing for the rest of my life.

My job at The Reading Clinic helped me earn a bachelor’s degree at San Francisco State, demonstrating that one never has to give up on education. I like to tell people (probably too many times) that it took me 30 years to get that degree. I started college in 1966 and graduated in 1996. I was as proud at my graduation as any 21-year-old. I can’t tell you how much studying history, my major, has helped me with the work I have done at The Reading Clinic, in developing programs for curriculum integration, and in extending our version of Visualizing and Verbalizing to include historical and geographical background.

The Reading Clinic helped to support me again as I moved through the Teaching Credential program at State, earning a multiple subject certification. Once more, my education supplemented and enriched my work with children at The Reading Clinic, giving me insights into the ways kids think and the ways educators can guide them toward reaching their full potential. The credential program also introduced me to the wonderful world of children’s literature.

During those three years of my own education, Ann and Kristin were completely supportive, giving me all the hours they could when I had time, and letting me cut back when I needed to study. I responded by staying with them through many years and incarnations of The Reading Clinic. The first clinic was a small room in an old office building in San Anselmo in Marin County. Then the company relocated to the basement of a church in Corte Madera. Then came San Francisco, and the complex on Amphlett Boulevard in San Mateo, and San Ramon in the East Bay, and Burlingame.

Through all these changes, Ann and Kristin encouraged me to work in areas where I felt most creative and had the most to contribute. After managing the San Francisco clinic and, for a brief period, San Mateo, I found myself burning out on administrative work and wanting to get back to what was really important to me: working with students. Ann and Kristin not only accepted this, they helped me to enroll some of my first private clients. They also asked me to create promotional material and write for the newsletter. That’s when Lars’s Library was born.

When Ann offered me the clinical manager position in Burlingame a couple of years ago, I had a dream job. Because the clinic would now have a director and a manager, I would not have to schedule, or be directly responsible for sales. Instead I could focus on the issues that I am most passionate about: clinical work with kids and developing individual programs, explaining that work to parents and incorporating their ideas, writing and reading about cognition and education, creating new programs, and stimulating staff development.

With the support, hard work, and contributions of my colleagues (staff, parents and kids), I put together The Reading Clinic’s Morphology Program and improved our curriculum integration. We put procedures in place that empowered students by having them participate in setting agendas and managing time, and by encouraging growth, rather than a fixed mindset. It was an exciting period, culminating this past summer when I learned the best way for me to “manage” tutors and improve the quality of staff was to empower and encourage them, and to let them empower and encourage me.

It is with great pride and a sense of accomplishment that I look back on my tenure at The Reading Clinic.

Although I have left, I am still in the area and still committed to my work with children. Please feel free to contact me at lars4learning@yahoo.com or (650)342-6254.

Autism: The Musical

Following five Los Angeles children over the course of six months, director Tricia Regan captures the struggles and triumphs of their family lives and observes how this musical production gives these performers a comfort zone in which they can explore their creative sides.

http://www.autismthemusical.com

Capturing Autistic Experience on Film

Interesting article about an upcoming film that will be shot in Spain and will follow autistic children and their parents through a 500-mile pilgrimage. (Including a young boy from Palo Alto.)

http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_9081380

More about the movie:

http://www.pilgrimsmovie.com/pilgrims/pilgrims.html

Literacy and Personal Experience

I recently came across these words in an article written in 1986, which I think have relevance to our practice of VV today:

"Literacy is the capacity to relate words on the page to personal experience. It is a mysterious filling in. When we read about a mountain, we go beyond dictionary definitions to flesh out the word with our own experience, whether from our senses, our imaginations, or what we have already heard and read. And we read between the lines in the same way, filling in the unstated motive, linking cause with effect. We use our imaginations."
--"Coming to Words: Writing as Process and the Reading of Literature," Gary Lindberg

I think our practice of stimulating our students' ability to visualize can only be strengthened by an awareness of where a person's pictures come from in the first place. By stimulating a student's capacity to visualize text, we are also helping that student access and use what they know already to build new knowledge. We have often noted to one another that VV is limiting when we think that picturing is the only way we process text. We have to help our students see that picturing is the way we connect our personal experience to the words we read.

I wanted to bring up this idea of activating schema and background knowledge because I have seen how it engages our students, how it allows them to have a successful reading. We need more systematized ways to activate schema before we start the process of VV with felts. Pre-visualizing keywords and making predictions have been extremely successful with our VV students in Palo Alto. In short, I advocate making pre-reading (in the sense of making a student aware of their background knowledge) the first step we take with all of our students when doing VV exercises.

Further rationale for systematizing pre-reading is in the needs of our students. Many of our students fall into one of two categories: top-down or bottom-up readers. Top-down readers over-rely on their background knowledge. They take a word or concept from the reading and make associations based on their own experiences. Often these students are described as "off topic" or as lacking focus. Pre-reading allows these students to be self-conscious of the experiences they are tapping into while asking them to respect the text, to acknowledge that it may have a different point of view or new information.

Bottom-up readers conversely over-rely on the text. These are the students who repeat back or memorize the text without processing it. Pre-reading forces these students to tap into their background knowledge, making it more available to them when they read.

In both cases, pre-reading encourages dialogue with the text and the higher order thinking skills we so highly regard. Let's make a conscious effort to learn more about schema theory and share that with our tutors, students and parents.

I have several articles (some more accessible than others) on schema theory. If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to make copies.

Kristin Agius

Chris Stephen: Featured Tech Innovator

The National Center for Technology Innovation is featuring Read How You Want founder Chris Stephen.

Click here to view the article.

Amazing 17-month-old

Thank to Kristin Powell for telling me about this story. They definitely touch on the importance of multisensory instruction for language acquisition.

Assistive Technologies for LD Students

A reminder from Parents Education Network about an upcoming event:

Assistive Technologies for LD Students
Date: 3 April 2008, Thursday
Time: 07:00 PM
End time: 09:00 PM
Location: Fort Mason Conference Center, San Francisco

Are you wondering what technology will help your child in school?

Bob Luke, Technology Coordinator at Charles Armstrong School will discuss and demonstrate the latest assistive technologies for LD students.

Topics will include:

- Internet resources for finding out about Assistive Technology and available products

- Paperless writing environment -- keyboarding, using Inspiration, MS Word and Kurzweil in the Writing Process

- Voice Recognition Software -- Dragon NaturallySpeaking

- Talking word processors -- Kurzweil, WYNN and Write:OutLoud/SOLO

More information at www.parentseducationnetwork.org