Zone’in Workshops

This article is the fifth of a six part series on successful school-based strategies to optimize attention and enhance learning ability, and follows the Zone’in Child Development Series December 2009 newsletter advocating for school implementation of the School Operating Safely (SOS) – Child Behavior Management Policy and Procedures. This policy has recently been forwarded to all provincial Education Ministers, as well as members of the Council of Ministers of Education.

Schools of the New Millennium – Declining Literacy – A learning disability or a teaching disability?

The escalating proliferation of untested technology in education systems to the detriment of child literacy.

I was consulting in Northern BC in a remote Native community, and was working with a bright and energetic grd. 4 student who had “learning difficulties”. The resource teacher stated that she thought he was underperforming, and had this year exhibited significant defiance and difficult behaviour. I was observing this child doing math, and when he looked at me and asked if the number he just produced was a “5″ (it looked a bit more like a backward “7″ to me), I realized he didn’t know how to print. I asked the resource teacher to scribe for this child, and he literally jumped to the challenge and proceeded to fly through math sheets getting all correct answers. Here was a delightful, smart and now extremely frustrated child trapped in a system that had not taught him how to print.

I would like for you to do a small task to help illustrate how children who are not taught to print feel on a minute by minute basis in our school systems. Write or print your name. Now do the same mirror image backward. Now print this way for the next week. How do you feel right now, having been given a task you neither know how to do, nor want to do? Confused, frustrated and a bit defiant? Might you eventually evolve into a child with “behaviour problems” if asked to continue with this ridiculous task? Hopefully, you would eventually develop a “motor plan” for this new way of producing output, but that’s because you are an intelligent adult with average motor skills, and not a developmentally delayed child, as 30% of our primary children are today (Kershaw P 2009).

Declining interest by educators to teaching printing skills continues to astound me. When children’s grades are based largely on output produced by printing, one would think that some effort to teach this essential skill would be warranted. Instead, far too often, lack of printing skill is perceived as a ‘learning disability’ when really it is a ‘teacher disability’, and the consolation prize is to hand children who can’t print a computer. Steven Graham in a 2008 survey of primary teachers found that average time spent on a daily basis teaching children to print is 13 minutes per day. In the 1970′s it was 60 minutes per day. Also reported in Graham’s study was that teachers reported methods for teaching printing were highly diverse and inconsistent, and evaluation of printing non-standardized. The illusion of the “quick fix” by handing children who struggle with printing a laptop is ignorant and short sighted, and is resulting in soaring rates of illiteracy. Half of grd, 8 students do not have job entry literacy for math, reading and printing (National Centre for Education Statistics 2005), yet instead of going back to the ‘tried and true’ McLean’s method of teaching printing, the education system continues to invest scarce resources on unproven and untested educational technologies (Fast Company April 2010). When I say “unproven” and “untested” I am referring to something more than a ‘conflict of interest’ document provided by the manufacturer. These devices require rigorous research that is reliable and reproducible over the long term. This becomes exceptionally difficult when technology is advancing at such a rapid pace (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY ). With dwindling resources, it might be wise to ask the question “Is it the job of the education system to provide children with updated computer applications, at the expense of not teaching ‘the basics’?” This line of thought is likely to bankrupt the Education Ministries in short order, and is presently contributing to declining literacy! Children with developmental delays and subsequent poor motor coordination, largely due to technology OVERUSE in the home setting (average use of entertainment technology is now 8 hours per day for the elementary child – Kaiser Foundation 2010), can no more manipulate keyboards than a pencil. We are raising a generation of children who are largely illiterate, and as a result, are being mislabelled with behaviour diagnoses. How long would you keep going to a job where your skills were deficient and you didn’t know what you were doing?

I recently completed a six week pilot project designed to enhance literacy and printing skills in two school kindergarten classrooms on the Sunshine Coast. This project consisted of the following components: 1) development of a K screening tool to determine sensory and motor components that limit acquiring literacy, 2) design a 3 hour teacher/SETA workshop on methods to promote literacy, 3) design and pilot test 12 twice weekly sessions to enhance attention, gross motor, oculomotor, fine motor, visual motor, praxis, and hand function skill components, 4) perform final evaluation using initial screening tool. Approximately 30% of each classroom was identified as developmentally delayed and subsequently referred for the intervention by resource and classroom teachers, a statistic congruent with Paul Kershaw’s 2009 15 X 15 UBC HELP study findings. Limitations were only 7 out of the total 12 session were conducted, screening and sessions required extensive revisions with consistent pattern established session 5, (largely due to unanticipated poor spatial concepts and inability to pay attention), use of printing “rules” and use of wall surface inconsistent with classroom experience (classrooms did not have chalk or white boards). Results indicated 12% and 18% improvements in two schools, with 29% and 26% improvements in hand function, and 16% and 26% improvements in visual motor skills (the two most significant skill deficit areas). While this pilot project was just a start toward a far more expansive printing program, it illustrated that a minimal intervention (two ½ hour weekly sessions) can go a long way toward improving children’s ability to print.

At this crucial point in time, when educators are actively making the decision to not teach printing skills, and instead turn the job of literacy over to computers, they would be wise to ask the question “Where is the evidence?” that supports this choice. I have long and hard championed the return of printing as a curriculum-based subject with all our Canadian provincial Education Ministries. If printing were curriculum, this would provide teachers with much needed consistency in teaching and evaluation methods. The continued escalation of use of computers in school settings is further contributing to rising rates of ADHD and illiteracy (Christakis D 2007). In his book “iBrain – The technological alteration of the human mind”, neurophysiologist Gary Small reports that children who use high speed technologies are rewiring their brains to not access frontal lobe (the longer neuronal tracks), and poses the question “How will educators teach children with poor executive functioning and limited impulse control?” Whole school districts in the US are supplying every elementary aged child with TeacherMates (Fast Company April 2010), calling it the “$100 curriculum in a box” and referencing the teacher as a mere “moderator”. One has to wonder about the future longevity and rapidly changing role of the teacher.

On May 3, 2010 I will have the opportunity to speak with 20 representatives from the Ministries of Education, Health, and Children and Families in Victoria on the impact of technology on the developing child. During this “technology craze” period, educators might want to revert to use of teaching tools that are evidence based and backed by reliable and replicable research studies, and not spend dwindling resources on technology that is antiquated before the box is even opened.

Research references can be located on www.zonein.ca under Fact Sheet.

Cris Rowan OT (Reg), BScOT, BScBi, SIPT, Approved Provider for ACTBC and AOTA
CEO Zone’in Programs Inc. and Sunshine Coast Occupational Therapy Inc.
6840 Seaview Rd. Sechelt BC V0N3A4
604-885-0986 O, 604-740-2264 C, 604-885-0389 F
crowan@zonein.ca
websites: www.zonein.ca, www.suncoastot.com