Learning How to Learn

The Woman Who Changed Her Brain, and Other Inspiring Stories of Pioneering Brain Transformation is both a memoir of growing up with a learning disability and an indictment of our publicly funded educational system and its failure to help students who struggle to learn. Throughout this book, Barbara Arrowsmith-Young describes her own struggles and those of students at the school she founded in addressing learning disabilities.

Arrowsmith-Young was born in 1951 in Peterborough, Ontario. By the age of six, it was clear that she was having trouble with learning. Although her parents were well meaning and well educated, they could not protect her from the frustration and isolation she felt in the classroom. Her struggle with school began right from the start. Whether it was being grouped with other weak readers, being teased by her classmates or being described as “slow” and “difficult” by teachers, school became a dark hole in her life. She describes the anger of her grade one teacher, who was unable to correct the child’s difficulties with letter and number reversals. She tells how the teacher decided that her inability to stop those reversals was an act of insolence. The teacher’s solution was to administer the strap to her in front of her classmates—an act we would find horrifying today.

Life did not improve in high school. Arrowsmith- Young was able to graduate and enter university, but not without learning challenges and emotional scars. Yet she had what today educational psychologists would call a combined gifted and learning disability profile. She describes her incredible auditory and visual memory (ranked in the 99th percentile). This strength would carry her through university and in turn allow her the opportunity to discover the work of Russian psychologist Alexander Luria while studying psychology in graduate school. The experience was an epiphany for Arrowsmith-Young. Luria had been examining the effects of brain injury on language-based thinking and communication. Arrowsmith-Young saw his observations of Zazetsky—a brain-damaged soldier, whom Luria cared for in a Russian army hospital and later followed for years—as a mirror of her experiences. With Zazetsky’s help, Luria was able both to describe the components of thinking and to map their locations in the brain.

Arrowsmith-Young next took inspiration from the work of research psychologist Mark Rosenzweig who, in the 1960s, would lay the foundations for what would later be called neuroplasticity. This is the understanding that the brain is able to restructure itself throughout the lifespan, not just during childhood. Rosenzweig’s studies with rats showed that enriched environments and training could change both the performance and the brain density of rats. With this knowledge, in 1978 Arrowsmith-Young set out to develop mental exercises that she believed would strengthen the parts of her brain that had undermined her education. Her first exercise was a clock-reading activity. She created flash-cards of analogue clocks, each showing different times. She had always had a hard time recognizing the right time, but with up to twelve hours’ practice each day, not only did her ability to read time quickly improve, but also her math, grammar and logic skill were enhanced. According to Arrowsmith-Young, she had created the first of her many brain exercises that would be able to change the brains of those with learning disabilities.

By 1980, Arrowsmith-Young had opened her own school in Toronto. The Arrowsmith School would specialize in retraining the brains of pupils with learning disabilities. This was achieved through a variety of mental exercises, each designed to strengthen a specific part of the brain. These parts of the brain are responsible for different types of information: language, visual, spatial and auditory, to name a few. In the psychology and education fields, this type of training is known as process training because it is supposed to improve the ability to process information in the brain.

Case closed, one would think. As Canadians, we should be celebrating the development of such a discovery that would cure learning disabilities that afflict between 3 percent and 7 percent of us and make school a living hell for a lot of kids.

But the story does not end this way, nor is it that simple. As the book progresses, Arrowsmith- Young identifies different problems with processing information in the brain and their related learning difficulties. In each case, she supports her examples with appeals to the authority of modern brain science. And she makes it clear that through her training program, the problems with processing information are fixed and students become normal. In order to appreciate the complexity of Arrowsmith-Young’s claims in this book, one must first understand the long and controversial road that, finally, reaches the concept of learning disabilities.

“Learning disability” is a broad umbrella term that includes a variety of accepted learning disorders. More importantly, it is a legal term. It refers to the rights and protection of individuals in both school and employment who have a learning disability as defined under governmental disability legislation.

“Learning disorder,” by contrast, is a clinical term. It finds its utility in the context of the medical profession, specifically mental health. A learning disorder is recognized in an individual of normal intelligence who is seen to have difficulty learning basic skills in the areas of reading, writing and math and whose development of these skills is not impeded by other disorders such as autism, a neurological problem, a sensory deficit (visual or hearing problems) or motor control difficulties. Simply put, learning disorders are defined according to functional criteria.

The term “learning disabilities,” when used beyond its scope as a human rights term, tends also to incorporate cognitive processes assumed to be responsible for learning disorders. These processes are responsible for the acquisition, organization, retention and use of information, whether it is language based or some other semiotic system. It is here that things start to get fuzzy, both in the learning disabilities community and in this book. That is because Arrowsmith-Young begins to talk about cognitive deficits in the processing of information, some of which are already defined by researchers and others that she herself has defined. All told, Arrowsmith-Young identifies 19 processing deficits that hinder progress in both learning and socialization.

Much of the body of the book examines these cognitive deficits. Arrowsmith-Young gives examples of students who have struggled with a “symbolic thinking deficit,” which, based on her description, sounds like a problem with executive functions, an all-encompassing term for the ability to plan and execute goal-directed behaviour. A few chapters later she discusses something she calls “predicative speech deficit.” She describes the experience of three of her students who were able to move from very limited language use to fully engaged discourse after completing the appropriate cognitive exercises. In the case of one student, this involved wearing headphones, listening and then repeating what he had heard.

With such purported success, one is tempted to ask why the educational establishment has not wholeheartedly opened its doors to Arrowsmith- Young’s program. After all, trying to teach students with learning disabilities has vexed educators and researchers for the last two centuries. Many teachers have inappropriately placed the blame squarely on the student, suggesting that a poor attitude to learning, laziness or just plain stupidity is the real reason. Even today, it is not unusual to hear horror stories from former students with learning disabilities struggling to get through school. Arrowsmith-Young is to be commended for her descriptions of the struggles of learning-disabled students in our public school system.

To appreciate the resistance to the use of brain- training programs in schools, it is necessary to look back to the recognition of learning disabilities in the educational community. In the mid 1970s, the U.S. government officially recognized learning disability and gave it status for funding in special education. (In Canada, where education is a provincial responsibility, individual provinces would follow suit over the next decade.) Research funds were also made available. Most researchers began to pick up on the trail of earlier work—focusing on identifying and fixing deficits in brain processes. The decade saw a litany of process-based interventions: Kephart’s perceptual-motor training, Feingold’s diet modification, Irlen’s coloured lenses and a variety of modality-based interventions appeared, to name a few. Unfortunately, when put to the scrutiny of evaluation, none showed any pronounced evidence of success.

At the same time that one group of researchers was trying to retrain the brain, others were exploring improvement in classroom instructional practices. The work done by Siegfried Engelmann at the University of Illinois in the late 1960s was significant. He developed instructional programs for the systematic teaching of sub-skills and their integration into more general skills for reading, math and language. Known as direct instruction, this approach involved both skills training for students and explicit instruction by teachers. DI is a step-by-step instructional method that demands that students master each step before moving to the next. Teachers are expected first to demonstrate how to do a step. Next, they support students as they practise what they have learned and, finally, the students are allowed to do it on their own. Other teacher-centred instructional practices would use the DI approach. These interventions did not fix the cognitive processes underpinning learning, reading or math. Instead, they tried to find better ways to teach reading and math.

This brings us to the 21st century. In this age of brain science, are we able to get process training right and eliminate learning disabilities altogether?

It is fair to say that the research in brain science has become one of the leading stories of the last decade. Whether dealing with social, economic or political behaviour, there are constant items in the media with explanations based on brain research. Yet for most researchers, the step from the laboratory into the real world is taken with great caution.

In the past, psychologists have done important work in the field of education by identifying cognitive problems, devising tools for assessing and remediating, and testing their validity in the research community. The research on reading disorders is an excellent example. Initially, researchers were able to show that some children struggled with reading because of poor ability to discriminate and to manipulate core sounds in language, which in turn hampered their ability to move from spoken to written language. The use of phonics programs helped to address this problem. Other children could read, but struggled with comprehension. Many of these children had poor attention skills and would lose track of content. Comprehension strategies went a long way to addressing this problem. Identifying the problem and utilizing appropriate instructional interventions made a difference.

Recent research has had the use of new brain-imaging instruments such as the fMRI, ERP, PET and MEG to actually look at what is going on in the brain. This has opened up great possibilities for the study of human behaviour. Yet these tools have limitations. They primarily measure two things: brain activation in real time and the location of the mental activity. Unfortunately, none of this technology does both at the same time very well. The fMRI is great for identifying brain activity within a few millimetres. But it captures this a few seconds after the event. The ERP, on the other hand, excels at measuring activity in real time, but is not as reliable on location. This produces a second challenge— designing a simple task that can be measured, and then speculating how that task can be linked to more complex behaviour like reading and math. Although the research is exciting and its ability to identify some of the building blocks of learning is important, the present discoveries are still works in progress.

This brings us to the core argument in the book: explaining the underlying science behind why the Arrowsmith program works. Arrowsmith- Young presents her approach as unique, inspired by Luria’s research and affirmed by contemporary research in brain science. Yet the Arrowsmith School comes from a long tradition in education of trying to train cognitive processes. One can go back to Jean- Marc Gaspard Itard’s work with Victor, the feral child of Aveyron, at the beginning of the 19th century, to see the role of cognitive process training for children struggling with learning. According to Arrowsmith-Young, what makes her story special is the validation of her theories and practice by research in the field of neurosciences, specifically the theory of brain plasticity. Hence the book’s title: The Woman Who Changed Her Brain.

In this sense the Arrowsmith program joins a new wave of cognitive process-training programs that include the use of exercise bicycles in math classes, computerized training to improve attention skills, meditation to improve self-regulation and neurofeedback to address wandering minds. Although researchers are starting to evaluate these activities, they are also showing that these programs do not fix the brain so much as make it more receptive to learning by reducing anxiety, increasing oxygen to the brain or emphasizing the importance of self-reflection in learning complex skills.

Schools are in the business of teaching children core skills necessary to learn about the world around them and to become productive participants in our society. When students struggle to learn these core skills in reading, writing and math, then schools try intensive instructional programs and supportive accommodations to help access knowledge. As much as retraining cognitive processes in the brain seems like a rational way to help students who struggle to learn to read, write or do math, until there is good evidence to support process training, the risk to students for lost time makes schools hesitant to invest money and student time in such endeavours.

The Woman Who Changed Her Brain makes a strong case for recognizing that we all learn differently and that educators must make the effort to understand why some students struggle more than others. Science certainly can inform. It can also help teachers to develop better instructional practices. In the case of the Arrowsmith program, it may also inform how to change our brain, but until it is fully researched, we will not know whether it is the actual process training or the caring teachers within the program that are making the difference.