Does your child need a tutor or brain trainer?

From kindergarten through grad school, students typically struggle because of two problems:

1. New information wasn't grasped because the child did not understand.
2. Weak cognitive skills are making it hard to grasp new information.

Tutoring works on the first problem; Brain training works on the second.The basic nature of teaching involves repetition. Tutoring is an attempt to re-teach what the child did not learn in the class. It involves repetition and memorization concepts to make the kid understand. However, brain training works on a different note. It involves training the brain cells to process the information in the right way.

Brain training focuses on improving the core abilities needed for academic success. It consists of a variety of exercises designed to improve functioning in areas such as sustaining attention, thinking before acting, visual and auditory processing, listening and reading.

But how do you know what kind of training is required for your child? When looking for help, right kind of testing in crucial. Far often a student's individual underlying skills are not identified. Testing prior to training skills and choosing the right brain trainer are vital in overcoming learning or reading struggle. The results are better academic performance almost immediately, and an enhanced ability to learn into the future.

Tutoring can benefit students in certain situations, but for those with underlying cognitive skill weaknesses, cognitive skills training is the answer. So, when you are looking to help your child's learning difficulties in school.... think brain training first.

Deferring Judgement

Have you come across the fable of four blind men and an elephant? One man believes the leg he is grasping to be a tree. The second man is sure that the tusk he is holding is a spear. A third is convinced that the writhing trunk he is touching is a snake. The last, feeling an ear, tells his companions that he has found a fan. If only the men had waited a bit and pooled their knowledge, they might have been able to make sufficient connections to realize that they were, in fact, dealing with an elephant.

Being able to defer your judgement, not jump to conclusions, is a useful attribute to have if you wish to improve your mind. In today's judgmental society, it often seems as if you need to have a smart answer to everything. Not being able to come up with an immediate sound-bite response can be perceived as a weakness. Yet this quality of delayed judgement is exactly what many complex situations require. It allows you to move beyond simplistic notions into more sophisticated ones. 

Tough problems take time to unpack. If you are too eager to solve them and strain away at the leash desperately trying to come up with an answer, your mind becomes brittle and binary. It can't see beyond the black and white, the yeses and nos.

May be there have been times when you have felt confused and quickly came up with an answer, but would have benefited from spending more time puzzling out a better answer? Or when you have been exploring a really difficult problem which may have had many different perspectives? Have there been times when you dismissed something as unimportant which subsequently assumed much greater significance in your life? Or when things have been difficult and you made an emotional judgement that you later regretted? By becoming aware of these situations you can consciously practise deferring your judgment the next time you are in a similar situation, and practice this response will become instinctive. 

It is smart to defer evaluation when working with others to come up with new ideas, for good reasons. First, if you jump in too quickly, especially with a critical thought, you are likely to make the contributor of the idea feel put down. This can evoke hostility or cause the person to withdraw from the discussion. 

Second, coming up with creative ideas is a dynamic, ongoing process. Ideas breed ideas. Often the better ideas come later as a result of earlier ones. By postponing judgment, you will enable yourself and others to go through this creative process. And third, if you are serious about developing your mind, then you may want to work on the personality which comes with it. People who never stop and think are hard work to be with !

Spelling Disability

Even good readers may have difficulty spelling but for students with learning disabilities, mastery of spelling is an even greater challenge. Students with specific reading disability have significant difficulties with spelling and typically make much slower progress in spelling than in reading. Even though disabled spellers progress through the same early stages of spelling development as normal spellers, they progress at a much slower rate and may never achieve the highest levels of spelling skill. Spelling is a linguistic skill which depends upon sensitivity to the sounds of words (phonology) as well as to letter patterns (orthography) within words. It is important to note that orthographic memory is different from visual memory and poor spellers may perform quite well on traditional tests of visual memory and visual-spatial skills. Studies of poor spellers indicate that impaired readers make errors related to orthography, phonology, and morphology. The students who responded best to instruction were those who made fewer errors related to phonology and morphology. Research indicates no relationship between IQ and spelling skills.

Spelling instruction should be thoroughly integrated with word identification instruction rather than a separate process. For students with persistent reading and spelling difficulties, the sequence of spelling skills should be the same as for reading. Therefore, the best approach is to use materials for reading instruction which include spelling skills carefully coordinated with word identification. If using materials which do not include spelling, the teacher must carefully coordinate spelling instruction so that it matches the reading curriculum. Words to be spelled by encoding should be the same words that the student is taught for decoding. Irregular words for spelling should be those words which are needed to read the decodable texts that are used for practice of reading. Assessment of spelling skills can also be used to guide instruction for individual students. For example, students who are significantly more advanced in reading than spelling might be working on roots and prefixes for reading but require additional work in more basic spelling patterns. Careful and detailed assessments of spelling skills can provide guidance for the teacher in selecting areas for remedial instruction. Even with such students (more advanced in reading than spelling), the teacher should connect the spelling skills to reading. For example, consider a student who has not yet mastered the doubling rules for spelling but can read these words correctly. This student could be led to discover the rules that govern spelling through analysis of the words and then given systematic practice spelling these words. It is important for teachers (many of whom are intuitive spellers) to thoroughly understand the rules and patterns which govern spelling in English.

My article in Mothernews

PRACTICE OBSERVING & DESCRIBING

Everyday you probably walk past something that is intrinsically interesting, but that you in fact barely notice. Improving the ability to observe and describe the world around you is another resource for building a better and more creative brain. You might specialize in observing a particular sort of thing that you yourself choose. The topic will vary, depending on where you live. It might be birds or barns. It might be paintings in a near by museum. It might be people you encounter, or may be the way the things are organised. Any of these might be a theme that you follow for a month or more, which is succeeded by a new one after that.

The first stage in this mental exercising is observing. Your long-term goal is to look intently and in detail, so that you observe aspects that you would not normally notice. You might begin, however, with a gestalt approach, much as the impressionist painters did when they invented impressionism in the nineteenth- century. This will exercise the emotional and intuitive components of your brain. Look at something that is of interest to you.What thoughts and feelings does that evoke  in you? Think and carefully choose the right words to describe them. Then switch over to observing more analytically. You will want to break your observation down into the details that are appropriate to what you are observing. Choose the perfect words to describe the shapes, colors, and the patterns that you are seeing.While performing this part of the exercise, you are beginning the process of  describing while you are observing. But to make the exercise complete you need to produce a written description. Sit down and write a paragraph in which you describe your observations in the most elegant and precise language you are able to achieve. 

As you continue this exercise over weeks and months, you should work on one topic several times a  week for at least one month. As you build your set of descriptions, notice how you are getting better at observing and describing. Then switch to another topic, preferably one that is quite different from the first.

You will very likely begin to notice a payoff from this exercise in your daily life. Your practice will generalize to many other things that you do. Observing carefully, in both intuitive and an analytic manner, will begin to become habitual. Your vocabulary will grow. Your writings will improve. And you will grow new synapses in your visual, language and creativity as a consequence of this mental exercise.

What Creates Creativity?

Extraordinarily creative people usually do not emerge in a random way over time.  They might be driven from within an internal predilection ("nature") to express their creativity. The polymaths, Leonardo and Michelangelo were from simple origins where there was no emphasis on creativity yet their achievements in art were their legacy to the world. What forces would have helped them produce this great flowering of the human brain?

An atmosphere of intellectual freedom, ferment and excitement is a compelling factor of creativity. The spirit of renaissance  - is the spirit of breaking out of old and oppressive boundaries, doing what people have not done yet;  thinking new thoughts, finding new ways to express and experimenting with new techniques - leads to intellectual freedom.

The creativity needs a nurture of supportive environment to manifest itself.  "Nature" can be defined as an innate or inborn gift that drives an individual to creative achievement. Once this creative nature occurs, nurturing it through a variety of environmental factors will further enhance it. Many different forces have an impact on how the brain grows and develops. One of our challenges is to understand those forces more deeply, so that we may eventually use that understanding more wisely. When the gifted are nurtured the right way, we shine brilliantly.

What we perhaps can say is that Mother Nature gives creative people - the brains that are well designed for perceiving and thinking in original ways. The creativity,henceforth, gets enhanced by cognitive and personality traits such as curiosity, openness to experience, and self-confidence. These environmental factor nurtures the creative brains to develop, modify and adapt to the political and social forces surrounding it.

The foundations of creativity 

• Need an environment of support
• Individual abilities in various fields
• No sense of limits being set on their abilities
• Discovery, recognition and appreciation of their abilities by others

"CREATIVITY REMAINS UNNOTICED UNTIL SOMEONE DISCOVERS, RECOGNIZE AND BELIEVE IN THEM "

Brain Plasticity

When we say that the brain is "plastic", we don't talk about the polymers. Brain plasticity means that the brain is marvelously responsive, adaptable and eternally changing. Its adaptations and changes occur in response to the demands and pressures of the environment that it encounters. We are literally remaking our brain and accumulating a trove of experiences and memories, every minute of the day; everyday of the week; every month and every year.

One important aspect of brain plasticity is the ability to retain and store more specific memories. We talk too much of memories but where are these memories stored? The storage of experience as memories is the foundation upon which the brain builds its capacity to continually remodel itself. Memory storage is carried out on the molecular level, and the synapse is the workhouse for ensuring that memories are preserved for long periods of time. Preservation of memories over the short term occurs because existing synapses are strengthened.

Another important component of brain plasticity is the concept of critical periods. These are relatively limited windows of opportunity during which the brain can learn, change and develop. If the opportunity is not seized during the critical period, the window may close forever ( Don't worry too much as there are brain training methodologies to open up the window). The concept has many important implications for building better brains, for enhancing creativity and for education. Examining everyday human life, inadequate environmental exposure results in failure to learn something during the critical period.

One of the best ways to get a new perspective on things to enhance this plasticity is to tackle a new field that you know little or nothing about. We might own our own creativity to bridge across these new disciplines. Many people have a secret longing to do something different from the work that is their daily bread. If you have always wanted to try your hand at painting or to master a foreign language, take the time and effort to do it. Do it in depth and with a passion, for this is the only way that you will really exercise your brain. Intense curiosity also aids this plasticity. This accelerates creativity. The seeds of creativity may be planted by nature but nurture helps it germinate, flower and grow. Nature cannot be changed but nurture is under our control.

We know that brain plasticity continues throughout life, and that using the brain is good for it. Individuals can do more to exercise their brains than they currently do, creating the possibility that they can slow aging process and perhaps lessen their risks for degenerative brain diseases.