so it's really it's an honor to be here today to have our three speakers who are really experts in this field of dyslexia and really lovely to see so many of you come out for this event today this is our first event as decoding dyslexia bellman and this is a great turnout  thank you so much for coming and i want to begin by i will just start right away by introducing the gob dr god is an associate professor of pediatrics at harvard medical school and boston children's hospital her research on auditory and language processing in the human brain and its applications for the development of both typical an atypical language and literacy skills in her very active research lab she said he's pretty markers of developmental dyslexia in the prevailing and infant brain using magnetic resonance imaging the underlying neural mechanisms of co morbidity for developmental dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and she's also developed numerous screening tools for dyslexia and she's going to come and talk about a whole bunch of all of that right now for us thank you percent of us fourth graders are not reading at grade level and this number is even higher if someone is coming from a low income family there are several components to can read they can lead to a typical reading genetics small get into the brain this is primarily what i'll cover today perception i cognition as well as the environment this is one of my most favorite quotes from steven pinker down utilize for reading so i don't know when was the last time you learned about the brain maybe in high school maybe recently and just wanted to give you for a brief introduction so this is things into a bigger picture here i brought you a video today again this is the brain from the left side the back the front and the bottom and then this video i'm going to show you an adult reading a couple of single words and you will see which brain areas are involved in doing this so whether to show you is that it starts here in the back and in the reading task and so it's no wonder that kids struggled with learning to read because what they have to do is to already made all these brain regions and put them into the reading network long period of time but this failure i can't figure it out i think i'm stupid your parents think you're laser mazie starts long long before official diagnosis and skip so i wanted to also cover genetics so we know that if someone has trouble learning to read has dyslexia has a reading this ability to there's a fifty percent chance that  daughter or their sibling or their son has a reading the simple ts well ok so if you have an older sibling or a parent you have a fifty percent chance to also develop a reading disability that's much much higher than together and pass these along highways to connect and work properly so people have shown that these problems are primarily here in the left side of the brain in the back part  part of the reading at work in children and adults who have dyslexia we could also show that these differences in the back part of the letter box of well as the area that maps the songs on to the  written campari is independent of i q so it doesn't matter if you have a very low i q or a super high i q these differences in brain are exactly the same so what happens if we do interventions can't and so i don't want to propose any specific intervention because i just want to show what a good intervention that really does improve our reading just a little reading  the books in camp so good instruction can do this too so i always tell teachers not sure how many teachers think here today but i always tell them next time you go up to a top cocktail party and someone ask you what you do for a living say i'd change your  usually get a diagnosis and we are there for the most effective and so right now in the united states of america we have a failure model in most states meaning you have to fail significantly over a long period of time before you get access to export resource ok unfortunately what the research shows is the window for the most effective intervention is thinking never that first grade this year  to germany tomorrow ok let's assume you none of you speaks german it will be really hard for you to learn the language without an accent and to learn the grammar so that you will sound like a native speaker at one point if i move a whole bunch of four year olds to germany it will be absolutely no problem for them to learn the language without an accent and to learn grammar and they will sound like a native in  what we've been doing is we've looking into be here roland brain markers of how could we identify children at risk leon before they even step on the first day of kindergarten and many many studies have shown really good predictor of later for instance or finland which is a little bit different because the language is a lot more transparent meaning they only have one song for each letter of show that words and see them on the screen like a goat and then you have to decide these two words started to say these kids are preschoolers this is prior before the first day of kindergarten left side of the brain especially the back so these children and we followed them maybe we could show that this is very specific to the kids who will end up struggling ok so these kids with their little backpacks step into the first day of kindergarten with a less optimal brain to learn to read so there's no reason to wait till the end of second and beginning of third grade to give them access to resources  of the cortex is pulled it seems to be different and that's really important to know because this folding happened in utero nothing of the folding happens after you're born so it's a really strong indicator that if the brain is already babies who have an older sibling or parent of a dyslexia we were interested in better these brain correct sticks can already be observed in infancy or whether they develop in response to language development so  way we do this is we asked the parents to come in we say put your baby to sleep right now that's what happened to be going on this incredible love machine they sleep for two hours and we have no this isn't we're going to come to school for free with a team from mit in boston children's hospital rescreen and the incoming kindergarten or with a thirty minute battery you get your results within two weeks we gonna tell you school districts many of them very close to the world we are located right now but i'm usually how my office saying all along we don't want you anywhere close to this and we said why not and they said because  this we should screen let me get this hopes we should screen in my opinion at the four or five year old checkup and doctors offices in kindergarden info sessions we should screen and space response to screening all right so we're developing the screener right now so if you're interested in maybe being involved in the validation please email me and so  child stress parental stress and improve the overall family dynamic and i have to say thank you to all the people working with me all the families who come and this is the study if you're interested  thank myself i have not had a formal diagnosis of dyslexia but the only way that i was able to get through harvard college through my readings there i only read three books i was there i did pretty well as a student but i had to go to what was then it was called library still there and listened to most of my major readings on what were then l p s while i was reading through the book my youngest son i had to teach how to decode because his teacher who is a lovely well intended person employed as sort of psycholinguistic guessing strategy approaches which are not good for kids who are likely dyslexic and my oldest son only finished school going to landmark school for his last year they are both successful i'm moderately successful but my oldest son is a chief in the navy takes care of large groups of kids so those of you who or how many of your parents of a child with dyslexia ok so we share this in common and there is definitely hope if we get to kids early as needing as suggested the youngest son ended up going to swarthmore college his room is full of books he loves books so teaching children how to read is crux so i'm at the institute of health professions in charlestown navy yard  our program is a unique program that pamela hook and i helped to develop or create that program it was the first program in the united states to offer the option of dual teacher certification in speech language and in reading with the unitary curriculum so the linguistic basis of reading and reading impairment is a long term interest of  as it is for for many of you so i do want to definitely think decoding dyslexia i have to tell you this group nationally has been changing laws to help support  families and their kids just extraordinary and nancy duggan but i think it would be an error to simply identify nancy because there are so many dedicated parents working  strenuously and with great commitment to children to help them so one of my teachers when i won my doctoral studies at harvard graduate school of education itself she started with stage one and then her students who were speech language pathologist said jean there's all this stuff that goes on before we do this formal intervention with  children and she said you're absolutely right and so she created what she called state zero and that deals with the sort of birth to kindergarten elements of pre reading acquisition the foundational skills that are fundamental to learning to read so what's interesting is that obviously stage is zero to five the relationship is going to be mano direction largely mano directional where children are hearing and speaking language and that's providing a sort of foundation for their school age written language skills and then once children get into their initial reading instruction and later this is sort of by a directional relationship so one thing that we've observed is that there is some debate around it but it phony mc awareness that awareness of individual speech sounds like in the word as a function of being exposed to grapheme phoneme relationships in in a school early school proper early school environment so this is called the simple view of reading a number of us in this room who have been studying reading for a while we found this to be a really helpful tool for thinking about components of reading and of writing as well we know that we want our children to be able to read and there are two major components one is were recognition or spelling for written  some people entirely more this in their approaches to reading and simply kind of higher level strategy they don't realize that right so children with a language disorder some people call it a developmental language disorder but a broad based language disorder you're often going to see these deficits in the bottom part and you'll also see deficits in in speech sound processing as well sometimes very subtle deficits and as need dean so nicely introduced us  this sounds simple accuracy as well as decoding fluency so they're not they're not the same thing they're that children have different kinds of needs and we need to be aware of what their individual strengths and weaknesses are so i'm going to focus initially on these sort of underlying language predictors of reading comprehension and then i will move on to decoding and encoding so this is nagin referred to these folk cabul retests i have limited time so i'm only doing just the receptive test but receptive means you're listening and responding and expressive means that you are producing a response typically you're responding to some kind of a pictorial stimulus picture so if the test this point to him by being which number would the child point to be a higher level item right so the fourth item and if it were  simpler item on the test it might say point two drinking so that's receptive vocabulary test it's one of the main paradigms or methods that we use for assessing underlying vocabulary skills here's an example of a sentence structure task by the way it doesn't work very well if you live in kuwait city point to the girl who is wearing her new raincoat even though she doesn't need it so a complex sentence it's long so there's a heavy load on phonological memory and on working memory holding a speech string in mind manipulating the information to understand it so this is a receptive task an expressive task might be make a sentence about this girl declarative sentence that starts with the word so we're going to look at sort of word recognition and spelling and the kind of prediction of those abilities and i'd like you to engage with me say sunshine now say that again but don't say shine outstanding so what kind of speech unit are you manipulating what size is it yes really word low it's these are compound words and you taking them apart so that's much more salient or meaningful to a child when they're doing it and it's therefore an easier type of item say cucumber now say it again but don't say  it's hard to argue that what is left is meaningful we have the word cue like a cue ball or cue tip or the sap that sound but it's essentially non meaningful there now say smack now say it again but don't say so you sense that you has it it a little bit longer than that because that's at the phoneme level so one reason that a task like that is difficult is that we don't speak in phonemes really if you intuitively we're speaking more in syllables so if you ask a child to analyze a phoneme within a syllable that's a very abstract requirement for them it's harder to do that in the word smack in addition you have this kind of blending the scene and you have to take them out isolate this that is very difficult for children with dyslexia where who are at risk for dyslexia so these are classic digit span tasks most of you know the sort of millar and nicely information that we basically can hold about five to seven units in this sort of short term memory space you're looking at them now and you're thinking those are the numbers you're you're correct but the key thing to think about is that those are actually speech information so if i give you if you close your eyes go ahead close your eyes and i'll see a series of numbers and then when i say open your eyes then i want you to write them down from memory you're ready it's three nine two one five seven six zero go it's really unfair to a group of people who have kids who are dyslexic because that means that a probably about a half of you have dyslexia yourselves this is terribly difficult for me to do terribly difficult  so if you look down here i think you are deciding kind of check yourself there if you're interested in other type of tasks that we do to assess his ability to hold speech implementation in memory and other words phonological memories is non word repetition tasks so if you close your eyes for a moment repeat after me hump excellent veneral lies separate tenney all so you have the idea the idea is that you're repeating words that you don't know i mean most of us have a pretty good vocabulary so we're thinking of words that sort of sound the same and that's a non word repetition task this also is often very difficult for children with dyslexia because they have trouble remember nineteen was showing you the pictures of that sort of temporal lobe the capacity for processing speech information is limited neurologically and this is the behavioral evidence that we get of the same phenomenon that she was talking about so this is the classic number nineteen also referred to ran type tasks this is called object naming looks first you make sure the child knows the individual items this is a nice test to use with young children who have been exposed to formal reading or this ok so in the initial might be hard for you to see if you're in the very rare so initially you make sure the child knows the items so it's not a straight on vocabulary test you make sure they can name the individual items and then you say as rapidly as possible i want you to name from left to right all of these items and meanwhile you're timing the task so let's try that right now starting  ok so how many of you found that you actually started to slow down confuse items towards the end the reason is one of the key reasons is that it's requiring rapid retrieval of speech information in this case you're not looking at letters or a word that would be registering in that sort of fusiform face area or in in particular the letter  to attach each information to that and then express it verbal and that's requiring rapid for the logical retrieval in response to a visual stimulus so words are visual stimuli in this case these are pictures so this ends up we'll talk about what it predicts later here's an example of a rapid letter naming task i won't have you do it you got the sense of how it works there are also digits are digit naming some people even use an alternating stimulus type of test words letter letter kind of randomized systematically letter letter number number number letter letter and so on where they're having a kind of switch back and forth that puts a heavy load on executive functioning or monitoring you have to kind of always be alert and vigilant and switching  here is a different type of test this is not a rand task this is a simple letter identification test and you can see that it uses capital letters small letters sometimes they actually vary the it was a brazilian test and we kind of thought well it's it's the only test it's available but it's a little bit problematic so anyway that's one form of orthographic awareness it's a sort of initial basic form and letter identification is you know is it as all point out is of great importance early on when children are very initially being exposed to letters so if you were looking at kindergarten predictors you would also include i  preschool and kindergarten we can predict with roughly eighty five percent accuracy if you include family history in there it increases the accuracy of that prediction who is going to have trouble with word recognition and who isn't who's going to fail before they fail so it's the same kind of incentive that they dean you can see the passion that she was expressing i feel a similar kind of passion around this extraordinary power that speech language pathologists or others who are schooled in these assessments that ability to identify once you get around the age of great s u v great to end a grade to grade three we're expecting kids to be fluent because readers and children can show poor ran performance all together i apologize for lots of arrows this is i know that some of you are much less interested in seeing sort of humanity's place but here's our kindergarten you can also put can't decode accurately and can't decode fluently then you have reading comprehension problems if you can't spell accurately and can't spell fluently you're going and if you look at their underlying language skills they're often so this is the big picture these are many of the same dashers that need dean just talked about that they use in their batteries so that  early prediction is of fundamental importance for watchful memory and so predicting all of these different skills but for different reasons i won't spend a lot of time with that i wanted to show you  picture by a friend of mine all the scarboro showed it ash conference around two thousand two thousand and one and it basically captures same second or third grade children are increasingly automatic they're increasingly fluent they're much more strategic they're in their reading if they don't have strong underlying so here are couple of references to the hook in haynes is in the handbook of charlaine which disorders second edition and it kind of summarizes a lot of sort of diagnostic and intervention implications  my colleague terry jennings that when mark school and i wrote a book entitled from talking to writing the kind of traces this sort of pathway of the importance of verbal expression and understanding auditorily if you're interested in that book it's available through landmark school and they intentionally price it to make it be available to as many people as possible that's available through landmark outreach so thank you very much i have the pleasure of introducing melissa orcon she is the program director at the center of reading and language research at tufts university and she has conducted extensive research on how motivational practices can be integrated into remedial reading instruction to foster self regulation and reduce avoidance behaviors and she purred she provides professional development trainings for administrators teachers and psychologists on best practices dork dr orkin has instructed on reading disabilities at the harvard graduate school of education contributed to publications on a variety of educational topics including literacy development and executive function skills and she regularly presented annual professional meetings in the fields of reading hi everyone how are you thank you so much for coming out on the saturday before thanksgiving when you have many other demands on your time i know and i'm very excited to see so many people here it's a real honor for us as researchers to be able to translate our work into practical strategies and and to inform parents and teachers and just to have a sense who's in the room so how many of struggling readers or individuals do what dyslexia is really great how many teachers do we have awesome i mean people play both roles yes ok wonderful so i'm going to be working we're kind of switching gears here a little dyslexia what screening tools can be used to identify children early we're not going to be talking as so much about instruction but that being said if you do have questions i'm sure we'd be happy to field questions about instruction during the question time i want to talk about engagement and positive learning experiences because i know when i teach children who are struggling in reading or who have dyslexia i have all of these strategies that i want to teach them about but if i can't get them to even sit at the table or to engage in the task it all goes to waste so sometimes motivation is thought of as kind of a secondary thought but i really think of it as a primary issue in helping our children to become more take greater ownership over their learning at our center we've spent about eight years examining what works for kids who struggle with reading how teachers and parents can help to foster intrinsic motivation so i'm going to be sharing some of the findings with you today so so i want to start by talking a little bit about this story of motivation so it turns out that motivation has a really really complicated and complex and there are lots of different aspects to it but i think it's important to have a sense of just how motivation develops in early childhood because that gives us insights into the critical aspects of a learning environment i want to talk about how the things that you say and you do as parents or teachers play a big role in how kids think about themselves as learners and then i want to spend a little time this ciphering elements of intrinsic motivation so hear that term before intrinsic motivation it's a pretty common term when i talk about intrinsic motivation what i'm referring to is this internal desire to work hard and that's compared to extrinsic motivation which is the idea of working harder engaging in a task because you want to receive a particular reward or incentive like for a grade or for a prize or for money or you want to avoid a longer term retention of information and greater effort and greater engagement so we tend to focus more on bolstering intrinsic motivation so i'm going to talk to you about the secrets behind intrinsic motivation ok so let's first just talk about the stages of motivation so motivation unfold over the course of development so motivation begins universally as curiosity for any of you for those of you who are parents you know that from the time your child can sort of coordinate their actions from about six months old they start putting things in their mouths and exploring things by opening up shelves and or drawers and closing doors are opening up cabinets and closing cabinets or filling things in spilling things and they do this over and over and over again and it's an effort to figure out how the world works it's called mastery motivation and it lasts until about two and then age two there is a big shift in motivation that with the development of language skills children begin to realize that there is an extract did behavior that there's a right way to do things and there's a wrong way to do things or that there is the appropriate way and the inappropriate way and the adults in their world send them messages about what's right and what's wrong so they tend to look to the adults and often can see this little girl in this picture she's doing a puzzle on the refrigerator and she's sort of looking up i'm assuming to the adults to say is this how i'm supposed to do it and two year olds are particularly good at testing the boundaries of what can i get away with right that's why we call them the terrible twos because they're always looking for where that line is they're trying to figure it out and then by school age around age three four five children don't need to look to the adults as much they can independently appraise their own behavior they can decide if they've done something that's appropriate or inappropriate and this is a huge shift in development because essentially what they've done is they now know what they should feel pride around and what they should feel embarrassed by they are regulating their own behavior in the sense of how it's going to be received by the others in their social environment motivation is predicated on the on the ideas are these emotions of pride and embarrassment and these are emotions that we call secondary emotions which mean we're not born with them has anybody seen the movie inside out that film inside out right so you remember those are primary emotions so those are the emotions that you're born with you're born with emotions like joy and fear and discussed and sadness and those are emotions that are universal everyone is born with them embarrassment are culturally based so in and in a western culture what you might be proud of could be very different than in like a collectivist society like in japan and these ideas of pride and embarrassment are not only based in a culture they can be specific to a particular environment so what i mean by that is you are sending cues to your child or to your student all the time by what you say and what you do about what they should feel proud of and what they should feel embarrassed by you're sending it through how you structure activities you're sending it by how you provide them feedback and thinking more about the cues is that you're sending are going to help you better understand their motivation so for example if you can see this picture this is a picture or i'm guessing of bulletin  so what is the message that's being sent here mistakes or your errors she hide them right so right there that's the message that kids are getting so here's another message that is being depicted in this illustration what's being to what's the message here yeah that the parent can do it better and if she takes over she can do it better that she's sending the child that message the minute she's taking over the homework she takes the pencil out of the child's hand and doesn't herself she's sending the message i can do a better this is how it should look and then finally this is a board that we happen to have in our center that we've developed over many many years of thinking about motivation and this board is called our beautiful board i don't know if anyone's for a million with that book beautiful oops by bernie salzberg it's a book about mistakes in art it's a really wonderful book about how are you can make all sorts of mistakes are and still can come out beautiful so we have this bulletin board and rather than having our perfect work we have all of our errors so the message here is the exact opposite that actually we want to think about errors as something to be proud of as like a badge of learning and we've thought a lot about how to normalize and on our mistakes all of these messages that we're talking about and this idea of what you're proud of and what you feel ashamed by this is related to our feelings of competence and competen turns out to be one of the four essential principles for fostering intrinsic motivation children need to feel as though they can build skills in a particular area may notice themselves growing and improving in an area that helps that helps activate their competence and that helps further activate their intrinsic motivation the other needs are autonomy so they need to feel like they have ownership over what's happening they have some freedom in how they practice their skills how they demonstrate their knowledge belonging is the third while so we work hard because of the relationships that we have with other people and when we feel like we're part of a learning community where our contribution is valued and important it is a further activates our motivation to engage and to persist with tasks and then finally meaning so we want to make meaning out of what we're doing we wanted to be either personally related to our own interests and goals or that we understand the purpose of a task in terms of our larger values for example i don't like practice same spelling but i do it because i want to be able to use interesting words when i'm writing my stories or i'm conveying my thoughts so these are what we call the a b c am principles of intrinsic motivation and our center whenever we're developing some kind of intervention that's designed to fostering gauge man our motivation we derive our strategies we derive all of our activities from these principles and this comes from a theory called self determination theory that's been widely research and it started at the university of rochester in the one nine hundred seventy s so this isn't something that we've created this is an established framework now we've used these strategies both in our work with children in reading instruction and to support parents as they do homework so let me just share some of the findings we have a summer reading program at our center it's an intensive five week program of they have three hours that's divided between explicit phonics instruction to use programs like killing ham and wilson and then they have they also have a program called the re vote program which was developed in our center it's a curriculum for  improving their fluency in comprehension so for a number of years i was running this program and we were using a lot of pizza parties and surprise boxes because if you can imagine as you know when reading is the hardest thing for you every single day and your parents tell you guess what we've signed you up for a reading camp you are thrilled and you can't believe you're good for it and you're so excited to be there every single day so we we had a lot of bait and switch like forget that we're reading we're going to have a pizza party later but we always had the a n c and we always had to increase the reward of the party or the chart the chart the sticker charts became like crazy complex sort of systems so we said you know what let's see what happens if half the children get those rewards and half the children get the exact same kind of high quality specialized instruction with  am motivational strategies built into them and will do it for five weeks now it's not a lot of time it's sixty hours which is like a blip in the life of a child but what we found was that actually with in sixty hours the kids who got the specialized instruction not only were more engaged and we know that because we had research assistants huddled in the corners of the classroom watching the children and checking off when they raise their hand when they made a comment when they connected their learning when they initiated task in persistent tasks versus when they were in the bathroom for twenty minutes or they were doing you know picking up their pencil or sharpening pencils extensively so they were more engaged we saw that learned more they learned more just the instruction was the same the content was the same it was the way it was delivered it was the way that we were creating the activities and giving the feedback that was different and just so that helped the children consolidate their knowledge and become independent as learners in a different way so we decided to take this information and think more about what happens at home because homework as if all of us who are parents of school age children know is this like a bitter pill that you have to swallow every single day and i know school districts are are debating about how much homework and when and and at what age and so and that's really exciting to hear and i'll share why in a minute but we know that homework can be a behavioral challenge because children feel like homework equals night school it's like they don't want to be in that school they were just in school for eight hours now they're home and they want to do what they want to do so there are lots of behavioral challenges around homework there is a very weak relationship between homework and achievement there's been a number of cities that have done a big man analysis that's basically shown that the homework has no demonstrably effect on achievement at the elementary level it's  very small at the middle school level and it really only begins impacting achievement at the high school level and that's i think because there's so much variation in how homework is completed in homes sometimes the student does it sometimes the parent helps sometimes it's a good metric of where the student is a good match to their abilities sometimes it's not so there's so much variability that doesn't really it kind of goes out in the wash and lastly you know parents are really unsupported in what homework should look like there are classroom teachers who sent home very clear directives about how homeworks of look who should be doing it how long it should take but what we found is by a large there usually isn't that kind of explicit instruction and so parents are just kind of trying to muddle through and figure out what works and it's particularly complicated for struggling readers so we had a study a few years ago called supporting parents engagement around reading we called it the spear and we brought in about fifty families fifty fifty parents and their children incredibly brave parents because they came in they filled out questionnaires but then they were videotaped working with their child on a task for twenty minutes which is like the worst thing ever so thank you to and to anyone who participated who is here that was an incredibly great contribution to science and what we were looking at was what predicts helplessness so by helplessness i mean that some children when they come to a task that's hard for them with their go where they don't feel confident or competent they either shut down completely and they just will not do it at all or they fall apart emotionally and they begin crying some children can lash out some children can engage they'll start the task with them they'll quickly become frustrated and it will all fall apart or devolve this kind of idea that they are indicating to you that they can't do it other children want incessantly ask for help like they want you sitting right there with them doing it alongside them this is very common among children who struggle with reading but what we found is that when we were looking to identify well what is predicting this helplessness actual reading ability was not a significant predictor it was not necessarily about whether or not the children could do the task a significant predictor and was what the parent was doing while the child was working now all of these parents were incredibly well intentioned all of them were very emotionally responsive but the parents of the children who were helpless were more likely to engage in what we call intrusive tasks so by intrusion i mean they were correcting the child without the child asking for help or they were interrupting the child while the child was reading or they were giving lots and lots of the way to feedback like that's good no that's not right yeah that's right that's not right so the point of this is that even though the child might actually have the ability to do this and the parent was a working to try and maximize the child's learning by giving them all of these corrections and and interrupting them and stopping the mistakes the message that was coming across to some of these children was i can't do this and so they would shut down because of that because they would lack the competence to pursue it so what we the next step that we took was we developed a workshop called the homework treaty and we have some pamphlets out there we still offer this workshop from time to time we have one coming up in january where we help parents use strategies from these s principles of intrinsic motivation to increase their child's engagement at home with learning experiences and to create just an overall more positive experience so i wanted to share a few a few strategies around confidence building with you we're going to talk about confidence and when we talk about the strategies for confidence what parents are doing is that they're redefining what successes for your child's homework a successful homework experience for your child if their they have dyslexia or they're struggling reader it might not look the same as the typical child in the classroom but you can redefine in your home what a successful experience can be like and how and what they should feel proud of what they should feel prideful about so there are two ways that you can send messages about competence you can do it in a proactive way which means that you're establishing clear expectations you're saying in a very clear manner at a time when it's not nine o'clock at night and you've had two hours of a homework battle and everyone is crying and exhausted and like on the edge you're doing this at like ten am on a sunday morning you've had some coffee because when playing everyone's relaxing you sit down and you walk through and we have this is part of our homework treaty workshop we're not going to talk about it today but you walk through a process of creating a contract of saying this is what i expect this is this what do you think you know i'm noticing homeworks a problem in our house i think we should talk about what homework should look and sound like and you're as explicit as possible because essentially what you're saying to the child is that if you follow these guidelines i'm going to be very transparent with you if you follow these guidelines it will be a successful experience i don't care if you don't spell every word write i don't care if you don't if you make mistakes when you're reading i want you to essentially engage and and do it for a reasonable amount of time now the time frame is a very important thing i don't have this in here but there are guidelines that are put out by the national council of the national education association which says that for each grade level how much time should be spent on homework and it starts in second grade with twenty minutes and it increases ten minutes for every grade level so if third grade it's thirty minutes fourth grade it's forty minutes fifth grade it's fifty minutes those are great guidelines for the amount of time a child should that you should work towards for your child at home to be working so so you want to be very explicit about and looking look and sound is a great tool because it says send messages about competence is through a reactive way so reactive means the child has begun working and you are reacting to their behavior and your reactions are going to send messages to that child about what they should be proud about what they should feel embarrassed by so the four ways that we send messages in a reactive way are first through our compliments and through our feedback first and foremost you want to praise praise praise what is going well because success begets success and once a child feels competent and you can reinforce that that will contribute to greater feelings of competence and pride the way that you respond to their questions can also build feelings of competence the way that you respond to their mistakes and the way that you respond to their misbehavior so i'm just going to go through these in terms of feedback that you give here are two types of feedback the first one is that your child is doing well and you say to them you are becoming such a good reader well that's a nice compliment to give but another compliment is i noticed you were sounding out the big words what's the difference between those two compliments one is very specific and it's a very what we call behavioral so here are another two examples one is you are so smart and the other one is oh i see you know you're making connections between the facts from this book to that other book that we were reading last week so again these are examples of what we call trait beast feedback and you know it's not a horrible thing to tell somebody they're smart the concern that we have in the research and a lot of this is come out from research by carol dweck written about mindset is that once you tell a child they're smart they might become really preoccupied with always proving to you just how smart they are and if there's ever a chance that they might reveal a weakness they will avoid that challenging situation so upsetting to a child they're smart doesn't really tell them exactly what's making them smart the specific behavior whereas if you can give them specific behavior based feedback and we often use this idea noticing and naming i notice you are sounding out the big words i notice that you're connecting the facts that's a really good approach to use with kids because it's telling them exactly what went well and what they can repeat for next time so we focus a lot on noticing in naming with feedback the next one are there perhaps you respond to questions so a child is working along and they get stuck on something now the way that you respond to questions actually can follow along this continuum from an intrusive response or they may when you when they make a mistake an intrusive response to an autonomy supportive response so the child gets stuck they come to you they say i don't know what to do here the very most autonomy supportive thing you can do as a parent is to play dumb but how many of us ever do that never because we think this is a teaching moment  going to download it to you everything that i know about this subject but for you to say i don't know what do you think like that is a great way to say to the child oh you're competent you could you might you could figure this out why don't you give it a shot so  eferring are playing is a great tool it doesn't always work but i always encourage parents to try it the second thing that you can do is offer a strategy so you could say to them gosh i was thinking about like what can we do to figure out maybe have a stand up this word or i don't know the answer to that question where could we look for it like you're thinking about the strategy because you're all to make goal here is not to tell them just the right answer it's to show them how to get the answer next time independently to say you're competent and you can do this and i'm going to coach you along the way and then finally the last one that kind of falls in the middle is to provide the answer and this is always it's  autonomy supportive when you wait for the child to come to you with the question are you there prompting you for assistance on the opposite side is when they're not prompting you for assistance you're in you're coming in and you're inserting the answer you're correcting them or you're intruding for some children it's fine and it does not impact them for those of you who have children who are very vulnerable to frustration and helplessness you want to do as little of this as possible because every time you do this you're sending a message to the child that there's an area in which they're not competent in now i'm not saying that you shouldn't correct their errors i think that you know you certainly want to  correct errors as often as you can but if you can i have time in that proactive time when you're talking about what homeworks will look and sound like say i'm going to be correcting a few things that you're working on give them kind of a heads up after you finish this i'm going to check over and i'm going to find two errors for you to to go back and rewrite that's going to help the child prepare for it because sometimes we know especially with writing assignments the child worked really really hard on a writing assignment they finished it they're done push it across the table to you and you start editing it and marilyn if they're linen it's over there on the floor they can't handle it anymore but if they have a heads up that this is going to be part of this process that's going to help   we have some books that i just grabbed i happened to be in the library earlier and i just grabbed a couple of books what we want to do is we want to eliminate the fear that children have about mistakes and children often will cover their work if they think they're going to make an error or it's hard they're afraid about revealing weaknesses they feel like a mistake is a sign of a lack of intelligence and we want to flip the model and this is what we've done in our in our work at our center during  summer program and we want them to understand a mistake that a mistake has great value in learning because it means that you're taking a risk you're pushing yourself further and that you have a piece of information that you don't have yet and that's where we can do some specific teaching we encourage families to have a culture of mistake making at home so adults mistakes are usually hidden or they are or we make a mistake and we curse and then it's not really discussed but being very open and honest about your mistakes really is a great way to portray to children mistakes or it happens to everyone like i constantly make errors there are also some great books i love using picture books even with the older students to to to share a lesson it's a lot less didactic than actually saying it so one book that i love is called snowflake bentley i don't know if you know this book snowflake bentley it's about a real life person whose nickname was snowflake he tried to photograph the first snowflake in the late one thousand nine hundred if you can only imagine how many mistakes he made trying to photograph the there's also the diner sorts of waterhouse hawkins this is great with middle school boys another true story about a man who wanted to create the first replica of a dinosaur in central park and encountered a lot of challenges and mistakes that's a fascinating one and then there's also the most magnificent thing which is a great one about a child who's trying to create an invention and she encounters a lot of challenges along the way so these are just a couple there are times and times and librarians and teachers are great resources for these for these tools so so the last is responses to misbehavior ok so let me just take you through a quick scenario your child procrastinates doing homework and they ran out of  time i know this never ever happens to you happens in my house but ok so one thing that can happen is you can just have the child hand in the assignment whatever they've completed and cope with their response ok that's one option another option is you have the child remain at the table until they complete the homework and the final option is they lose technology privileges for the rest of their  life or maybe just for the evening right ok so these three options are three different types of consequences so the first one is called a natural consequence because of the child runs out of time and they don't do their homework and they just have to cope with what the teacher says and that's the most natural extension from the behavior the second one is what we call a logical consequence so it's logical if they've run out of time that they then you have to sacrifice other activities to remain at the table until it's complete and the final one is what we call a punitive consequence so here you have consequence means this consequence is not at all related to the problem or to the task and you're bringing it in because you know this is something that's valuable to the child and you wan somehow indicators out of this is unacceptable but which one do you think is the most effective at changing behavior in the long term the natural the natural consequence it's the most effective and it's the best way to avoid a power struggle because you are with these other consequences you're driving the consequence you as a parent feel the pressure that the homework should be done and you're saying i'm going to i'm going to instill all these consequences that you also feel  pressure my darling but with a natural consequence what you're saying is well this is the way the world works you're going to have to do i don't know what the teacher is going to say teacher sometimes has this has this extra problem so you know you're going to have to deal with what the teacher says sometimes parents combined to where they have kind of and natural and the logical but in the long run you want to think about using natural consequences as often as possible because that is a true reflection of what the system is at play and that will help change the child's ability in the long term i just want to show you one quick video that recaps all of these strategies  about great so i mean i as i said we have some information up front if you're interested in learning more about these strategies we also have and i want to go from the beginning on our website we have a number of different resources we have some of the articles that we publish if you look for the center for reading and language research you can find out more about some of the research that we've done the homework treat just a two part workshop that we do in the evenings and yeah if you want to contact me if you have specific questions about this this is my email and my phone number so i think we'll take questions now just in all of our presentations yeah yeah