My approach to all my work emphasizes relationship and connection. While my training and practices are highly structured based on researched models, my delivery is dynamic, fluid, and informed by engagement in the moment. The Learning Frameworks mindset combines explicit structure and multi-sensory strategies to support struggling learners. Strategy practices are layered with researched models, combined with creative delivery for individual learners. Some of the programs that are woven into the fabric of my practices are Slingerland, Wilson, Orton Gillingham, Lindamood BellTM, Step up to WritingTM, and Winston Grammar.
Components of Practice
Here are some modes of thinking, training and experiences that influence and inform my style:
- Sensory factors
- Creativity and art in all its forms
- Improvisational responsiveness
- Compassion and mindfulness
- Neuropsychological and therapeutic models
- Embodied cognition
- Helpful technology
- Board and card games
- Playfulness!
Making the Invisible, Visible
Learning Frameworks are:
- Organized, structured, and systematic, to support the content, information, and increasingly complex knowledge that is built up over time.
- Visual, concrete, kinesthestic, narrative, or musical to connect to multiple modalities for increased retention.
- Adjusted in concert with the learner, so that they participate in making a structure their own, lending their individual lens to the process.
- Able to offer categories and frames to encode learning that ease retrieval from memory.
- Taught with direct instruction and dependable across content areas.
- Reinforcing to the development of solid executive function skills.
Developmentally-Based Sequential Instruction
Layers of learning build in time and in tandem with developmental readiness. Many learners need direct, multi-sensory instruction to acquire understanding of the systems that underlie learning. Frameworks are developmentally and dynamically progressive to respond to a student's need in the moment. A lifelong learning strategy can be introduced even at the elementary level using frameworks sequentially. Frameworks are built around tried and true, research-based programs such as Structured Literacy in the Orton Gillingham model, and Step Up to WritingTM. I found my students needed an active and interactive means to tackle the content, so I built frameworks around the components to increase engagement and enhance retention. Below are some components that many may take for granted and do automatically, which some learners need to tackle more directly:
- Letter-Sound Knowledge – Abstracts symbols may need concrete, kinesthetic learning so they develop automaticity as a foundation for later reading and writing.
- Handwriting instruction – A complicated series of sequential motor movements that require automaticity to underlie expression and become invisible cognitively.
- Reading and Spelling – These next layers build on the prior letter-sound and handwriting, and have a reliable system that is invisible to many readers. The ‘code’ can be taught with direct instruction to unveil the patterns.
- Written Expression – A layer that integrates many systems of the brain, and relies on the prior layers, is best addressed through an explicit framework to package ideas with structure and organization in a step-wise manner.
Frameworks Provides Customized Learning Strategies
- Teaching strategies for a lifetime of learning.
- A step by step process.
- Transfers across subjects, content, and time.
- A structure for capturing ideas, presenting knowledge, and sharing information at any age and grade level.
- Designed to address, support, and develop executive functions.
- Dynamic, customized, and designed around individual learners, to promote productivity and ease of output.
- Multi-modal, systematic, simultaneous practices that are well suited for more deeply ingrained learning to support memory, attention, self-regulation, and building alternative neural pathways in the process of learning.
- Content is inspired by programs such as Orton-Gillingham, Slingerland, and Step Up to WritingTM.
- Emphasis on narrative, visual, and verbal methods to create custom, supplemental connections based on individual interests, personalities, and temperaments.
- Kinesthetic methods are emphasized whenever possible based on research and theories of embodied cognition.
