April is Occupational Therapy Month

The American Occupational Therapy Association has designated April as Occupational Therapy Month. It's a good time to look at what occupational therapy -- often called "OT" -- is and how it can help students.

OT services are designed to support individuals with the tasks they encounter in their daily lives. For adults, this can mean helping them recover from an injury or overcome a disability to manage tasks at home or in the workplace. For students, OT supports such school-based activities as handwriting, keyboarding, and adapting the school environment to promote success. An occupational therapist can help connect students with both high-tech solutions, such as computers, software, and digital tools and low-tech aids, such as writing implements with special grips and notebook paper with textured lines. Services are provided by a licensed occupational therapist, who has trained in a master's level program and passed a licensing exam.

OT is a "related service" available to students with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) or Section 504, provided by the school during the school day, without cost to the family. It can be a "pull out" service, where the student leaves the classroom for a period to work with the occupational therapist, usually in a small group but sometimes individually. Or it can be a "push in" service, where the therapist comes into the classroom and works with the student or students as they go about their daily activities. This is a particularly effective way of providing services, since research demonstrates that skills are better mastered when they are practiced in the environment in which they occur. The frequency and duration of these sessions need to be specified in the IEP or 504 Plan. Some families choose to work with an occupational therapist who has a private practice outside of a school.

In addition to helping students with graphomotor (handwriting) difficulties and keyboarding skills, an occupational therapist can help address such issues as the need for specialized seating in the classroom or on the bus, learning self-care (for students with significant disabilities), and practical matters such as managing a backpack or dealing with sensory issues such as intolerance for excessive noise or school bells and buzzers.

Benefits of Learning to Write by Hand

We were fascinated by a recent piece in The New York Times about the controversy over handwriting instruction. The article thoughtfully summarizes work by neuroscientists demonstrating that learning to write by hand plays an important role in a number of developing neural pathways. Handwriting appears to have a positive impact on reading, idea generation when writing, and memory formation when taking notes in class. Keyboarding does not appear to have the same impact. Interestingly, manuscript and cursive writing each seem to provide different benefits, and research indicates that learning each style of writing leads to greater cognitive engagement than using only one approach. At a time when many schools are abandoning cursive instruction, this finding is particularly provocative.

As our world becomes ever-more reliant on technology, it is important to develop a true understanding of the impact that writing by hand has on the learning process. In our practice, we speak with many parents who are unsure whether to belabor handwriting development when their kids genuinely struggle. Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply transition to typing since that’s what they’ll use when they’re adults, they wonder? And, as the Times piece points out, the nearly ubiquitous Common Core standards suggest that children learn to hand write legible letters only in kindergarten and first grade; after that, the focus is shifted to keyboarding skills.

Here at the Yellin Center, we often find ourselves considering “the genius of and versus the tyranny of or.” Simply supplying children with a list of accommodations (e.g. either do it this way or learn it that way) is often limiting; a better strategy is establishing a system of accommodations that works in conjunction with a carefully crafted instructional plan (e.g. do this and that, too). Some students need help with a mechanical aspect of a task to complete classwork and should be given workarounds to get through particular tasks. But that doesn’t mean those mechanics shouldn’t be practiced at a separate time. For example, a child who struggles to sound out words certainly needs to develop those critical decoding skills. However, it’s also important that she listen to texts that match her intellectual level so she can practice her comprehension skills and build a love of literature. Learning to decode and listening to texts is a much better approach than only working on either decoding instruction or using audiobooks.

Children should learn how to write by hand, but if they are having difficulty with letter formation they should be given “bypass strategies” like having someone scribe for them, using speech-to-text software, or keyboarding, so their capacity for developing rich written output is not hijacked by their weak graphomotor function. It is essential, however, that kids continue developing handwriting “off-line”; as their mastery and automaticity grows, handwriting can be brought online and integrated into the writing process gradually.

Welcome to the German Gymnasium—Now Get Lost!

Today we have a guest blogger, Darrel Moellendorf , who writes about his family's experiences with German education.

I recently accepted a position as a professor at a German university. This is relatively unusual for an American, but several of the most prominent German universities are seeking to “internationalize” their faculties and student bodies in an effort to compete with their U.S. and British counterparts. I have been warmly welcomed and supported by my university. My son’s experience with the German school system could not be more different.

A bit of background is in order. He was an “A” student in California. And although he was 12 when we moved here, he had been learning German in school since age four and visited the country often. So, his German is very good, and he is proud to speak without the typical American accent. He also has minor learning challenges, which earlier in his school career required support in order to keep him organized and on track in school. His most obvious and enduring problem is dysgraphia. By the time we left California the only accommodation he still required was for his handwriting.

The public educational system in Germany is very different than that of the U.S. Children are tracked from grade five onwards into three streams, one of which is the college track. Traditionally these kids go the Gymnasium (grades 5-12 or 13). Future technical and office workers go the Realschule and go to an apprenticeship after 10th grade. Future tradespeople and laborers go to Hauptschule and go an apprenticeship after grade 9. The apprenticeship system seems very good at providing vocational skills. There was a reform in the 1970s that created unified comprehensive or Gesamtschule, where the tracking is internal.

After arriving in Germany we sent our son to the local public Gymnasium, which has a reputation for being one of the best. We now understand that part of what people seem to understand as "best" includes it being very traditional, with an incredibly narrow approach to the kind of learner that fits and an amazing amount of discretion in the hands of the teachers.

We were surprised to find that 50-65% of a student’s semester grade in each class depends upon class participation, defined mostly—but not only—as raising one’s hand. The best justification that we have heard of this grading practice is that it encourages important discursive abilities. But among my son’s many friends it is widely viewed as corrupt, allowing a wide field of arbitrary assessment in which teachers reward their favorite students and punish those whom they dislike.

Being somewhat reticent to speak in class when he was new, our son began to be perceived by his teachers—despite the obvious explanation of being in a foreign environment—as an inadequate student. His music teacher used the sophisticated pedagogical technique of pubic shaming to announce in front of the entire class that unless he participated more he would certainly fail her class. Incidences such as these, of course, did nothing to bolster his self-confidence.

The hostility to him has been distressingly widespread. We asked his German teacher if he could have some additional time for writing an upcoming test. She said that she had not heard of many cases of such handwriting difficulty and seemed a bit incredulous. Although she agreed to give him a little extra time, when the day came she did not honor the request. Given the conditions, we did not expect a high mark, but we were surprised when he received a nearly failing grade. So, we showed the test to a retired German teacher and a teacher of German as a second language, and both, independently, said that the grading made no accommodation for German not being his native language. Both noted too that it was evident that the arduous task of writing had interfered with the exposition.

We subsequently learned that there is no official legal recognition of dysgraphia here in Germany and people at Gymnasium seem never to have heard of it! Kids who have such difficulties either get pushed along another track or find a means of survival in the Gymnasium environment, which can be openly hostile to learning differences.

We formally requested that the school accommodate our son simply by allowing him to type his homework and by granting him more time to write his tests. Between the time of that request and the formal answer, our son’s history teacher announced to the entire class that even if our son had a learning disability, his main problem is laziness.

Because we did not see ourselves as requesting that heaven and earth be moved, we were dumbstruck when the teachers and the principal turned down the request. Not only was it rejected on grounds that the diagnosis providing its justification is from an American doctor, the teachers and the principal also opined that the real problem is that our son simply is not working hard enough. In reality, he works very hard just to perform the writing they demand of him.

Although dysgraphia is not legally recognized in Germany, schools are legally required to accommodate disabled students. EU member states, such as Germany, are signatories of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). [Editor’s note: which the United States, incredibly, has not joined!] The EU Disability Strategy 2010-2020 was developed to implement the UNCRPD, and it calls for an inclusive education for children with disabilities. But, so far, the culture of elitism in the gymnasium system has not yielded much to the demands of human rights. And it seems that most German parents who do not want to foreclose the opportunity of their children going to college but whose children don't fit the narrow learning profile send their children to the Gesammtschule rather than having them go through the humiliation of the Gymnasium.

When we discussed the situation with our son’s pediatrician, she was not at all surprised. Her husband--who is a professor of education--wrote a book criticizing such practices in schools and it was considered very controversial. Apparently, many teachers see it as part of their professional prerogative to treat children in that manner. She said that in her experience, students who deviate even slightly from the standard learning profile are told by means of shame, humiliation, and hostility that they don’t belong in the Gymnasium. Eventually they leave, and the teachers have one less problem to deal with.

One important function of human rights is to protect those who are vulnerable to the arbitrary use of power. Children who are struggling to succeed in a hostile environment, made possible because of the wide latitude for arbitrary evaluation by adults, are especially vulnerable. If a socially privileged American kid with minor learning difficulties is made to suffer so at the hands of adult educators, the plight of children far less fortunate must be much worse. The message these kids are being sent is you’re different; you don’t belong here—get lost!


About the author:

Darrel Moellendorf is Professor of International Political Theory at Goethe University Frankfurt

To Type or Not to Type? For Young Kids, It’s Not a Question

Adults of a certain age (in this case, over, say, 40) would notice a very startling difference between the college lectures of their university days and the lectures of today if they sat in on a class. Sure, some professors might use PowerPoint presentations instead of the whiteboard (or chalkboard, for those much older than 40). But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking, instead, about the laptop revolution. Students who take notes on paper with actual pens are fewer with each passing year. Instead, the professor’s voice floats over a sea of muffled bursts of staccato as students frantically type their notes into word processing programs (or, to be fair, chat with their friends on social media).

coolabanana/Flickr

For some students, being freed from a pencil and paper is a lifesaver. Kids with graphomotor difficulties and real spelling problems benefit enormously from keyboarding and access to all the editing tools that are included in word processing programs. And by college, or even high school, most students can type much more quickly than they can write. But for the average student, is making the switch from hand writing to typing a good idea? A recent article in Scientific American unequivocally urges young children to step away from the keyboard.

The article discusses a series of studies that examine the relationship between handwriting and literacy tasks, like learning letters, spelling, and writing quality discourse. Highlighted findings include:

• Subjects who hand wrote foreign letters were better able to recognize those letters later as they endeavored to learn them.
• More brain activity was measured in subjects who looked at letters they had learned to hand write than in subjects who had studied the same letters by typing them. Interestingly, activity was found in both visual and motor areas of the brains of the former group.
• Legible, automatic handwriting in young children was the single best predictor of spelling ability and quality and quantity of writing generated in written compositions when those same children grew older.

It seems that there are many good arguments for developing handwriting, even in the digital age. Here at The Yellin Center, we notice that children who don’t use systematic patterns of pencil strokes to form letters tend to produce sentences and paragraphs of lower quality; the act of forming letters seems to sap their cognitive resources too much to come up with strong sentences, choose good vocabulary, and remember the rules of written mechanics. We encourage teachers and parents of young children to scrutinize a child’s letter formation, not just the legibility and uniformity of the letters that end up on the page. If it is determined that a young child forms letters slowly and laboriously, instructional programs such as Handwriting Without Tears can be enormously helpful. On the other hand, older students—third grade and up, or so—may be better off learning to keyboard quickly.

Little research exists on handwriting versus typing in older students and adults, but Teachers College professor Stephen Peverly notes that his students, especially after learning about handwriting’s role in memory and knowledge acquisition, tend to leave their laptops in their bags when they come to class.