Watch Dr. Yellin Discuss How to Help Struggling Learners

In case you missed a terrific discussion with Dr. Yellin, you can catch the video below. In a conversation with Laura Hart of Robofun, Dr. Yellin gives a clear explanation of the evaluation process and how it can help students of all ages. 

The "call in hour" Dr. Yellin mentions in this video is scheduled for every Thursday morning (EST) from 8-9 am. Our office telephone number is 646-775-6646. If you can't get through, just leave a message and someone will get back to you.

 

English Language Learners

Required professional development courses vary greatly in quality, so it is a real delight when a day devoted to accumulating necessary Continuing Legal Education credits turns out to be a truly fascinating series of lessons in areas that attorneys working in the field of education and special education don't always consider.

Such was the case yesterday at the Practicing Law Institute's School Law Institute. Discussions about sexual assault on campus, transgender youth in public schools, the use of police authority and arrest powers in schools, and how changing family dynamics make deciding who is the "client" in an educational matter complicated, all were extremely well-presented. So was the more expected discussion of new developments in special education case law.

One particularly interesting topic was presented by Abja Midha, Esq. of Advocates for Children of New York, where she is Director of the Immigrant Students’ Rights Project, which works to protect English Language Learners’ and immigrant students’ access to educational programs and improve their educational outcomes. The Project has numerous resources available - many in multiple languages - and is involved in policy initiatives as well.

Ms. Midha noted that not all children who are English language learners (ELL) are immigrants. Some were born here to parents who speak languages other than English. And some children who are proficient in English have parents who have limited English proficiency and require translation services to be able to access necessary information about their child and the school system.

Federal statutes and case law have created significant rights for ELL. In the 1974 U.S. Supreme Court case  Lau v. Nichols, (414 U.S. 563), brought by non-English speaking Chinese students in the San Francisco public schools, Justice William O. Douglas' opinion noted, “There is no equality of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education. Basic English skills are at the very core of what these public schools teach. Imposition of a requirement that, before a child can effective participate in the educational program, he must already have acquired those basic skills is to make a mockery of public education.”

The day's presentations on all topics will be available in a couple of weeks as an "on demand" program. The Practicing Law Institute offers scholarships to selected programs for attorneys in the nonprofit sector and others.

This Friday, April 11th, Dr. Paul Yellin will be the Keynote Speaker at a forum titled Silent Crisis: The Impact of Chronic Stress and Trauma on Early Childhood Learning and Development. His presentation will look at a number of important considerations in the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral development of children under stress from the environment in which they live.

Starting with the famous "marshmallow experiment" and its follow-ups, he will look at how children's impulses are shaped by whether they have - or don't have - a reliable, trusted adult in their lives. He will discuss how early language skills are acquired and the importance of exposure to language in this process. He will then proceed to look at how the developing brain is impacted by stress, using images of brains in different circumstances to clarify his examples. 

Dr. Yellin will then speak about  neuroplasticity - rewiring our brains - to see how this ability is part of resilience, the ability to bounce back, recover, and ultimately overcome adversity. When children have a "turnaround" person in their lives, they are often able to succeed even if their early development was fraught with stress and lacked the language input and emotional support that is optimal for brain development. 

This event, with other speakers including Aletha Maybank, MD, MPH, Assistant Commissioner of the Brooklyn  Public Health Office of the NYC Department of Health; Evelyn K. Blanck, LCSW, from the NY Center for Child Development and Renee Wilson-Simmons, Dr.PH, Director of the National Center for Children in Poverty, is co-sponsored by Healthy Start Brooklyn, Central Harlem Healthy Start, and Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health Downstate New York Healthy Start, in collaboration with the Northern Manhattan Perinatal Partnership.

The forum will be held at the Oberia Dempsey Mult-Service Center, 127 West 127th Street in Manhattan and admission is free and open to the public. It begins at 9 a.m.

Free Back-to-School Workshops for Parents and Educators

The Yellin Center for Mind, Brain, and Education will present a series of free back-to-school workshops for parents and educators at our Center on West 29th Street in Manhattan in the coming weeks.

Jeremy Koren

First up: on Tuesday, September 24, Paul B. Yellin, MD, FAAP,, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at New York University School of Medicine and Director of The Yellin Center will discuss ADHD, Attention, and Learning. Special emphasis will be placed on the topics of common symptoms, the process of diagnosis (and what labels like "ADHD" really mean), some recommended treatments, and how to deploy individualized strategies to best support weak attention and executive-function controls in learners at every grade level, from elementary school through college.

On the following evening,Wednesday, September 25, Susan Yellin, Esq. will present College 101: What Students with Learning Issues (and Their Parents) Should Know. Mrs. Yellin will focus on matters of import to students and parents who are in various stages of the process of transitioning from high school to the more independent setting associated with colleges and universities, including admissions, student support services, choosing a school, SAT/ACT testing issues, disability disclosure considerations, and more. Parents of students from middle school through 12th grade should find this presentation highly informative.

Finally, on Thursday, October 17, Dr. Yellin will present a special discussion on Memory and Learning. In this conversation, Dr. Yellin will aim to provide parents with a new understanding of how variation in the brain functions which control memory can impact a student's performance in school.

All of these events are free, but advance registration is required and space will be limited. Doors open at 4:30 p.m.. Events will begin promptly at 5 p.m. and conclude by 6 p.m. each night.

Register online here, or call The Yellin Center at (646) 775-6646. Please tell a friend to join you! We hope to see you there.

Download printable fliers for the events here and tack them up on your local community or school bulletin board.


-Jeremy Koren