I am reading a wonderful book, The Shut Down Learner, Helping your Academically Discouraged Child, by Dr. Richard Selznick," and I think every school district, principal and teacher should make it required reading. It is all about identifying young children who might show signs of becoming "shut-down learners" and also helping children all the way up to high school or as adults who may have found that they finally did shut down and how to rebound from that.

The opening dedication to the book sold me before I started reading it. The author dedicated it to his father who "would never let a child shut down on his watch," and he complimented his father with these words: "no one understood the art of developing a child's self-esteem better than he did." I now strive to live up to those words and hope to give that gift to my own children and the children I teach.

This is not about stroking children's egos and never allowing them to struggle. It is about identifying strengths to build upon, including finding strength to develop skills that do not come easily. My column is not long enough for me to lay out an education plan here, but start with the book and get back to me. Once I started reading it, I could not put it down, and I am sure you will feel the same.

Dr. Selznick is a nationally certified school psychologist and the Director of the Cooper Learning Center at Cooper University Hospital in Voorhees, NJ. The Shut-Down Learner (SDL) is based on his experience working with parents and students who are not doing well in school.

According to Dr. Selznick, the term shut-down-learner means “children who thrive with hands-on tasks requiring visual and spatial abilities, but who become discouraged by their difficulty mastering core academic skills such as reading and writing.”

Dr. Selznick wrote this book to give hope to families of these children. So often, school failure has set up a pattern of negative interactions between the school, child, and parents that wind up leading to a child who just quits trying. Depending on the situation, the child can become completely shut down.

Dr. Selznick writes about Alex, a typical SDL. In an interview with his mother, he described a child’s motivation as seeping out slowly “like the air seeps out of a pinhole in a tire.” He then asked, “When do you remember the difficulty with school beginning to emerge for Alex?”

Alex’s mother said, “For Alex, it wasn’t the air slowly seeping out. I think there was a big puncture in first grade because the teacher gave the kids worksheet after worksheet after worksheet….He would come home at the end of the day with a half-dozen of these worksheets, which he was asked to complete for homework, on top of all the ones he did not complete in school…Can you imagine? First grade! He was six years old!”

In the book, Dr. Selznick describes how he works with these parents and children to discover their strengths and capitalize on that as a way to motivate and excite them about learning. In the chapter called, “The Shut-Down Learner’s Perspective,” a former SDL tells what helped him come out of his shell. He says, “I was the guy with the camera.” He goes on to say about Dr. Selznick’s book, “I think the most important thing is to help mentor the kids and teach them how to value and use this visual-spatial talent that they have. That’s what [is] great in your book. That really struck a chord with me. It’s like this gift that they don’t understand.”

If you have a child who is struggling in school, you will enjoy reading Dr. Selznick’s book. It can change the way you interact with your child and possibly “make all the difference in their future.”

The book offers suggestions for how to dig out of the despair and learn to understand and appreciate the strengths of your child.

Review in The Futurist (pdf format)

The new academic year nearly always holds a lot of promise for parents. While the kids figure out what to wear the first day and have the excitement of meeting up with friends they haven’t seen for a while, that excitement soon wears off. For some kids, that’s when they start moaning about homework, disliking school, and looking for excuses. It might be that instead of just lazy or unmotivated, you might have a shut-down learner.

I got a review copy of The Shut-Down Learner: Helping Your Academically Discouraged Child by Dr. Richard Selznick a couple of months ago, and thought the beginning of an academic year was a good time for a review.

In Dr. Selznick’s words, a “Shut-Down Learner” typically comes in two styles:

1. Disconnected, unmotivated and difficult
2. Pleasant and terribly insecure

Where the first style disconnect and give an attitude of not caring, the second style is more social but rarely participates. General signs of the shut-down learner:

• disconnected
• fundamental reading, writing and spelling skill weaknesses
• increased avoidance of homework
• dislike of reading
• hatred of writing
• little/no gratification from school

—Technology News

My child has a reading disability and struggles with writing. What kind of writing instruction does he need?

Children who struggle with reading typically struggle with writing. Even if their reading improves, their writing often doesn’t.

A common reason for their continued difficulty is the failure of their schools to adequately diagnose their writing problems. Instead, their schools limit diagnosis to grade equivalents from standardized tests — “Sawyer’s grade equivalent for writing was 2.9; he’s three years behind.” This statement fails to identify the current causes of Sawyer’s problems. It fails to tell his teachers and parents what he isn’t doing or can’t do that’s causing his writing problems. In all likelihood, instruction that’s built on an inadequate understanding of Sawyer’s problems will be inadequate. It will likely ignore or give short shrift to those parts of the writing process that should be stressed for Sawyer.

If your child struggles with writing, it’s essential to examine how he meets the demands of writing. In an excellent summary of how to teach writing to struggling writers, Tanya Santangelo, Karen R. Harris, and Steve Graham describe the demands. They assert that for a struggling writer to become a skilled writer, he must:

• Develop extensive knowledge of writing. Skilled writers know that good writing requires far more than good penmanship and knowledge of grammar and spelling. It must logically communicate important content in ways that interest its audience.
• Plan, compose, evaluate, and revise what he writes. Skilled writing is involved and systematic. It takes planning, writing, and evaluating and revising drafts — in other words, commitment — to write something that’s clear, focused, relevant, engaging, and concise. As Blaise Pascal, the famous French mathematician and physicist, quipped, “This letter [is] longer than usual because I had not the time to make it shorter.”
• Plan carefully what he will write — before writing. “Prior to creating a draft, skilled writers devote significant … time to planning and developing goals [to] … guide what they say and do” (p. 4).
• Generate substantial content about his topic. “During the initial phases of writing, skilled writers frequently generate more content than they need and then eliminate superfluous ideas or information through the revision process” (p. 4). Without substantial content, readers will complain, “What a waste of time. I didn’t learn anything.”
• Revise his drafts. Revising requires writers to critically analyze what they’ve written, with an eye to cutting unneeded words, adding information, and rewriting and reorganizing sentences and paragraphs. This takes considerable thought and time. Writers who don’t revise their work or do so superficially produce poor work.
• Have good transcription skills. These include spelling, capitalization, punctuation, handwriting, and, in some cases, word processing skills.
• Persist, persist, and persist. Good writing is difficult, systematic, and time consuming. It requires students to think about what they want to write, gather and organize information, compose drafts, revise them, and solve problems of organization and phrasing that can seem insurmountable. This requires persistence — a quality of skilled writers.

—Howard Margolis, Learning Disabilities / Reading Disabilities

Your teenager is struggling in school, and you’re convinced it’s because he’s just not applying himself. He barely does his homework, there’s a constant struggle at home, and the more you push, the more he retreats.

This is the classic case of a shut-down learner, says Dr. Richard Selznick. Selznick, who serves as director of the Cooper Learning Center, a division of the Department of Pediatrics of Cooper University Hospital in New Jersey, assesses and treats a broad range of learning and school-based academic and behavioral problems. Over the years, Selznick has consulted with thousands of families and has discovered that, unfortunately, shut-down learners are a fairly common group of learners. “The prototype shutdown learner is a teenager who feels pretty beaten down by the time he comes to me,” Selznick says. “He has an emotional block, and his battery is depleted. He’s got his parents coming at him, the teacher. It’s too much.”

Selznick’s recent book, The Shut-Down Learner: Helping Your Academically Discouraged Child, is written for parents of just this kind of kid. “I try to present things to parents in a very down-to-earth way, without any jargon, so that it’s digestible and not threatening,” Selznick says. “The message is this: parents need to understand these kids. Yelling at the kids, telling them they’re not trying hard enough—this doesn’t work.” Selznick explains that in many cases, parents just need to back off, be less aggressive about the homework, and find a way to relate to their child’s struggles.

“These kids may have a range of learning disorders,” Selznick says, “but I want to stay away from the labeling because in the end, these kids have a great number of strengths that they need to key into.”

As Selznick explains it, the shut-down learner tends to be a problem-solver, someone who learns spatially and thrives with hands-on tasks that load on visual and spatial abilities. On the downside, they often lack the core skills necessary for success in school. “These kids often get all the way through the system, getting more and more disconnected because they simply can’t learn the way teachers want to teach,” Selznick says. “But when you say to the kid, ‘Look, you’re really good at this stuff—if I put you in a room with a hundred kids, you’re better than ninety of them’—then the kid feels okay, like ‘I’m good at a lot of things. I’m smart.’”

Selznick says the key is that these children learn differently; they need patience and understanding from parents, and they also need their parents to believe in their strengths and to empower them.

“They can be a hard group to work with. They’re giving their parents a hard time, they look bored in class, they’re disconnected,” Selznick says. “Or, the second type I see is the ones who are more pleasant in the social area, but they’re masking their insecurities. Either way, they need to understand that they’re really smart kids and they’re good at things, too.”

In fact, Selznick says, if these kids can survive school without losing too much self-esteem, they have a good chance at being highly successful.

Lloyd Stone, a classic shut-down learner growing up, has turned out to be successful despite his earlier challenges in school. Today, at 53, Stone is president of Manny Stone Decorators in New Jersey, a company that designs and builds trade show exhibits for clients on a national and international scale. I’ve overcome this and adapted to it and have actually been able to assimilate into society by creating a different path,” Stone says. “It’s almost like a mutation … I branched out in other directions that got me to the same place.” Stone’s experiences in school have also given him a very specific take on best practices in business: “I hire B students. A students, things come too easily to them,” Stone says. “I want the B student, the guy who has met with defeat and has been able to learn from defeat.”

This should be music to many parents’ ears. However, Selznick urges parents to trust their instincts when their kids are young and to spot the learning problems early. “Some people will say, ‘Oh, you know how boys are. He’ll grow out of it.’ But if your gut tells you something’s wrong, get it checked out,” Selznick says. “Save your kid the trouble later.”

If you think your young child might fit the mold of the shut down learner later on, here are a few things to look for:

• Tuning out in circle time
• Highly spatial and visual learners
• Active or over-active
• Difficulty with language-based activities such as reading and writing

—Anna Weinstein, Education.com

If your child has a reading disability, like dyslexia, if he feels defeated, hates school, and comes home sullen and miserable and angry, Dr. Richard Selznick’s The Shut-Down Learner: Helping Your Academically Discouraged Child can be of tremendous help. It can help you better understand why he’s miserable or angry. It can help you to better understand dyslexia and its emotional effects. More importantly, it gives you simple, sound, and practical advice on how to help him.

Here are a few samples:

1. Identify the “cracks in the foundation” as early as possible. Find a professional who knows the “red flags” to identify for early learning problems. So much heart-ache can be avoided if you address the skills weaknesses early.

2. If the cracks are widening, seek outside help if possible. Don’t be passive and wait for the schools to intervene. They may, but it’s often a long process. Many of the children I see are not bad enough to warrant the school’s intervention. It’s a negative snowballing effect. Use word of mouth in your community to find people who can intervene

3. Know the kind of reading problem you’re targeting. There are essentially two types. In the first type the child has trouble decoding the words and reading fluently. This type is the largest majority of the struggling kids. In the second type, the child can read fluently, but has great trouble understanding what he/she has read. Get clear on what you are targeting!!!! Don’t scattershot your remediation.

4. Take the heat out of the interaction. For most of the struggling kids, the daily ritual of yelling about school is a constant. Households are tense. Lots of blame goes around. Pecking at your child, nagging and yelling are not working. Why continue?

5. Find the child’s true strength and help kid embrace it. The shut down learners that I know do not feel very good about themselves and they do not see their strengths. Most of these kids are very solid in the visual spatial dimension of ability. This is often not valued in school. The kids need to learn to value this trait and see it as a potential.

6. Find someone to connect and mentor your child in school. If your child is older, push the kid to have one adult in the building as child’s mentor. It should be someone that your kid can form a relationship with. Too often shut-down learners go through school not bonded to anyone. This is tragic.

7. Keep your humor. Try not to let school problems become all consuming. Go out for an ice cream sundae with your kid even if he hasn’t done his homework! School problems can be so all consuming - don’t lose touch with your kid’s good qualities.

Fortunately, the value of The Shut-Down Learner doesn’t end with advice. Dr. Selznick shows you how to apply this advice. With great sensitivity, he writes about several of the shut-down learners he has known. He shares their conversations and insights and shows how they didn’t let their learning problems and the rigidity of schools destroy their lives.

In 160 well-written, easily understood pages, Richard Selznick has given parents of discouraged, defeated, and demoralized learners, a simple but powerful set of ideas for helping them help their children.

—Howard Margolis, Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds