Barbara runs schools and programs that give brain training to students diagnosed with learning differences. Chatting with Barbara on my visit, I found it hard to imagine that this woman herself had had such severe disabilities in the past, as she is an impressive communicator and thinker. Barbara has developed over forty hours of tests that diagnose students’ brain strengths and weaknesses and a range of targeted cognitive exercises that enable students to develop brain pathways. Students come to her Arrowsmith schools with severe disabilities and leave without them.
When I visited one of the Arrowsmith schools for the first time, I saw students sitting at computer screens intensely concentrating on their cognitive tasks. I asked Barbara if the students were happy doing this, and she replied that students stay motivated because they can feel the effects of the program very quickly. Many of the students I spoke to talked in the same terms—after they started on the cognitive tasks, they felt a “fog lifting” and were able to make sense of the world. When I visited the Arrowsmith school for the second time, I sat and talked to some adults going through the program.
Shannon was a young lawyer who had become concerned after criticism for the length of time it took her to produce her work, as people typically pay for lawyers’ time by the hour. She was referred to Arrowsmith and decided to enroll for a summer. When I met her, a few weeks into the program, she told me that it was already “life changing” for her. Not only was Shannon thinking a lot more efficiently, but she was able to make connections she had not been able to make before. She was even making sense of events that had happened in her past, even though she had not been able to make sense of them at the time. Shannon, like the others, talked about a “fog lifting” from her mind; she said she used to be a passenger in conversations, but now “everything is clear” and she is able to participate fully.
Barbara not only offers brain training for students who go to Toronto and enroll in the school; she has now developed a program that educators can be trained in and take back to their schools. Some students stay in the program for a few months, some for a few years, and now a remote program is being developed for students to work in different locations. Barbara is somebody who is leading the world in her brain-training approach. Like many groundbreakers, she has had to endure critiques from the people who do not accept the idea of neuroplasticity or that brains can be exercised and developed, but she has continued fighting for the rights of students who have been made to believe they are “broken.”
Most of the students who contact Arrowsmith have been given the idea there is something terribly wrong with them, and many of them have been rejected by the school system. They leave Arrowsmith transformed. One of the results of my visits to the school was that I became determined to help spread the news of what is possible with brain training and share the Arrowsmith methods with our army of teachers and parents who follow youcubed (they call themselves youcubians). As mentioned, the approach of special education in schools has been to identify students’ weaknesses and teach around them, essentially teaching to their strengths. Arrowsmith’s approach is the opposite. The teachers work to identify brain weaknesses and then teach to them—building up the brain pathways and connections that students need. My hope is that all students with learning differences will be exposed to brain training and freed from the labels and limits they have been forced to live with, replacing these instead with hope engendered by a transformed brain.
Many amazing individuals who were written off and told not to pursue particular studies have excelled in them. Dylan Lynn was diagnosed as having dyscalculia, a particular brain condition that makes learning mathematics hard. But Dylan refused to accept that she could not learn math and pursued and achieved a degree in statistics. She did this by refusing to listen to all the people who told her to drop her mathematics courses, instead working out her own approach to mathematics. Dylan now collaborates with Katherine Lewis, a professor at the University of Washington, in telling her story to inspire other learners who were told they could not achieve their desired goal.16
It is time to recognize that we cannot label children and have low expectations for them. This is true regardless of any diagnosed learning difference. As we ourselves are learning in these pages, the most notable quality of our brains is their adaptability and potential for changing and growing.
In addition to children with genuine learning disabilities, many other students are either told or made to believe they have a learning disability when they do not—particularly when it comes to mathematics. For decades, teachers everywhere have identified children who do not memorize math facts as well as their classmates and labeled them as having a deficiency or disability.
One study, conducted by neuroscientist Teresa Iuculano and her colleagues at Stanford School of Medicine, clearly shows the potential of children’s brains to grow and change as well as the danger of misdiagnosing students.17 The researchers brought in children from two groups—one group had been diagnosed as having mathematical learning disabilities and the other consisted of regular performers. The researchers used MRI scans to look at the brains of the children when they were working on math. They found actual brain differences. This is where it gets interesting. The difference was that the students identified as having disabilities had more brain regions lighting up when they worked on a math problem.
This result is counterintuitive, for many people think that students with “special needs” have less going on in their brains, not more. However, we do not want all of the brain lighting up when we work on mathematics; we want a few focused areas to light up. The researchers dug further and gave one-on-one tutoring to both sets of students—those who were regular performers and those identified as having a mathematical learning disability. At the end of the eight weeks of tutoring, not only did both sets of students have the same achievement; they also had the exact same brain areas lighting up.
This is one of many important studies showing that after a short period of time—research interventions are often eight weeks long—brains can be completely changed and rewired. The “learning disabled” students in this study developed their brains to an extent that allowed them to function in the same way as “regular performers.” Let’s hope they returned to school and lost their “mathematical disability” labels. Just imagine how everything could change for those young children in school and in life.
High-Achieving Students
The importance of knowing about brain growth is not limited to students diagnosed with learning differences. It extends across the entire achievement spectrum. Students come to Stanford with a history of school success; often they have only ever received As in school. But when they struggle in their first math (or any other) class, many decide they cannot learn the subject and give up.
As mentioned, for the last several years I have been working to dispel these ideas with students by teaching a class called “How to Learn Math.” The class integrates the positive neuroscience of learning with a new way of seeing and experiencing math. My experience of teaching this class has been eye-opening. I have met so many undergrads who are extremely vulnerable and too readily come to believe they don’t belong in STEM subjects. Unfortunately, they are almost always women and people of color. It is not hard to understand why these groups are more vulnerable than white males. The stereotypes that pervade our society based on gender and color run deep and communicate that women and people of color are not suited to STEM subjects.
One study published in the premier journal Science showed this powerfully.18 Sarah-Jane Leslie, Andrei Cimpian and colleagues interviewed university professors in different subject areas to see how prevalent the idea of a “gift” was—the concept that you need a special ability to be successful in a particular field. Their results were staggering. They found that the more prevalent the idea of a gift was in any academic field, the fewer women and people of color were in that field. This held across all thirty subjects they looked at. The following graphs show the relationships the researchers uncovered; the top chart (A) shows the science and technology subjects, and the chart below
