Transitions: Dyslexic Learners Podcast by David Poeschl.

Hello, my name is David Poeschl and I'm a parent adviser with Matrix Parents at Marin CIL. This is another in our series of monthly podcasts for the year 2024 to 2025.

Today I'd like to talk about something called dyslexic thinking. And first of all, what I'd like to do is to talk about the origin of this. And then we'll talk about dyslexia for a minute. Then we'll get into the, into the definition and, and what the study we're going to be talking about says of the study was conducted by an organization.

It's a charity in Great Britain, made by dyslexia. And if you haven't heard of it, it's one that's, I'm not sure. Founded by or mainly funded by Richard Branson, the Virgin chair. And, it's been doing research into dyslexia, and different thinking modes. And they, conducted a study that was, contributed to by a number of organizations, including Microsoft and LinkedIn and, Gchq, which is the head of British intelligence.

So am I five and am I six were part of this. And the purpose of the study was to look at dyslexic thinking and look at this different way of thinking in a way that turns it on its head, disability, and looking at it for the skills that the strengths that it brings and what they've done is that they've applied this research into what strengths people bring, who are dyslexic and have equated those with the needed skills for at least the rest of this century, and what skills are going to be the most in demand?

Okay, so let's go and talk about, first of all, a definition and the definition of ordinary.com online. And it was sponsored I suppose or pushed by like LinkedIn and Microsoft to have it as a dictionary entry. And it's also in LinkedIn. And we'll talk about that in a second. So, the definition, first of all from dictionary.com is an approach to problem solving, assessing information and learning, often used by people with dyslexia that involves pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, lateral thinking and interpersonal communications.

Okay. So, this is a way of looking at this and not talking about the deficiencies of dyslexia. It's talking about what this other part of it is. And let's define dyslexia the way it's used in this context. And it's a little different than what they do in Great Britain. What we're talking about is a learner, a person who has what it was called a spiky learner, or they have scattered scores on intelligence tests.

This is what this comes down to. And usually, the profile of someone is that they have either a processing deficit or some sort of learning disability, or an issue with basic skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic. On the other hand, they're very strong in other areas. Usually what they're talking about in the definition of dyslexia, thinking that visual spatial pattern recognition, the ability to be able to see things the way they're put together, give you an example of someone like this who would be that teenager who is a terrible speller and can't write and he solve the Rubik's Cube?

That would be an example of someone who has very acute visual spatial skills and has a processing deficit that affects, a basic learning, a learning issue. And I talked about dyslexic thinking being in the LinkedIn, what they've done is that they put in dyslexic thinking as a, as a work skill. So, someone can add this to their, to their list of skills.

Now, let's look a little more into what the report said. And it's a little more dramatic than what I said. And the dyslexic thinking skills being in demand, what they're saying is that the old paradigm of language-based strengths is basically over. If you think about it in terms of AI, and that's the way they're framing it primarily on the report, is that their prediction is and they're saying that it's already happening and these skills are already in demand, is that AI is taking over all of the basic functions, the reading, writing and arithmetic sort of things, and then what the skills are that are going to be in most demand are

those that look at big picture, that look at the way systems are put together, the way patterns come together. And so, they're saying that people that are language based, have language-based strengths, which is which is what I have were more of the sort of the New Age pencil pushers arms of, you know, thinking about an accountant as, you know, someone who, who just keeps tab of things.

And the, the dyslexic thinkers are the big thinkers. And the report talks about this being the fifth industrial revolution, but actually, it's an integral part of the emerging fourth industrial revolution, which is which is recognized pretty widely. And this is a theory that was proposed by Klaus Schwab, who's the founder and executive director of the World Economic Forum.

And the concept and this is something that like that I mentioned a minute ago, proposes that the Internet of things, the interconnectivity of machines to humans through AI means that the mundane tasks of language-based strings will become more marginalized. And the fourth Industrial Revolution has been called the beginning of the imagination age, where diverse thinking will be prized more than language-based competence.

The one area that does not favor some neurodivergent individuals, particularly with autism, is that they have significant communication challenges. And that makes, learning communication skills and learning social skills for people with autism, significantly more important, based on the fact that, interpersonal communication skills will have, have value. Now, hopefully that's not, not that's not too technical.

That's a pretty simple, pretty simple definition. I think. And what I'm going to do though is I'm putting a graph, a picture of a graph in the notes, and it'll give you a visual. Avoid a dyslexic thinker. Looks like in terms in terms of testing, if you have a child with disabilities, a child in special ed, you could look at their psycho educational test and look at the maybe the whisk, the Weschler, the intelligence scale for children that may have been administered.

That. And you can look at their processing and you can look at, you know, things like, orthographic, post processing. You can look at, working memory. All of those things go into, into what we're talking about in terms of, processing and learning disabilities. But the main thing you'll notice immediately when you look at that graph, or you just think about it, is the spiky or scattered nature of the scores.

And you notice that the strengths that are associated with language-based strengths, those are low. And the strengths associated with dyslexic thinking strengths, those big picture imaginative, strengths are much higher. I sometimes see as an example where an IQ score for a child is 15 points or more higher when they're working, memory and processing speeds are removed, and those are areas that favor language-based learners.

For instance, I, I don't know how my process processing sometimes I wonder about that with aging, but I know my working memory has always been good. And those are the things that favor language-based learners. But those are the things that are now most important. Let's stop for a minute and compare what a podcast written by someone like me with or with someone who's a dyslexic thinker.

What would the difference be? So, for me, I'm a heavy-duty linear thinker, and that's a much different profile than what we're talking about. If you look at my IQ, testing, you'll see things are very much in a straight line. They're very linear. And again, we talk about those folks that have learning disabilities or the dyslexic thinkers having those, those spiky patterns.

As a good example would be the structure of this podcast. You notice things that when I'm talking, I try to follow a sequential pattern, a logical framework where one thing follows another. And if you're teaching like I did, you want that if you're teaching a foundation or a skills-based class. And that's what I was doing. I was teaching special education at the at the university level.

And, and that point, you want to get across those points that are important for people to remember when they're doing their testing or if they're going in the classroom. All of those things, those skills they need to learn. So, a dyslexic thinker, maybe, what would they do in something like that? I, you know, to tell you the truth, I have no idea because I'm limited by my ability to think, in a more lateral way.

And one thing I would think is that someone who is this big thinker might go off topic more than I would. They made The Verge more into, into other topics. I have no idea. But if you think about someone like me teaching a big picture philosophy class or something to do with theoretical physics, you know, something that takes this, this brain that just is built differently than mine.

You can get the idea of the difference in the type of thinkers that, we would be, it's like, you know, for other dyslexics, something just like the thinkers, what it would be in listening to this podcast, I think some would be probably pretty bored by my voice right now, and also bored by the sequentiality of the way that I'm presenting this, but for those of you who are language based learners, you might like or at least tolerate the straight line that I take. And that's because youŐre like me. You need to understand concepts based on the filter of language. So, it's clear that the dyslexic thinkers and neurodivergent people in general, they experience the world differently from neurotypical people.

They the way Temple Grandin puts it, is that they see the world instead of filtering it through their language. And I have to say that one of the main issues that I see consistently across the board, with children that are in special education, is a leveling of anxiety that they feel going to school doing these things and, you know, going out and putting themselves out.

And like I think about it from the perspective, and this is anecdotal, certainly on my part, and this has nothing to do with, with research, is that it seems to me that a person who is a visual thinker is going to experience the world in a much more direct and visceral way, and so all of the input coming in is not filtered through that, that, I guess, haze of language which with which we who are language learners interpret things.

It's just the stimuli that's coming in that must feel quite visceral to people. You know, and I don't, I don't know, but I know that these things, of course, are on, you know, a spectrum, like anything else in human existence. So maybe a language learner, like, like myself when I'm admiring a beautiful view and just experience it, that that's what a person feels like that has ADHD.

And as a visual thinker, I don't know. Anyway, let's continue along my linear path and see where we were we go. Now let's look at common areas of strengths that dislike that thinkers possess. And the first of all, there's analytic thinking. And Indeed.com had a good definition of this. And what they say is that analytical thinking is a method for analyzing a problem and finding a solution.

This is a way for processing and breaking down complex information. Analytical thinking is helpful in identifying cause and effect relationships and making connections between two factors. For instance, someone may use analytical thinking to understand the relationship between sunflowers and humidity, and to do this they may ask, why does sunflowers have trouble growing where there is humidity in the air?

The next is creative thinking. It's not only that ability to have ideas, but it's also including areas like risk taking and flexibility and open mindedness, resilience, and agility. The next is motivation and self-awareness. Motivation comes from having a vision, a purpose, an idea that needs to be explored. Self-awareness among dyslexic thinkers is the ability to put their challenges into compartments.

This allows them to make the accommodations needed to make it less of a problem, which allows a greater concentration on the big picture. Next, we talk about curiosity and lifelong learning. This means being willing to learn and improve how you do what you do. Every task can provide some information or knowledge that could be useful, and these people take advantage of it.

Now, our schools handling this new and extremely important trend in the US, at least, there's a little evidence of a recognition of the need at the school district level. And that, of course, is where the change really happens. The report says our education systems prioritize easily tested skills like rote memorization and recall, spelling, grammar and punctuation often. But these are the skills most likely to be taken over by AI.

What dyslexic thinkers need is an environment that recognizes the priorities we've been discussing, not the skills were teaching in the way we are teaching. A 2021 report by the organization for Economic Cooperation found creativity among 15-year-olds to be lower than that of ten-year-olds. It may be partly due to the education system frequently demanding conformity from students and a potentially stifles their creativity and curiosity as the advancing age.

So, what's happening is that these children are ten years old, and because the education system is stifling their ability to have ideas and that think and to, to be curious that it could be related to the education system. Andrea Schneider, director of Education and skills at the OECD, warns what current education systems prioritize is creating robots over nurturing human abilities.

He said the world must focus on human skills that complement AI, creating first class humans, not second-class robots, he states. They're they are what make us a human. In the world of artificial intelligence, our assessment systems must make the invisible visible the creativity, the curiosity, the empathy, the trust, the persistence visible and tangible for educators in the year we're in, these are the skills the world needs.

These are the skills that dyslexics are hardwired with. So based on the results, have found that when students are encouraged and supported to develop their own solutions to problems, they form deeper connection with the subjects, and they're more likely to find purpose and satisfaction in their learning journey. So, what do you do about this? If your neurodivergent child is in the traditional program or even a nontraditional one that focuses on the old ideas of the past centuries, educational practices, the strategies I'm going to talk about, and some of the ideas come from an article in the Journal of a Special Education Apprenticeship.

And I'll put a link to the article in the in the show notes. The first thing the authors talk about, and this is an important distinction to make, is that there's stark differences between students who have just a disability, just a learning disability, and students who are just gifted and students who are twice exceptional. There's a very different ways of looking at them.

And one of the things we find is that at times that students who are just gifted, can be gifted underachievers, so they're not, achieving to their potential. But it's for a different reason than the twice exceptional children. And if you look back at the spikey idea, the idea that they are they're talking about IQ is, as I talked about, like mine, which is, which is linear, just that they're very high.

The other thing is that for twice exceptional learners is that a disability can mask their gifts. So, a lot of times, in fact, this was very common 20 years ago in schools. At least in my experiences, that school districts would have difficulty qualifying children who were twice exceptional for special education because they were performing at grade level, and just because that they had a higher IQ.

The theory went or the reasoning went, that if they're getting by in school, that's the way that the special ed law should be applied. And that's really it just and I think in the last 10 or 15 years, that wall has started to come down of looking at twice exceptional learners with that spiky profile as certainly needing special education services.

Let's go into the strategies now and talk about the there's a five of them. All right. So, the first one is emphasizing the strengths of twice exceptional students. First, provide opportunities for student choice. Allow the student multiple ways to respond to new content. This is really what is called universal design for learning is about. It's providing students with instruction in their strongest modality.

If a student is a visual learner, then as much as possible information that the student wants and needs to learn is presented in a visual format. And also, the way the student responds to the new content is that that should be in their strongest modality as well. So, if a student again is a visual learner, they can do model, they can do a visual representation.

They can do a slide show. There's a number of things they could do to show mastery. So the idea is to break down that barrier that I talked about previously of language and allow the student to get around that language barrier by learning and responding in ways that, that they're, they're strong in address the needs of twice exceptional students, explicitly link new content to previous learning, teach organizational skills or let's take those each individually explicitly link new content to previous learning.

This is very, very important for the dyslexic learner. And the reason for it is that, again, if they're seeing the big picture, then they're not going to want to learn a fact in isolation and then have to make that connection to their previous learning. There's that's a step that they shouldn't have to do. That's a step that a language learner doesn't have to do so with new information is connected to old information, information that's already learned.

It becomes contextual. So that big picture need is fulfilled. Teacher organizational skills are important because, dyslexic thinkers have a tendency to be disorganized in the details and teaching organizational skills is, is a, something that they're going to need. And if it's embedded in what they're what they're learning that is relevant, then it'll be a much easier, much easier thing to do support the social emotional needs of twice exceptional students.

Allow additional time for task completion to alleviate anxiety. Help to ease students, develop self-advocacy. Teach stress management techniques. These are all critical. The. One of the things I talked about it in this, in this episode, is that anxiety is an issue that embeds itself in all parts of the life of the dislike I think are many times it's a, it's a constant.

And so alleviating that that anxiety that, you know, allowing them to have a filter from the world, that alleviates i.t. And so also teaching self-advocacy. And I have done a podcast on self-advocacy that talks about the importance of being able to, plan and determine your future and be able to do that, to speak up for and to, to, to advocate for oneself, recognize the differences between two students and gifted underachievers.

After assessment data and other evidence is gathered, considered at the student is to be or gifted underachiever, providing the appropriate supports including counseling support, learning support and or gift support. We're not going to go into today, but gifted underachievers, are addressed have different needs than do dyslexic thinkers that do to children. So, we have different, different programs and different ways of approaching that collaborate and communicate to provide optimal support to, to students.

This means that these students need to be recognized as gifted. And so gifted personnel need to be part of if there's an IEP or special education involved, to be part of that team, because they bring that perspective of the studentsŐ strengths into it, where the special education brings in primarily the studentsŐ deficits. And look at those, the support personnel should all be at those meetings.

And so, it's creating a balance of activities that both challenges and remediate. And what we're talking about with the challenges that those providing those opportunities to think big, those opportunities to provide ideas. So, opportunities to be who they are, but also mixing in those remedial activities in the way of the learning disabilities or processing deficits, so that those are alleviated to the greatest extent possible.

A couple of other things that looking at a student's strengths and allowing them to express those strengths does, is that the child becomes more willing to work on non-preferred and deficit based work by having that idea, that feeling of success, that feeling that they're valued, that they're allowed to be who they are, then they're going to be more willing to understand the need.

First of all, for the deficit-based work and also to be much more willing to do it. And then, we talk about that. It's really challenged in summarizing needs of to his students in a, in any sort of a, I guess, a coherent way. And so, the purpose of this podcast is to look generally at some of the things that we see with two students.

However, there's such a variety that, it's, it's endless in terms of the combination of students. But, you know, again, we're just looking at the, at the cases that I've seen over the last few years and some of the research that we've been looking at.

Well, that's it for this broadcast of this podcast. Thank you very much. We appreciate you joining us. Remember to call our helpline at (800) 578-2592 for further assistance. Our parent advisers at Matrix Parents at Marin CIL are here to help. Take care now. Bye.

© 2025 Marin Center for Independent Living (Marin CIL). Podcast author, David Poeschl, Parent Advisor at Marin CIL.