Video: REEL Speaker Series: Dr. Susan Baum Strategies to Ignite the Reluctant Writer

Writing almost always tops the list of challenges for all types of 2e learners, who have both high ability and potential as well as complex challenges such as specific learning disabilities (e.g. dyslexia), autism, ADHD, and anxiety. Parents and educators need tips to help these students experience success with writing. Renowned 2e expert Dr. Susan Baum joined REEL for a creative and pragmatic discussion on ways to support writing development for 2e learners.

Read the transcript here

Dr. Susan Baum: Strategies to Ignite the Reluctant Writer - Formatted Transcript

0:00

About strategies for struggling writers and um you feel free to introduce yourselves in the chat some of you have been doing that and you can also use the chat to ask questions um susan will be speaking for about 45 minutes to an hour and after that we will ask q a from the chat but feel free to ask as we go and we'll note them for later and we are recording this session so that we can screen it later. So um welcome everyone if you're not familiar with real we are resilience and engagement for every learner i'm one of the co-founders yeah elbolic and cali turk is the other co-founder here with me. The mission of real is to ensure that twice exceptional students thrive in school by raising parent and educator awareness and understanding through resources tools events like this one and services.

0:49

So on our website realty.org we have a lot of articles blog posts and recordings of past events from everything from how to uh teach your child to self-advocate um how should strength-based learning work what are some strategies for anxious tui kids and more and also you can share the tui fact sheet with your teachers. We have a couple of upcoming events and more going to be announced soon um we have a support group with parents helping parents on january 13th at 7 p.m you can sign up on our website and we will also have a strength-based parenting event in february the date will be announced soon and we have all of our other fall events recorded on our website so feel free to browse those including we just wrapped up the stanford neurodiversity summit and we had three panels on k-12 um if you'd like to keep in touch with us and you haven't yet please join our real google group where parents ask each other questions and we notify you of upcoming events or other interesting resources we come across our website and you can also follow us on facebook and twitter real also hosts events for educators you can bring these workshops to your school your district so please contact us if you would like us uh to come and deliver these to your school we have done these with several local school districts including intro to the 2e learner where we give interactive vignettes so people can go through actual stories of real tui learners and what strategies help them in the classroom and learning different simulations where we help help build empathy um for learning differences so please contact us at real2e.org to bring these workshops to your school kelly i'm going to stop sharing so you can introduce susan great well i just couldn't be happier tonight.

2:47

And more excited to welcome dr susan baum as our guest speaker on strategies for struggling writers when we surveyed our real community earlier this year to see which topics might be most helpful for for everyone writing came up almost at the very tip top it was it was right tied with anxiety and when i saw that and we made the commitment to doing a session on writing i knew there was no better person to address this topic and help the parents and educators in our community than dr baum she is a literal rock star in the twice exceptional universe i when you see her and you see people meet her she's just everyone's so alive when they get the chance to to meet her and she currently serves as the director of the tui center for research and professional development at bridges academy and is the provost for academics at the bridges graduate school of cognitive diversity and education but those titles don't really reveal her deep commitment to creating new generations of leaders who can continue to find ways to support 2e and cognitively diverse students for many years to come and i knew that she would be the best person to invite to speak because not only is she someone i've admired for many years i also have the honor of having her as my advisor at the bridges graduate school in my doctoral program and i have been so honored to be able to be in her classes when she talks about strategies for helping 2e kids especially those that have writing challenges the wisdom just flows and you want to soak up everything she says and only wish you could remember it all when you're actually sitting down to work with your child so if only we could get dr baum in front of every parent and teacher to talk about writing i know that our students would both grow and enjoy their learning experiences in a much more authentic and deeply satisfying way she has a long and distinguished career and you can read her full bio on the website i'm not going to go into all those details you can read all about her there but i am so grateful she agreed to be with us here tonight and i'm really looking forward to what she has to share and the question and answer session that will follow take it away dr bomb well it's great to be here and i love to talk about this subject uh and it's one that troubles everybody it's a product it's productivity in general specifically writing that is particularly challenging.

5:24

And why is particularly challenging is because schools seem to be putting more and more emphasis on writing school has become a secret language arts lesson and that's not good for kids who can't write because it's everything is about writing and uh things that they might love to do in school i go to science class to do experiments they get bogged down because of all the writing that's required so i'll i want to share the screen and see if we can find this powerpoint oh i find i that's my biggest dilemma i can never find them again and i like to word it slightly differently gifted but won't produce strategies to ignite the reluctant writer and it is really about motivation uh mostly because writing if it's difficult will continue to be difficult people who don't write well it takes an awful lot of practice and an awful lot of grit and determination to just sit down and write even great writers get writer's block and can't always write writing is a challenging activity for these kids.

6:55

If you would like this presentation you can take a screenshot i think you could have that tiny url and then you could have this presentation just wait a second okay um let's talk about why writing is difficult for many many children and and when writing is difficult for kids who are really really bright why is that well writing is very complex note-taking for instance is one of the most complex skills that there is in school and let's see how complicated it is so in order to be able to write take notes initiate writing sustain writing kids have to just activate and sustain attention during the sessions where they're brainstorming and beginning writing they have to understand what's being asked of them what is the writing prompt what is it that the teacher is requiring they need to have some knowledge about that topic they need to figure out for whom is this writing who is the audience they have to remember the rules that remember grammar how to have a topic sentence in a paragraph they have to be able to organize the multitude of ideas in a linear way they need to be able to use visual spatial skills to create the margin and the spacing and all the parts and the grapho motor skills of writing holding the pen getting the lines put the letters in the proper place proper size proper space and then there's spelling and punctuation so for kids who have a one-track mind who can think about one thing at a time you can see that the frustration levels would be high.

9:01

They have these amazing ideas and this brilliant knowledge and thoughts and they can't get it down on paper now the other reason that writing is challenging for these kids i think is what happens when they can't produce what's expected and what happens when you can't produce what's expected in school and that translates to so many different things and these i'm going to touch upon four things that really can happen when kids can't produce. The teacher questions ability we've all been there when the teacher has asked your kid to write something and it comes up lousy and maybe it's a timed writing test and what do they say to you your kid's not really gifted you know your child doesn't really have the ability that they should be writing at if they had you know advanced thinking. I'm sure you've heard that lots of times and that hurts parents know their kids are bright they know what their kids can tell them and what their teachers see is this lousy product that's supposed to show how much the child knows and then they judge the child sometimes as lazy or dumb or incapable of learning so bright students who cannot produce what the teacher expects and what they expect because they're very critical at themselves and self-aware they know that they're smart and they can't get their ideas down so so this lack of production just is so frustrating to them so the first thing that happens is maybe the teacher or someone blames the kid or labels the kid.

10:45

The second thing that can happen when the child can't produce they set academic goals that don't match their talents and ambitions how many times have we heard i don't want to go to college i want to work at best buy i want to work at starbucks not that there's anything wrong with that but when you know a kid has the potential for so much more because of their what they're interested in or what they like to do and they don't want to pursue it because their confidence got shot and they don't see themselves as potential learners it's it's it's terrible i've seen this time and time again and i've had a student say to me don't tell me i can go to college because i know i can't i can't write and that's what they want in college and so bright kids are limiting themselves because of this this inability to to write or to be able to produce in ways that are acceptable uh to others. The third thing that happens when they can't produce is is that kids um become anxious they develop anxiety and kids just don't want to go to school they don't want to go to writing workshops and they'll begin to have stress headaches and all sorts of avoidance behaviors because of writing. The last thing and probably the worst um is if i really i can't produce what i know and all these things have happened to me i just begin to take this out on myself and i develop negative beliefs about who i am and what i can do and and so this is the core of so many of the kids we work with who have this potential and who are such amazing thinkers and such great problem solvers and they can't produce and so all these things happen.

12:57

So what i'm going to do today is share some strategies and ideas and i've organized my presentation around what i call four major principles that i think are critical to working with reluctant writers we need to ensure that there's a purpose for their writing and that they write for an authentic audience and that writing makes a difference they need to understand that a reason that i am in this person's life for communicating with them because if i can't tell somebody what i know why would i work so hard to get this down so we have to make sure that the writing is purposeful and that's that's really principle number one. Principle number two is that we need to build their self-efficacy and that means first respecting what they can do and respecting their strengths and using those strengths to help them in their writing processes and also we need to give them control because for kids like this who who cannot do what is is typical in schools um having control is is really critical because it allows them to show you what they know. Principle three is that we have to reduce the barriers that come from their asynchronous development and so that means we have to give them the tools we have to allow them to use assistive technology or or different ways to um to to be able to communicate their their messages and we need to make sure that they're doing that in as many different ways as possible. Principle four is really involves instructing their writing supporting their skills and building an awareness of what's going on when they're writing and teaching them what metacognition is so they can begin to monitor how their brains work and figure out what to do when it doesn't work for them.

15:04

Okay so let's go through these one at a time and let's start with making sure that there's a purpose for their writing and that when they write it makes a difference to somebody or something or some project or some activity that they're involved in and real writing should be authentic and purposeful should have a real-life reason and i think we need to teach kids that writing is a form of communication it's just a way to share your ideas and your thoughts with others and so they need to think about writing as a a tool for communication there are so many ways to write so that you can share your feelings and your knowledge and learn more information and so first in this goal purposeful writing they need to understand the value of communicating and just using writing as a tool. One of the things i think we need to do is help kids know that their audiences are more than their teacher because that's usually who they're writing for it's like they're writing for that teacher and they have to get it right and if they have a wider audience of people who are interested in their topics or interested in who they are or what they're doing or you know kids when they start talking about what they love people are interested in them if they start talking about what they do people are interested in them so they can blog they can post they can create uh websites they can do all these different things that are purposeful to them and kids love it when their when their thoughts make a difference they like it when they can um when people send them messages about you know oh that's really interesting tell me more. I found that in one of the schools i worked in we had pen pals from a retirement home that lived across the street from the school and these kids would write letters back and forth with with adults who were retired who really didn't have too much to do during the day and they would write to these kids and the kids would write back and this was just fabulous because they wanted to write these people because these people gave them feedback you know and the feedback was uh it was positive and encouraging and so so we really need to think about for these kids the purpose of writing is to to communicate and we need to make sure that they have a way to to communicate with real people.

18:01

Another thing that's really important is that we need to integrate writing with things kids are really really interested in and so if they're passionate about something if they're interested in something we need to hook writing into those those topics and so that will um will make the writing easier so some strategies some ideas that we've used um we want to make sure that the writing is tied to their passions and interests so what you would see is kids writing about pokemon or kids writing about space exploration whatever it is that the kid is interested in whenever we assign writing we want to see how can we connect what we're asking them to write about to something that they really really find interesting and rewarding. Another strategy is to make writing social so kids are writing collaboratively with other kids and when you do that you reduce the amount of writing each child does but they get the whole topic across so it makes it easier because if they're working with a partner or a group of kids they're only responsible for their part and we need to make sure that the parts they're going for are shorter and are parts that they're very interested in and i think that's going to be more motivating for them because they're not in it alone. I think this is a great picture in terms of writing this is not putting words down on paper this was a book that was written by children and they did research on it and they created a performance about ecosystems and they invited all the parents to this performance and they talked about the different ecosystems and the different habitats and what's involved in that and that was their product so writing could be a script it could be program notes it could be a letter inviting people to come to a performance so there's all different kinds of writing that they can do within a project like this that will allow them to use writing for authentic purposes.

20:04

We need to encourage kids to write from authority which means they write from what they know so when kids are writing from what they know and what they're interested in they don't have to worry about all those frontal lobe higher order skills for putting things together and sequencing and putting it all in order they know what they know and it makes it easier for them to write and so if a kid really likes animals and we can use animals in different ways in their writing it's going to make writing easier for them because they're going to be writing from authority. I think another thing that we can do is whenever we work with kids we want to make sure that when we're helping them with their writing we're not doing all the questioning we're taking turns with questions so we ask a question they ask us a question we respond to their question and then we answer we ask another question so we're trying to model what dialogue is all about and i think that's important too in terms of writing so we want to make sure that they're learning how to ask questions when they're writing and as a parent and as a teacher we can we can give our answers the way we would want a reader to get an answer and and and demonstrate the writing and and we can say you know it would be really good if you put in a question here because i'd like to know more about that so we can ask them a question then they learn how to ask themselves questions when they're writing so writing will be that kind of reciprocal uh interaction. If a child has a question at school if a child um would like to know something uh that question the child's authentic questions could be the start of a writing assignment so i worked with um some middle school kids a while back and they were studying the civil war and there was nothing about the civil war that interested them at all and i started having them ask questions well i want to know about medicine i want to know about weapons i want to know about food you know and so so what we did we took their questions and we made those their research topics so um so they had an authentic question something they wanted to know and they got to research it and report on it.

22:23

The second principle that i that is really critical with these kids is respecting their strengths and putting them in control and we start with respecting their strengths and letting them share what they're interested in and letting them talk and so oral storytelling is is something that we need to make sure happens with all these kids and we need to honor their oral storytelling and that might be one way that they share their knowledge is is orally and we should give credit to that and we shouldn't say well you have to put it down on paper because lots of these kids can tell you wonderful things and so this is a ted talk on storytelling because there is an art to telling a story and and i really encourage you to look at this because it's it's wonderful. I think asking kids to use their special interests to persuade others or to inform others is is a great thing for them to do i think it's i know a kid who is an expert on world war ii and he's about 10 years old and he read everything he could about world war ii and he wanted to set up a museum so so his his his first thing he had to do is write a business plan to his parents about why he wanted to do this and he had to try to get his parents to see that this was a worthwhile venture and so he had to use persuasive writing and and he was happy to write because it gave him a reason to uh create this museum so he he wrote this whole plan and it was beautifully done because it came from him and it came from what he knew so then he actually got it and he set up this museum and he kept records of all the people who came and what their feedback was and so you you know writing was easy for him because it was purposeful and it was something that he wanted to do. We need to let kids express themselves creatively and i'm going to show you that this is something that one of my students did um he wrote it this is about bats and he used poetry to talk about the different um topics on bats so on echolocation he wrote a poem on habitats he wrote a poem um and so instead of writing a report he was writing poetry and this this child's poetry was delightful and we were so thrilled with his with his project and he was an amazing writer but would never write reports.

25:02

Putting students in control means that they can decide how to organize their ideas as long as there's a logical order to them i've seen kids use different forms of graphic organizers and different kids use different organizers and lots of times these graphic organizers are given to them but if you allow the child to make their own graphic organizer they're developing those frontal lobe skills and so how would you like to organize this information and let them figure out on their own what what type of tool to use or strategy to use so i wouldn't say to all the kids you're all going to you're all doing reports so you're all going to use a five paragraph essay structure no you all have different abilities you all have different ways of thinking so if i ask you to write a report how are you going to organize it and then we can give them some choices that they could use or they could come up with something totally on their own but if we want to put them in control and teach them to to uh to think we need to teach them how they organize their own information. Here's a student who had to write about um something a book a chapter book that he read and he decided to organize it with a plot roller coaster so this this little picture here is one way to organize information and so he wrote it as if he was at a theme park and he talked about lining up to get on the roller coaster and in line he was explaining the book and what the setting was and as the roller coaster started the plot went up and up and up then it came to a climax and then he got all the way to the end and it it was it was an it wasn't a five paragraph essay but it was a very creative way to summarize a book and he was in control of it and he he came up with the idea himself and the teacher was so delighted with what he did that he read it to the whole class.

27:10

This is another one somebody else gave me this is a fourth grader um she was from a school in philadelphia and she also was organizing information and um she had to do a a study of scientists she picked barbara mcclintock who was a geneticist and she organized it the same way that barbara mcclintock organized all her genetic studies so she made a corn plant and she had each piece of corn a different color and each different color represented a different chapter in her life this was about her birth this was about her marriage this was about the work she did so she that was the way she decided to organize the report and each piece of corn was a different color and it corresponded to different aspects of barbara mcclintock's life that's pretty creative. Here's a student who was interested in political cartoons so he wrote his whole chapter book report using political cartoons not words so putting kids in control means that they get to make these choices and these are authentic choices and we need to respect that and and just see how creative they can be and i i think it's it's not always that i hate this it's that i want to do it my way so if i do it your way i'm going to show you i don't want to do it your way by not doing it so we need to make sure that there are there are times when they do get to get it across in their own way.

28:36

Here's a sixth grader who wrote what he wrote is a whole it was actually a picture book on the digestive system and he went through the whole digestive system and he made a fabulous picture book with with beautiful pictures of organs and then a little bit about it and that was his picture book so the product it's writing there's plenty of writing here it took probably more time to do than to write a boring essay or a boring report but it was a lot of fun so putting students in control is what it's all about. Now when kids can't produce and they can't meet those expectations you know that writing is the you know the tool for learning one of the things we have to understand is that these kids are asynchronous and what does asynchronous development mean well it means that they're very very bright in some areas of their thinking and their intellectual development and they're not that good in other areas so some kids can have amazing ideas but they can't hold a pen or spell or punctuate or do any of that and so what we need to do is is understand that that the tools for writing are not there yet but the thinking skills are there so we bypass the things that are difficult for them and we give them assistance with those things and we allow them to develop their ideas first before we ask them to worry about what the product is going to look like. I think this was said to me once by a kid you you you you just don't like what i have to say because you're always correcting my grammar and punctuation so i'm not going to tell you anything and i think that's such a powerful statement because kids say you know when i write down what i i think and i get it back and it's all red marks all over it um that's telling me you don't care what i have to say you just want me to spell and punctuate and do all this.

30:37

So we have to understand as as teachers and as parents that you need to find out what your kids know and appreciate it you know don't read their writing to correct the grammar and punctuation and spelling read it to find out what they know and if the product is so bad you can't read it just say read it to me so i can hear what it is you want me to know and then once you get to that then you can work on the other stuff so so the first thing is is to that we have to do is show respect for ideas over correctness because if we do that then kids will be more willing to write so our goal is to say here are your strengths you have amazing ideas here here are the places where it's more difficult and let's work on the difficult pieces separately when it doesn't get in the way of your producing and sharing your amazing thoughts. So we want to reduce the barriers we want to bypass these deficits so that the student can show their knowledge and and feel productive so some of the ways we can reduce the barriers is that we allow for dictation we allow the kids to dictate their stories and their reports to someone else lots of times parents um can can be scribes and take the dictation and teachers can and older children older siblings can and and kids can dictate into into programs and the ipad the ipad is a great great tool for dictation because you just have to open up email or notes and you press that little microphone and the kid starts talking and what they say goes down in writing and then you can work on it because it's there we want to make sure that we're allowing assistive technology so there are programs like co-writer that can help them with word prediction so as they're spelling a word it gives them some choices about what the word is going to look like there's software programs now that can correct grammar for them software programs like grammarly or you know there's autocorrect there's spell check so there's so many programs that can help them with this.

32:53

We also need to sometimes adjust the writing tasks and so we need to look at the writing task that we're assigning and maybe reduce them in length or maybe don't grade everything the kid writes just pick certain pieces that you're going to uh grade and look at the quality of those but um there are some writing tasks where you're just checking to see what the kid knows you don't have to worry about the spelling or the correctness or anything else you're just seeing um what the kid is able to uh articulate and so i think we need to look at the tasks and we need to look at the purpose of the task if the task is to see if the kid understands the concept then we don't worry about the spelling and the grammar and the punctuation if the task is to produce a narrative with good punctuation and grammar then maybe we shorten it or we look at one aspect of it. Another thing we can do is provide them with a checklist so they can self-monitor their writing we have a lot of kids who say i'm done and they haven't done one quarter of what they need to do to make their writing acceptable so we have to have a checklist so that they understand what good writing is and they can check off did i do this yes did i do this yes did i do this yes okay i'm done so putting some kind of a checklist there which tells them and that's going to help build their metacognition it's going to help them also know what good writing is i'm going to develop their awareness and that's what my fourth principle is all about. First of all we need to have writing instruction be writing workshops where there's mini lessons and we model and we teach and then they practice and we discuss what they did and it's not writing writing writing and everything has to be perfect so i really believe in this writing workshop approach where they work on certain pieces in depth until they become perfect and other things they just they practice they get feedback and they try some more.

35:05

We need to teach them to make choices about their writing so i i think that um we need to teach them to make choices about how they organize it we need to make let them make choices about what they write on so we have to teach them how to think for themselves and how to to to realize that there are choices in writing and that they're going to have to make those choices and sometimes the choices they make don't work out well so we have to give them plenty of opportunities to make those choices and learn by making their choices. Another thing we need to do is monitor their own writing processes so if we're going to build self-efficacy one of the things we need to do is to have kids understand what their strengths are what the writing process is all about and how they write so we want them to understand what a first draft is what a rough draft is we want them to know when they do their best writing do they do best writing if they talk about it first or do they do better when they draw a picture first or do they do better when they just start writing so we need to help them understand how they write best so they can become more strategic in their own approach to writing and i think that we can help kids all different ages kindergarten you can start asking kids you know so how do you when you start telling a story how do you how do you think about your stories and just get them to be aware of how they how they produce.

36:36

We also need to have discussions about and conferences with kids about their writing so we need to sit down with kids and we need to say you know what did you want me to know after i read this what was the most important thing i should know and listen to what they say and then say did i understand that tell me more because you know i kind of got confused there and and walk them through editing based on on your reaction as a reader so we need to have these conversations with kids we also need to teach them about audience and purpose so if you're writing for your your peers you know a kid in your classroom you might write it differently if you're writing for a teacher and so understanding how to tailor your message and your style based on who your audience is who's going to be reading it we need to teach kids about what makes a good lead for a story what makes a good opening paragraph we need to teach them transitions we need to teach them lots of things about grammar and all that and one way we can teach that is through through mentor texts so if we just say to kids you know you need a good lead and you need to start with action that's one thing but if we give them 10 leads or five leads in books that they all know that are interesting and then say which one of these leads do you think is best and let them discuss it with each other and vote on it then they become aware of what good writing looks like we can do that with characters we can do that with showing not telling we can do it with punctuation we can do it with so many different things and and that's the way we learn i think mentor texts are the best way to learn writing you know you can have a writing book and it's going to have specific things you're supposed to teach but if you have a lot of books and you have you know and these books could be picture books or they could be chapter books whatever it is and you let kids make judgments on what's good and what makes it good they become strategic and aware of what good writing is all about.

38:47

The other thing we need to do is is that we all need to teach ourselves to become better observers of kids and so we need to look at the student work and and figure out what's getting in the way of their writing what seems to be the problem what behaviors do they engage in during writing time do they sharpen their pencil 10 times before they start do they you know go to the bathroom do they do they start arguments with kids around them i mean you know kids have so many avoidance strategies so let's document those and let's see what patterns are there and and that will tell us something about the kids. I think also we need to not wait for them to fail before we do something so many people want a psychological because the kid can't write well guess what the diagnosis is going to be dysgraphia or an executive function issue and you're going to pay thousands of dollars to find this out when you could just support the kid from the beginning so so we really need to say you know what we need to reduce the barriers for this kid because if we do that he'll show us what he knows and so we need to make sure that we are not waiting for failure before we do something.

39:54

If you're a parent you want to make sure that you advocate for your children and you attend these iep or 504 meetings and that you you make sure that the plans are realistic and uh doable in your children's classroom um i had a woman write to me last week saying my child keeps getting zeros because he can't turn his homework in on time and um his iep says that his grades should be computed on mastery of work submitted and not unsubmitted work and i can't get the school to do this and that's just so so frustrating because the the adults are supposed to be looking at what the kid can do and working from there and so it's just it's really hard if they keep getting zeros and failing at school and you go there because of their asynchronous development and you keep saying you know he should be getting the grades for what he does that should be on his iep and i said go back and revisit that because maybe you need to put it in writing a different way because it's not if the school can't understand it then they're not they're going to be there and the kid's going to continue to have self-doubts and negative feelings. So what i'm saying is that we really need to become better advocates and if you can afford it hire an advocate to be with you in these meetings because sometimes they're they're very helpful in in making sure that what's supposed to be done can be done and also they can give you they can interpret what's going on if you don't understand.

41:37

We need to give kids time you know i i think that we need to understand that kids are not going to be good writers right away it takes a lot of practice we need to persist with what we're doing and we can't give up and i think that really helps when you celebrate every step forward and and look for for things that they've done and and celebrate that. So i think what i'd like to do now is i'd like to just see if there are any questions because i've talked for a while and um i i hope this has been helpful and um what i'm just going to pull up the chat and see if there are any and uh kelly and abby you might want to help with this because i i know that i talked fast so feel free to unmute yourselves.

42:32

Yeah i am unmuted um there have been so many wonderful comments as you've been going and so many thank yous and i think also people are appreciating the emphasis on motivation and purpose but we've got a couple of questions and so um just want to make sure we get to a few of these so someone asked about a student who has a lot of creative ideas doesn't want to write them down even when dictation and speech to text are offered do you have any suggestions for the student who really is very blocked even with all these assistive technology or even dictation. Yes i think you that we have to be respectful of what the child wants to do and um i think if the child has an interest in just sharing their ideas and thoughts orally that's fine that's absolutely fine but i think we need to understand what is it that we really want the child to know how to do and if writing is is what we want the child to do then we need to figure out ways to motivate them to want to write and i think starting with their interest and starting with giving them control is is really critical i know a young man who would not write at all unless it was unless he could type it so he would only use a computer so i i think this is what i mean by we need to give kids control and we need to figure out you know does the medium make a difference some kids don't like to write in a notebook they like to write on index cards some kids like to have digital writing only i mean everybody has their their little quirks and so i think we have to be respectful of that and and figure out what it is that this child is willing to to to do but you're not going to force a kid who won't write to write so what i would do is i would say okay well for right now let's not write let's put writing aside and let's see what you're really good at you know and let's see if we can link writing to that.

44:43

I saw i saw a kid this was amazing um he's in middle school and he wouldn't write anything he'd write like two words that's all he would write but he came up with this whole plan to to run a fundraising campaign for a school in the navajo nation and he wrote in his head this whole business plan about why his his peers should help him raise the money and and he he went to the principal of his school and he sat down with this principal and and he explained the whole process in such detail that the principal had her secretary take notes because he would not write and the secretary took notes and typed them up and gave them to this child and so but this child was able to tell her and he he was able to write in his head but he was not comfortable putting it on paper and i said you know at some point he's going to want to write this out himself as he gets more comfortable and and more confident and he has more successes but there's no reason to push that if he can find other ways to do it so i would just say fine i'm putting writing aside and i'm i'm respecting what you're good at so let's figure out what you're good at and then from there we'll start linking it to writing but i need to i need to respect where you are right now.

46:16

I love that advice um and this is actually the parent who posted that question has a comment she says i have one of these kids who has writer's block even with assistive technology and she says i am totally sold on your ideas about motivation so i think that's great um i wanted to also there's another question about can you share more ideas about how to connect writing to a student's passion. Okay so this is this is something that i do when i meet kids i talk to them about what they're interested in where it is that they like to do in their free time what they think about what they dream about and so that we get this whole profile of the child and then as we do units of study or as we assign homework or as we assign writing assignments i look for ways to link the writing assignment into what the kid's interested in so um so years ago i had a student who loved baseball only baseball and so we were studying poetry and he was supposed to write a haiku well so i said to him what what is it about baseball that you like you know and he said i said tell me how you feel when when a ball is hit when you're at the game you know and so i learned about what he liked and and then i said well write me a haiku about your feelings when the ball is hit and um and he had these three or four sentences and i said which one's most important and he told me and i said well that's your first line so i had to work with him on taking his ideas and chunking them but he wrote this haiku and it was a beautiful poem that you could just feel the energy and his his response to it so i think i i as the teacher or as the parent we have to do the work and help them link their interest to the task but you gotta know what they're interested in first and if you don't know get to know them and find out.

48:23

I love that um someone was asking and i thought this was another good question um i have a student who's just in the very early phases maybe learning that they are 2e and a parent is worried that they will be asked to do too much writing in school before we can really get the support started um so how do you help if you're in a school that is very writing heavy and you feel like things like a 504 or any support is moving slowly how do you start making those changes to protect the child if the system is moving slowly for getting those accommodations. I think you if it's moving slowly and you um you can certainly have a conversation with a teacher and you can certainly get documentation from other people that what your intuition is is is accurate and have have the teacher send you the writing samples have you look at them because you want to be able to say you know i don't think my child can do this and here's what i think is getting in the way so the more information you can get the more you can advocate so talking to the teacher asking the teacher to share writing samples with you and and saying you know i'd like to look at this because i'm worried about it and if they bring home zeros for for assignments i'd want to know why they're getting zeros and if it's because they're not completing assignments or they're completing assignments but they're so bad and then i want to understand why why is this um you know i i think we need to we need to get enough data so that we can understand what the problem is so when we go to the school and say i want my child to have a 504 plan i want my child to have an iep i can tell you what i'm concerned about and why and if they say well we don't see it then that's a problem and you can you know if if you can afford it i would get a neuropsychological because it's data and data talks and when you go to these meetings you can say well look what it says here and and they can't deny what a neuropsychological says.

50:37

Can i chime in for a second because we've actually gotten a related question a few times that i think is important to answer which is people are asking what if they're in a state that doesn't allow 504s or they're in a private school that has that says no we're not going to do 504s what would you do in that case. Um i would find another school i really would because you know you you put your kid in in an environment where they don't have the supports they need this is not going to get better for them i i really think that if if parents can possibly find a school where the school understands twice exceptionality and has um you know the training and and the knowledge to help these kids i would do that and i'm not saying leave leave public education but if if the school can't provide you with what you need then i think that you have to look for it somewhere else because you you you your child's precious and you want to make sure your child is is going to be successful and i and i would really hate to think that that a child is in a school that can't do it and they're just suffering year after year it takes a toll and so i i would work really hard to try to find a school that that could do it.

52:05

That's that's great advice um the other thing i just wanted to say to that because we do have members in california and we also have members like in wisconsin and other states um where they they are different is you know if if you're in a state that does 504s but your school isn't offering you them you can go above the school you can go to the school district and there are people whose job it is to do 504s so you can bypass the school and go to the district and say this is my child's rights and um i've seen many people be successful doing that but if you're in a state that doesn't even do 504s then you know you have different you have different choices and and um and i would urge you to look at it you know is it the teacher who's willing to work with you regardless or is it that the entire system there doesn't support it and then yes i would agree with susan it's time to start doing your research on what other school options you have. There's a great article that was uh by by megan foley nicpon about how to advocate for your child and it's a it's on the davidson's um it's on davidson's website and it's called something like finding common ground and it's it's really i think you know i i read it to all my my graduates in my graduate program read it because it's the best article on advocacy i've seen and i think it's important to read it so you know how to approach the school and how to work with the school and and do it in a in a way that both of you are comfortable and both of you understand what you're trying to do i think that's i think that's really important.

53:48

Um and um abby do we have you want to help me find some more questions um sure yeah um or should we maybe we should wrap up i don't know what time it is oh well we have a little bit more time so why don't we do a few more questions and um i'll say this i will um we talked before about just really emphasizing the importance of making writing purposeful and i just wanted to let everyone know that later in the week probably on friday we will send out the recording of this session and we'll also send an email with some of the resources that susan has mentioned today so you will not need to screenshot everything so um don't stress about that um so a couple of questions um we have someone who asked we have gifted students with dysgraphia and they say i've been told we'll never be able to write by hand could you kind of share a little bit about your experience working with kids who have dysgraphia. I think dysgraphia is is a really really difficult learning disability because it affects the grapho motor and so we want to make sure that these kids are not always relegated to keyboards and typing but we want to make sure that that they can at least write for short periods of time because in the real world you need to be able to sign your name you need to be able to write a grocery list you need to be able to write a note to someone so i think the occupational therapists have some really good strategies for helping kids write and if if they have severe dysgraphia and we've exhausted everything then i think we need to bypass it and and not just say you'll never be able to write so let's not try i think i think we need to you know every child is capable of writing something and so i think we can work on stamina for writing and we can get them to be able to write more and i i think that that's that's the way i look at it. So you can't always bypass it you know you i mean you can bypass it from when you're you're asking them to show that they know something but you can't bypass it from from life and so i think you need to teach skills in handwriting and i think that occupational therapists have have strategies and i'm not an occupational therapist so i i don't know exactly what they are but but i would say if you feel that your child really has severe dysgraphia i would get them into occupational therapy and and the more practice with handwriting the better they might become unless it's so severe that you know it's really really something that needs to be bypassed all the time but but handwriting even if it's for short periods of time is something they should be able to do.

56:45

You know i'd love to even add to that because i know abby you know this in our daughter's story and i know many parents i talk to from real who have kids with dysgraphia see huge progress with occupational therapy and that consistent use and so i wouldn't i agree with susan i wouldn't just give up on it i think there's an assumption oh you have dysgraphia you'll never write with your hand you know abby you've probably written by hand since before you were three because your dad taught you to handwrite and then you stopped because it was so painful and so challenging but then with some really good occupational therapy and consistent work you know now you'll take notes for for your grad classes and write essays by hand and people are like i don't understand how you have dysgraphia so don't give up keep working on it keep trying i think there's we can make progress there. Do you take notes and everything in class so that's amazing but it's still painful yes but you can do it right yeah okay that's impressive that's good that you you could do it there you go okay so i think that's a that's a great example.

57:55

Um and i want to make sure we get to this question because a couple people have been kind of thinking about this um so someone asked how how should we determine if a child is in that kind of phase of like practicing the basics of writing or if they're in a place where they actually should be demonstrating their knowledge through writing like what phase should you be kind of thinking about kind of holding a standard or where should you still be doing like more practice without the standard. That's a great question and i think that's that's a judgment call i think that um when the child can show you that they are able to use the writing skills that you've been teaching with fluency and then i think you need to work on something else but um but i i think that there are certain times when you're working on a specific writing skill you work on that skill and you keep working on it until they get it and the only way to know they get it is that they can do it with with ease so when you're looking at something and they're doing something that they seem to be pretty good at that's the time that you can say okay now i want to see you do it i want you to show me you know and so i would say don't grade the work that they do as they're learning but once they've got the skill then then you can grade it so i think there's a difference between formative assessment and summative assessment formative assessments are the things we do when we're practicing and we're and we're trying to get better and we get feedback but we don't we don't like if your child was in soccer and they're trying to figure out how to dribble the ball they're not going to get graded on their dribbling they're just going to be coached and they're practicing and they're trying to do better and once they can do it then they're out there on the field using the skill so i think it's the same thing writing we practice we try to get better we get feedback we get coaching but once we know how to do something we can show you that we know how to do it and then you might grade it so i think i think that's the that's the way to look at it it's a judgment call and it's based on how well they do when they're when they're practicing.

1:00:12

Love it um i know there's so many great questions that have come in um and i want to make sure we kind of have time for one last question if that's okay um so someone asked you mentioned a scribe as an option for dictation and i think that's amazing in the long run what about in the short term when maybe even the parent is getting super frustrated because it's taking a really long time to sit there and scribe so do you have any advice for parents who are getting frustrated because it's it's taking 45 minutes to scribe a paragraph what how can we kind of help with that. I i think that that um you take a break the parent can say you know this is taking a really long time and so i'm going to we're going to do half of it and then we can do the other half later or you know what i need a break so i'd like you to finish this the other way so so i think the parents need to if if it's getting really really frustrating and i think a lot of times parents get pulled into homework it's like the kid says i can't do this and the parent does it or helps the kid way too much and so i think the parent needs to set boundaries you know i will i will help you for this much time and after that you you're on your own or you need to figure out something else so i i think the parent has to say i'm willing to do this but i'm not willing to do this all the time and i'm not willing to you know spend an hour working on this i'll spend 20 minutes and if you can get it done in 20 minutes fine if not then then you need to figure out what else to do and then you write a note to the teacher and say you know this was a real struggle tonight and it took you know 20 minutes and we only got this much done and um i'd like to know if there's another way that he could finish this or if this is good enough because right now this is all i have time for so i think it's really important that parents um recognize that this is their their child's responsibility it's not the parent's responsibility and so the parents need to advocate and say you know i'm willing to help for this much time or i'm willing to help with this but i'm not going to do the whole thing.

1:02:23

And i think that's great and i've heard you in other settings also share how important it is for parents to to save that relationship with their kids and it sounds like if you're getting overly frustrated it's it becomes it's not helpful for the child it might actually make things worse so i i love that and i want to add to to this too if anybody has the means to hire someone else to help with the writing that can be a good way because then you're not the scribe and and hopefully that person is is really skilled at it and they'll have some techniques that are going to be better than a parent could do and then you don't have that parent-child i told you to do the homework issue so i i think that's that's another another idea. I love that and and i think i saw one other question come in about a specific case about like a middle schooler who's who's like really struggling with note-taking for science and this actually made me think of something i wanted to ask you too because i know you know a lot of these strategies um with a lot of these strategies you're talking to teachers but for parents who might want the teachers to use the strategies what do you recommend or would you recommend that the parent just sends the recording of this to the teacher says hey we saw this great presentation dr bomb did on writing would you mind watching it or what do you think would be the best way for the parent to kind of be able to say i heard all this great stuff but i'm not the teacher like how do i get my teacher involved. Well you might you might ask the teacher do you have 15 minutes where we could meet on zoom and i'd like to share some things that i learned and i think it would be great to share it with you so that we can both be on the same page when we're working with my child and so you know if the teacher says well i don't really have 15 minutes then you can say okay well i'm going to send you this link and you know these are some things that i that i heard and you know i'd like to see if we can make some of these changes so i think you you don't demand the teacher to do anything you just share it and you say you know would you mind taking a look at this because i think some of these ideas might work with with my child and if you're open to it i'd love to have a conversation with you you know is there a good time for us to talk.

1:04:37

For that particular question about the science class do you have one strategy we could share that the parent could bring to the teachers just one easy thing to start with oh god i don't even know what that question was can you remind me of it the child taking notes in the science class and the parents were frustrated because it was i think it was cornell notes and it was taking 10 hours a week so she was losing her love for science so i guess that was the question is how do we start bringing some of these um you know options into these other subject areas right and i i think that i've seen a lot of kids especially engineers and kids who are more visual their notes are visual and they can explain them and they are amazing notes i saw somebody's one kid's note on on some theory and if you allow a lab you know if you can get it down any way you want to get it down there's no reason to say it has to be in words and if you have a different way to express it mathematicians talk to each other in mathematical symbols and they go you could see movie after movie how they're writing on the board and they're pointing these things out i would like a child to be able you know if they have to write their proof if they're writing a math problem on the board with another child and they explain how they did the steps why do they have to put it in verbal writing there's no reason i would say to the teacher it's very important to understand why you're assigning what you're signing so i want to make sure that the child understands how they got the answer and but that so aren't there other ways to explain how you got the answer you didn't say to me i want to know if the child can put explain themselves in writing because if if that's really what you want to know that it has to be in writing you there's no justification for that sometimes things have to be in writing and then there is justification but if writing is to be used to see if the child understands a math problem there's many other ways to understand that math problem and it behooves all of us to say to each other and to teachers what is your objective is your objective that my child learns how to write a story a narrative a descriptive paragraph or is it today's objective that you want to know if they understand population dynamics and in in biology and so if it's to understand the concepts in the unit on population dynamics what are other ways that that child can tell you if it's that i need to see if you can know how to punctuate a conversation well then fine but victor borga even did it in a song so be clear on your objectives and if writing is the objective because you want the child to have a writing skill but if writing's being used to show understanding then there should be alternatives you know and i i think what happened in the case with this family i know is that ultimately the parents talk to the teacher the child was not ready to self-advocate on this topic she's been self-advocating on a lot of other topics so the parents talked to the teacher and the teacher was so responsive and said no parent had ever come and talked about the challenge before and they that she knew that in the other classes they had stopped using this this note-taking system so i think sometimes two parents are are afraid to have a good conversation with with teachers and sometimes the teachers never heard the feedback and that's not always true of course that's not always true but i do think it's a valuable thing for people to know is it's we can sometimes be afraid to feel like we're going to ruffle someone's feathers but there's a way to talk about it with a teacher that is productive for everyone yeah i i think that if um there are shorter pieces of writing if a child uh is in a class and and one of the things that it might be on a 504 plan or writing it's you know just not reduce the amount of writing that that child needs to have during any semester is a good strategy so that don't sign off on the plan unless you have some control over how much writing and a plan that was used in a school in in prince george's county maryland that that they weighed this child's work differently he got much more points for projects than he did for the writing assignments so it favored his strength and and i guess another one i just thought i'd mention see you know i i was in a presentation about a universal design for learning and there was a college level class where the teacher had each person share their notes once during the semester and everyone was a little nervous about doing it but the what it showed everyone was just different ways how different people do notes in different ways and it gave people new ideas about how they might do their notes and they learned a lot of fun ways to take notes whether it was sketch noting or uh whatever it was and i thought that was a super interesting idea too and then no one feels locked into one style and a lot of our kids do better by recording you know there's there's that pen that scribe pen that where they take notes and that they don't get the note down the pen is recording and so if you want to know what the teacher said you might write just one word and when this the pen then will play back what the teacher said at that word so they it's like note taking and then you have that backup it just kind of gives you like a bookmark to the part of the lecture the teacher was giving so it's 8 27 and i want to honor your time and everyone else's and i think we have time for one more question and then um if people want to stay on with those of us from real we can stick around for a little bit susan if you need to run that's okay um so i think y'all or abby has one more question i can ask you um someone mentioned this and you uh brought it up as well um about 504 and iep accommodations that you've seen people ask for related to writing yes uh what else do you recommend other than reducing the amount of writing are there others you've seen.

1:22:22

Uh well i i think that i would make sure that on an iep or 504 plan i i would say i would separate um when we're developing writing skills this is what i would like and when the child is being asked to explain understand something in a content area they are to be given a choice but what it's about then if they're learning they need to write whatever they're writing then we want to make sure that perhaps it's the length can be reduced or they put instead of producing 10 pieces of writing that they could take one piece of writing and perfected over time so it's a beautiful piece when they're finished well every kid would be lucky if you were their teacher i'm lucky that you are are my teacher so thank you for for teaching and for being here with us tonight i know a lot of you are here because you thought there was going to be a magic way to get your kid to write you know and it's about motivation it's about getting them to love telling you what they know and it and and communicating think communication and think of all the ways you communicate if you know even if there was a family newsletter electronic news that are a magazine and they were the editors who went around the whole family those little articles are easier you know and they could be setting it up and you know there's so many ways that we can you that could be excited about it they would be more willing to do the harder work good luck well i feel like we all need to like take our cells off of mute and clap and thank you so much thank you so much the chat has had just comment after comment about how useful this was and how much people plan to send this out to all their teachers and their schools so and i am going to stop the recording now okay