Lindamood-Bell: Success for Students with Learning Difficulties
By Liza Young
Lindamood-Bell Learning
Processes provides a haven of learning for students, from pre-K to adult age,
with mild to severe learning disabilities, across the spectrum of Attention
Deficit Disorder (ADD), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),
dyslexia, and autism spectrum disorder.
Education Update recently visited the New York base of Lindamood-Bell, located
in a welcoming town house on the Upper East Side, decorated to evoke the
comforts of home, where we watched the trademark one-to-one instruction with
students of varying ages and learning difficulties engaging in tasks ranging
from decoding to comprehension.
The high success rate of Lindamood-Bell —with typical
jumps in grade level in 6-8 weeks—is based on a foundation of
comprehensive research in learning, dating back thirty years.
In a demonstration of the techniques used with students,
Jennifer Egan, Director of the Lindamood-Bell Center, provided an enlightening
view of two case studies of children with learning difficulties, and the
resources and tools used to overcome them.
Student “Lance” is behind
grade level in spelling and fluency in reading, based on difficulty in
visualization of letters in words, slowing down phonetic processing and
limiting spelling ability. Lindamood-Bell employs the “Seeing Stars” program
for students such as Lance, which uses a unique sensory-cognitive approach,
combining imagery and language, to achieve phonemic fluency and improvement in
spelling skills, moving from individual letters to multiple syllables, and then
to the context of reading as well as spelling. An additional tool is the Lindamood-Bell
Phoneme Sequencing program (LiPS) to increase phonemic awareness through
highlighting actions of the mouth involved in producing sounds of words.
In the case of student “Michele,” who is hyperlexic—above
grade average in spelling, and phonemic awareness, but with difficulty in
reading and oral comprehension— the tools used by Lindamood-Bell help
Michele to move from getting only parts of what she reads and hears, to getting
a “gestalt,” the whole picture. A program of visualizing and verbalizing,
focusing on concept imagery is used to help Michele “make movies in her mind’s
eye.”
The overriding philosophy at Lindamood-Bell is geared towards
independent learning; students are not simply given answers to problems during
learning, but are guided towards finding answers through a questioning process
geared towards self-correction.
The Lindamood-Bell learning process begins for all students with
a full diagnostic evaluation, pinpointing a student’s strengths and weaknesses.
Regular and intensive instruction is available, with regular instruction
occurring an hour each day over the course of between 4-6 months, while
intensive instruction includes four hours a day of learning over 6-8 weeks,
encompassing 120-140 hours. Group instruction is additionally available, with a
maximum of five students per group.#
For more
information visit www.lblp.com.
