Tag: Piece of the Puzzle

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is currently the longest recognized word in English, and if you use root words, it breaks down and self defines. It’s about the pneumonia you get from breathing in tiny glass particles from a volcano. This is a wonderful strategy for not only reading, but for approaching education as a whole.

Educational Psychology is the resulting discipline of understanding assessment results and explaining how we learning. We specialize in putting the pieces together and understanding how a limited working memory may be making longer math problems difficult or how visual-spatial issues makes cause and effect difficult to understand. Being able to know what to do with assessment results is critical. While IEPs find areas of deficit, we take an action based approach. Your child took time to complete those test, so the adults should make time to to put in the same effort to come up with a meaningful plan that creates a purposeful plan for success! We do this by carefully looking at processing abilities and aligning them to academic needs. By piecing the information together, we can work deliberately to achieve results. This is sometimes referred to as educational therapy, but we proudly place it in the forefront of our BRAIN programs.

How is this different from neuro-educational strategies? Well, this is what we actually do! Our research was prompted by a wonderful speech pathologist telling us to teach “transitive verbs first.” (Those are verbs that we use that must have an object). Why is this so important? Well, it requires something observable to be done based upon a student’s thinking. Consider the verb “to carry.” You cannot use it without identifying what to carry. “Carry the bag of groceries” makes sense while “You carry” does not. Other verbs are met with minimal thinking and are typically based in habit, like “eat” and “sit” (these are intransitive verbs, if you were wondering). This led us to the wonderful understanding and appreciation of processed based learning!

Process based learning is as simple as “show me 3×4” rather than “What is 3×4?” The former requires an explanation, with modeling, rather than the rote response as required by the later. Memorizing is hard. That’s not to say we don’t want to build fluency and automaticity, but we don’t learn by memorizing. We learn by trial and error. Which is a process.

We also build instruction through the remediation of specific processing needs, essential to neuro-placidity. Why let a child struggle with their visual perceptual skills when we can improve them through game like activities or with the help of our local Developmental Optometrist? By improving the processing, we can help improve the actual process of learning rather than just continuing to support a deficit. We also have strategies for working memory, language, and more, but we’ll follow up with those later.

We’re a big fan of educational kinesiology, too. Creating movement rather than just sitting and clicking a mouse. (We’re looking at you, Kahn Academy. Your proof of concept was in the pandemic!)

If you’d like to know more about how we can apply these to your child’s learning, please reach out to us today!

You may have heard some rather negative press coverage of independent study charter schools, like the former Inspire Charter School network. Was there mismanagement? Yes, there was. But there were many students and their families that were trying to find a place that worked for them for many different reasons. Slower processing times and other learning differences. Anxiety Disorders. Neurodiversity needs. Twice exceptional students that worked on college level concepts, but need help writing a single word. Students that wanted to move quickly into more interesting topics. It is these reasons why we continue to support alternative public school environments! We’re working hard to overcome the past problems to broaden the options that families have while ensuring accountability. Our advocacy with the charter schools encourages students to participate in State Testing, working to meet state standards, and encouraging students to lead their own learning period conferences. We encourage you to find out more how independent study schools develop more accountability to meeting students needs and expecting progress than some of the more traditional options!

As a vendor for these schools, we sign a vendor contract that stipulates how we will be reimbursed for services we provide. This is part of our total transparency. You’ll see our prices right on our website so there are no surprises. We’re challenging other institutions to do this as well. We’re not out to be competitive with our pricing, but to be accessible to as many students as possible (which does make us competitively priced, especially with private schools!).

Since many of our students are in Special Education, it comes as no surprise that we attend IEP meetings. While we come as a child’s advocate, we know that building relationships is much more than finding wrongs and demanding they be corrected. It’s about building the long term relationship to better the experience over time and trying to empower the school with new ideas to find success not only for our own clients, but the school and community at large.

One of the ending accomplishments of this is to save us money. Yes, us. Special Education settlements can cost school districts hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle. Even more if it results in a residential placement in a school in Utah where we fly the staff and families back in forth. Our local relationship building keeps monies where they should be: servicing students locally with effective supports to make our communities even better! We look to be win-win, For the Future!

We started in Ventura county going directly into clients’ homes providing after school tutoring to any family wishing to gain clarity for themselves or their children. As a former Special Education classroom teacher, it was different being in the other side, not just on the other side of the table. Parents want the best for their children (heads up- schools only provide “educational benefit”) and they don’t always know what it looks like.

The need to provide at home supports quickly outpaced the need to provide academic tutoring only. As we built trust with our clients, we saw that there was a need to provide more supports in the modern world- technology, social media, teenage drama, and everything else we’ve been dealing with! Yes, the academic needs were there, but so too were the other needs that were wearing us down from understanding academics. Out of this came some amazing at home supports to meet the children at their level, foster independence, and return a sense of calm to a home.

As we’ve grown as a business, we’ve become a vendor for several independent study charter schools and have settled down in a physical location in Santa Barbara for classes and tutoring. We’re continuing to build relationships with the schools that were re-established after the fallout of Inspire Charter School to continue to build a solid foundation for supporting independent study programs and individualized education. This includes ensuring access rigorous academics, accountability, and transparency. We know that public schools cannot be a fit for 100% of the population, including those students receiving special education services. To truly create a modern educational system, we must look to the whole community to support public education, ensure our public monies are well spent, and support alternatives where existing options are not meeting current needs.

Where are we looking to grow next? Well, technically everywhere with an internet connection. Many of our classes are now joined remotely with students in office and virtual, with the same high expectations we have in person. We’re now providing staffing at Private Schools in Santa Barbara. Future consideration includes parent support groups, working with Santa Barbara and Ventura County SELPAS for paraprofessional training and / or staffing, and developing supports for students transitioning into Santa Barbara City College. If you think we’re a good fit for changing how education is managed in your institution, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us!

Welcome to our New Blog!

We’re excited to share what’s going on with the community! Sometimes we get so caught up in working with our students that we forget to reach out to share with others what we’re up to!

We’ll be sharing a little piece of what’s going on so you can get information on what we’re helping our students with! While we would love for you to come work with us, we believe that knowledge is power and is worth sharing!

As we find interesting and exciting ideas for all students, we’ll be posting them here one piece at a time.

You may be thinking to yourself, “Why are they still using the puzzle piece as their logo and theme?” There has been some advocacy against using the puzzle piece as a symbol for the diverseness community since one organization does not seem to represent the larger group. The part to the whole relationship is what makes the puzzle piece theme so intriguing. The whole is its own entity comprised of its individual parts. Each piece should be understood and its interconnections studied so we can appreciate the whole even more. We hope this blog shows you how this essential skill of seeing the whole and its parts together and separately is such an essential skill throughout life.

We welcome conversation! Let’s move everyone together, For the Future!