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Brainy Moms
Brainy Moms is a parenting podcast with smart ideas to help moms and kids thrive! Hosted by cognitive psychologist Dr. Amy Moore along with rotating co-hosts Sandy Zamalis, Teri Miller, and Dr. Jody Jedlicka, this weekly show features conversations and guest experts in parenting, psychology, child development, education, and medicine with practical tips to help moms navigate the ups and downs of parenthood. We're smart moms helping make moms smarter...one episode at a time!
Brainy Moms
The Brain Science of Reading (Part 2): Why Cognitive Skills Matter More Than Curriculum | Donesa Walker
America faces a reading crisis that's worsening despite decades of curriculum changes and interventions. In this eye-opening continuation of our Brainy Moms series on reading, Dr. Amy and Sandy interview reading and dyslexia specialist Donesa Walker. We explore why reading scores keep declining nationwide and what parents can do about it.
Louisiana's dramatic rise from near-bottom to 16th in national reading rankings offers valuable insights. Their success came through mandatory science of reading training for all teachers, high-dose tutoring for struggling students, and crucially, empowering parents with educational choices. Yet even this success story highlights a fundamental truth: schools cannot bear sole responsibility for reading achievement.
The discussion takes a fascinating turn when we examine the cognitive foundations of reading. Processing speed, working memory, attention, and other brain skills form the bedrock upon which reading abilities are built. Without these foundations, reading interventions become like "laying asphalt over potholes" – temporarily effective but ultimately failing to create lasting change.
Donesa explains why traditional reading interventions often show disappointing results in research studies – they simply don't address the underlying cognitive weaknesses. Meanwhile, a program called ReadRx combine cognitive training with reading instruction and has demonstrated dramatic improvements, with studies showing 4-5 year gains in just 24 weeks.
We also explore how background knowledge shapes reading comprehension. When children lack rich experiences that build vocabulary and background knowledge, reading becomes an empty exercise. This explains why the number of books in a home directly correlates with reading test results, and why programs providing free books to children make such a difference.
The conversation concludes with a paradigm-shifting perspective: every parent is essentially a homeschool parent, simply choosing where and by whom curriculum is delivered. This perspective empowers families to take control of their children's reading journey, filling curriculum gaps and providing the experiences and cognitive development necessary for reading success.
Join us to discover practical strategies for developing your child's reading skills beyond the classroom, and learn why brain health deserves the same attention as physical health in today's educational landscape.
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Hi, smart moms and dads, we're so excited for you to come back and join us for part two of our Brainy Moms series, with reading and dyslexia specialist Donesa Walker. If you tuned in to our prior episode, we talked about the latest Nation's Report Card results in reading, what's happening there, what are the potential reasons for this continued decline in reading performance across America? And we ended that episode by drawing the conclusion that we cannot expect schools to have the sole responsibility for reading performance and instruction even because of the importance of prior knowledge to reading fluency and comprehension. And we need to dig in a little bit further on that idea, because if we can't expect schools to be solely responsible for reading instruction and performance, then who can we lean on? And so that's what we're going to talk about in part two of this episode. Welcome, Donesa. We're so excited that you're spending so much time with us on this really critical topic.
Donesa Walker:Thank you for having me.
Sandy Zamalis:Donesa. So Education Week just had an article recently that was talking about the NAEP scores and it highlighted Louisiana, which is your state, and it talked about the massive gains that your state was able to make. In the same time period that we've been talking about they, I believe they went from correct me if I'm wrong almost dead last in reading yeah To being in the top 16th. You're right 16th now after being in the bottom.
Sandy Zamalis:Yeah, I was going to say top 20. Yeah, but that's a significant move from where you guys started. Can you share with our listeners, because we want to talk about positive ways we can address this issue? What is the state doing that has made such an impact?
Donesa Walker:Well, I think that we've turned the ship here very quickly in the science of reading.
Donesa Walker:So that was one of the things that made.
Donesa Walker:A big difference is that every teacher was mandated to go through the science of reading course and learned the principles behind, no matter what grade you taught, and that was a requirement.
Donesa Walker:So, again leading back into that, teachers that you know were science teachers and maybe they were accountants and went back to school to be a math teacher. They didn't know anything about reading, but now they do. So they started understanding the principles behind reading and helping children understand that reading actually is a process that begins in the brain and that you do have to have these core skills, and also in understanding that there is a significant amount of building process that has to happen in vocabularies, and helping them to understand and build that knowledge that I'm going to call it's weaved together maybe is the best, best way. So when you start with a process that you have to build and you have to constantly weave and move up and weave and move up, and so you have to go back and pull through, go back and pull through, like with your crochet and a quilt, you have to go back and pull through the prior knowledge and to the new knowledge, and so building that background and relating to that was a key part of that. Guidebooks has been part of that process.
Sandy Zamalis:What are guidebooks for our listeners, who maybe don't know what that is.
Donesa Walker:So basically giving an overview, direction and putting it process. I'm going to say it's a direction scoping sequence maybe is the easiest way for them to get it. A scoping sequence that helps them have the fullness. Basically, that's what we've talked about. You've chosen one curriculum, then you choose another curriculum and then you go to another curriculum. There's loss of content and knowledge, there's big holes and we our state is a very mobile state and people are moving in and out a lot for different reasons. So getting that knowledge where there's a consistency across the whole state and that you can pick where the child is and what the lack of knowledge is by doing an attainment of where they are, so when they come in you actually find out exactly what knowledge that they know and what basis that they know and where the potholes are, and I think that's been a big key. I think it's a really big key to making big changes, understanding where the pothole is and helping them to pull forward.
Sandy Zamalis:So what I'm hearing you say is they assessed right. They assessed kids from that K through five and probably even beyond, and then they really looked at statewide measures of consistency to try to build.
Donesa Walker:And there's a constant assessment process. That's an ongoing, constant process that they're doing. So they integrated this what they call high dose tutoring so that every child who is at a low level had to receive high dose tutoring every day, no more than four to one, and it had to be by a highly qualified teacher. And when they did not have the ability to do that, they pulled in outside resources SES providers such as myself and we were able to go into the classrooms and deliver that high dose for them to be able to receive that. So they had specialists who were on board and when the district didn't have the right appropriate people it's still a work in progress. It's still very much a work in progress.
Donesa Walker:In my area, you know there's a lot of motility. Still that happens. There's a lot of people who are still homeschooling. There's a very groundswell group of people who are realizing homeschooling. There's a very groundswell group of people who are realizing that they need to take authority for their own children's knowledge and schooling, and so there's in my city there's 45 private schools, so that's an enormous amount of people who are making alternative choices, and so that's why the state has moved into this philosophy that it is the parent's choice of how the education is going to be driven and so what school you choose.
Donesa Walker:If your school was a school that was an F school and it wasn't making growth, then you could actually move your child to a different school and it was approved. We have magnet programs where you actually test into a certain school that specializes in science and math or in arts, and so you can actually move your child to a school that is going to feed into their process. And then we actually have also introduced some other schools that cater to special disabilities, such as the Louisiana Key Academy, which specializes in dyslexia, and we have one of those in down South and now we have two more, so we have three of those across the state.
Sandy Zamalis:So I imagine, yeah, so I imagine the state really had to look at with that scholarship that you were just talking about. They had to take into account the socioeconomic factors here, so families that could afford to pull their kids out and put them into private schools that left kids left in school that maybe had some socioeconomic hindrances that would keep them from moving. So they really had to key in on how are they going to help all kids build skill so that it wasn't going to be affected if large portions of kids can move out of the system.
Donesa Walker:Correct.
Donesa Walker:The embracing and the knowledge of that I think made a big difference to your scores.
Donesa Walker:You're going to have a lot more when you're looking at it as like we need to get to what the cause is and then we need to start addressing that root cause.
Donesa Walker:We need to be very realistic about this is where the child is struggling and we need to meet them where they are and move them forward from where they are, and I think that is a key to the school process, and I think that the state as a whole has really pressed that issue that the parent needs to make the choices, and that's why our website is called Louisiana Believes that's our educational website, believes that's our educational website and it's got a plethora of information on it, including all the tutoring guides and building the UFILI guides that you can go to where the parent can actually work on these things at home, that they can access those things at home. And that's hard in a world that's gone very technological, when there's not workbooks going home and there's not textbooks going home and math is done differently than it used to be done, and so there's a lot of changes that are still needing to happen, but that is definitely what has moved our state forward?
Sandy Zamalis:I love that.
Sandy Zamalis:Oh sorry, go ahead, that's okay, I was just going to say I love that there's been a shift in we're not assuming anymore that all kids have what they need. I think if there's any, I think highlight for me it's that this myth of neurotypical and that we've all got the same background, knowledge and the same information and so we should be expected to thrive in these situations. That myth has been debunked now, and now we're going to really try to assess, figure out where gaps are and try to really meet kids where they're at. I think probably it's been the biggest win of all of this, even though it's hard to see with all of the data coming out.
Dr. Amy Moore:Yeah. So I want to point out, while I think this is absolutely cause for celebrating for the state of Louisiana, for a state who has really struggled for decades to move the needle on reading absolutely let's celebrate it but I also want to point out that Louisiana is not above the national average. Louisiana is 16th, so still right there in the problematic national issue. So you've made improvements from coming up from the bottom as a state right, but you're still in the struggle. You're still right in the middle of the struggle that america is having with reading right, and so you're going to hit a ceiling. You're going to, you're going to get to a place where you can still only do so much right as an education right If we look at it, the realistic.
Donesa Walker:Here's my miniature soapbox, because my soapbox is about dyslexia. A lot we have. 1% of our kids in our state are diagnosed with dyslexia. The national average is 20. Okay, Hello, what's going on with this other 19%? I'll tell you what's going on. We also have a huge amount of our kids that are diagnosed with ADHD and on medicine.
Donesa Walker:With changes that are happening, a lot of these kids are not getting the process. So it is going to catch us if we don't start addressing it. It will catch us just like we looked at those scores and said Louisiana made good gains, but we made good gains, but we made good gains in one area. Look at our eighth grade scores. Just this is the whole thing is that it wasn't just, it was in an area and, yes, we made intervention and we made some changes and we put some things in place, but there are some massive things that are going to catch us if we don't start addressing that and saying, okay, we have to take authority and make moves and decisions that are going to be about every brain, not about a cookie cutter approach that has never worked and never will work. Okay, and if we go back historically, honestly, truthfully, schools were put together out of convenience, right, it was, the parent was responsible for the child. And then it was like, ok, let's group together and let's create this micro classroom and one teacher is going to teach it and one parent, and then we are going to hire a teacher. And then it became, through history, the process of what we have in our public school systems and became more systemic and the more systemic that it became the process of what we have in our public school systems and became more systemic and the more systemic that it became, the more loss of the child. And so I think we have to look back at what was working, and that's why we see a lot of parents who have moved to like classical delivery models for homeschooling is because they see the value in the foundational approach. And so I think that we have to look as a society and say, okay, where are we headed as a society and where do we want to go in order to stay competitive and educationally attain the direction that we want to go.
Donesa Walker:When I, my kids were in public school, when I was a public school teacher, and then, when my kids moved, when I started learning Rx, my children were in second grade and fourth grade and at that point in time I was like I now have the opportunity as a business owner that I can actually homeschool my own children, and so I chose to pull them out of the public system because that was where their curriculum had been delivered before, and now I chose to homeschool them so that I could give them the best. My two children were raised in the same home and they had the same parents and they had the same upbringing and they had very different schemas that were built, their schematis because of how they approached things, very different in their brains. Okay, john was an avid reader. Gabriel did not love reading. Gabriel struggled with some dyslexic tendencies, he had ADHD, he had a little bit of a temper, but he was a much quicker on his feet thinking process.
Donesa Walker:I had to look at education very different for them. I had to choose actually different curriculum, surprisingly for them, because one curriculum didn't fit them for everything Right, and so even one approach, even the way that we approach things, was very different. So I think that's where we have to really get. I'm not saying that every child has to homeschool. I'm saying that we need to get not so stuck on a one size fits all for every child and we need to start looking at it as an individualized process for every child. Not only the child who needs a 504 needs to be on an IAP, not the child who needs intensive intervention and needs to be on an IAP, not the child who needs intensive intervention and needs an IEP. I think we're going to have to start looking and say everyone needs an individualized plan and that is a broad approach to thinking and as a former teacher, I think, oh my God.
Sandy Zamalis:I know I was thinking all the teachers listening to this. I just went. What would that look like?
Donesa Walker:in my classroom. What would that look like and how would that look? But it's more of kind of that Montessori look of. These are the skills that you need to learn, but you need to go through the process of learning them differently than everybody and it is challenging. It is challenging from the school perspective.
Donesa Walker:But I think if we as a society embraced it and said, okay, the parent has to know what is being delivered at that school, what is being delivered and what is the lack, and then make up the difference for that lack. Okay. So if this curriculum has this lack, then I need to be doing this. That's what I did as a homeschool parent was, when that lack was there, I had to make up the difference or change curriculum or choose the whole thing. So we have to get our mindset where every parent understands is you are a homeschool parent, every single parent is a homeschool parent. You're just choosing for your child's curriculum to be delivered in a different location by a different authority and you are still responsible for what does that curriculum look like?
Donesa Walker:Okay, so if you're choosing that school, that location, that you need to know where the strengths and weaknesses of that curriculum are, because the realistic thing to know is that some of this curriculum is either above or below my child's head and what they need to know in their knowledge base and I'll drop back to Louisiana again. I have some phenomenal things that blow my mind. Oh, my word, these third graders are studying the American revolution and they have this vocabulary that's this huge and they have to spell that. It does not follow any patterns. It's challenging for them, right? And so you see a lot of struggle through that. And I remember having this conversation with my daughter-in-law and she's it's just so above their heads and I said you just have to teach them to think, erase what they know and say let's embrace it, instead of like this, don't say every child has to know this, instead say what do you know? That's your ground, and then you start building from what you do know to where you need to know.
Dr. Amy Moore:Yeah, All right, so I have a couple of questions. Okay, so if we look at the breakdown on the nation's report card, if we look at the graph, we can see that strong readers typically stay strong readers, and we can surmise that it's because, hey, I'm a good reader, therefore I'm motivated to continue reading, because when I read I learn more, or it brings me pleasure, right. And then poor readers continue to decline. And we could say this is the Matthew effect. Right, it's that strong readers get stronger, poor readers get poorer. It's a phenomenon that we can see across the board in different types of skill sets, based on motivation or attention or whatever contributes to that effect.
Dr. Amy Moore:And we also know that some kids are going to learn to read more easily than others, than others, and that we would guess that those kids in that top 10% just had this more natural inclination and it was in that visual word form area in the brain developed more easily for them. So what is happening in the lower half of this graph? What is happening in weaker readers that has made it more difficult for them to learn to read? What is happening in their brains? What do we need to do about it? Let's talk about how can we stop that Matthew effect in these poor readers Because in the absence of an intervention they are going to continue to decline. Correct.
Donesa Walker:And it goes back to making sure that they have experiential knowledge. I think one of the biggest factors and not just COVID, but in finances and in budgets is that we removed some of the experiences going on field trips and having experiences and understanding this. And I'll just give you a prime example. I have a young man who has astounded me. He is 19 years old. He went to and his story is going to be something that's going to probably blow up the world because he's such a precious and sweet young man but he never went to school. He absolutely lived off the streets, never. Ever. Even his mother birthed him at home. He never.
Donesa Walker:He just lived off the streets and a local businessman brought him to me and said this child has never been to school at all, has no knowledge of reading, math et cetera, nothing. What can you do? And I said give me a year. So now this young man, a year later, is reading and doing math and writing and it's phenomenal to watch how his life changed, and so I can see so much for him in that process. But as we're sitting there reading and we are reading a story in his life, we're reading a story and it was about mowing the weeds and he falls out laughing and he was like, yeah, I know what he's doing.
Donesa Walker:And I was like, yeah, his concept of mowing the weeds and my concept of mowing the weeds were nowhere the same. Okay, and so it was a whole different mindset, right? Just the word weed was not the same at all. As you can imagine, this is what we see in a lot of the lowest quartile kiddos. Okay, is that their experiential knowledge is so incredibly weak. And if we keep removing art, music, experiential things that stimulate the brain, like field trips and like those types of things, because of we need to spend more time reading. It's a key component to reading. That is a key component. If you never experienced an escalator, you're never going to know what it is, right. Somebody can say moving stairs all day long and you have no idea. If you never experienced the move of me on the screen, you have no idea what I'm talking about. Right, sorry, did that on purpose, didn't mean to make you sick, but the purpose of it is understanding. Experience is the greatest teacher, it's the greatest teacher, and so if you don't experience it, you don't really know it. You know it, but you don't really know it, and I think that's the key finding that I have is like how can we get more experience to this lowest quartile of children? I love the Imagination Library Dolly Parton does, where she sends books to kids when they're from birth. You all familiar with Imagination Library. Oh my gosh, it's so amazing. Basically, dolly Parton has this program that a child can start getting a book. You can register when they're born and they get a book shipped to them like every month for the rest of their life. It's really cool. But the different areas have to support it, the different towns and cities have to support it. But it's really a cool project because it puts books ownership into the hands of children and that's an incredible thing. Is that ownership?
Donesa Walker:And as a child who I was a preacher's kid, we were not wealthy I love Ruby Payne's Children of Poverty because I relate to a lot of that, because that was my lifestyle when I was young. That was the thing of being dependent. I was a kid who was on free lunch. I was a kid who had those types of things and I know I mentioned that my siblings went to private school, but it's only because my dad was a pastor and somebody was willing to help my siblings go there. We were not wealthy, we were free lunch kids, and so I think that the reality is that many times we make assumptions about kiddos and their wealth of knowledge, or their lack thereof, just because of the way that they look or the way that they dress or the background that they have, and we miss out on building that experience of kids, that in our area we have a ton of homeless children, a ton that live out of their car, live out of a hotel, and they don't have the experience.
Donesa Walker:We have to have a whole group of people that manage just our homeless children, and I think that many people don't realize that. They don't realize that depth or lack. We have a lot of children in foster care that are not getting a lot of it, and these are our kids in our public schools and they need extra. They need extra to be given to them extra experiences. Next, because those are going to feed. That's going to be our future, that's going to be our test scores on our NAP in a few years, right, and if we're not giving them the experiential knowledge, and even if we have the science of reading or teaching them how to read a word, but we give them no meaning to that word. We place them in front of a TV and they are getting image after image put on their brain and then they never learned to create imagery for themselves. That's incredibly building a deficit that we don't even realize. That will affect them.
Donesa Walker:My passion, if I had unlimited funds and that, would be to get every single child a cognitive assessment and know where their starting place was.
Donesa Walker:Because I think that should be the thing that should be done for every single child every single year of their life, because if you did that then you would actually know where the gaps were and you could start closing gaps and you could start making significant difference in their educational attainment long-term. And that's why I'm a Learning Marks franchisee, because I'm passionate about that. I love the whole learning process and the reading process and I've trained in all kinds of methodology Orton-Gillingham. There's a whole bunch of different Orton-Gillinghams. That Orton-Gillingham is a methodology but there's a whole different all kinds of programs that I trained in that were based on that methodology. It's good methodology for SOAR science of reading and based on that, and so I do see validity and that's what we're looking at. But if our memory is poor, if our processing is poor. If we're struggling in all of these other areas and we never address those issues, then all we're doing is throwing jello at a tree and hoping it sticks. It's not going to work long time.
Dr. Amy Moore:All right, let's talk about that. That's a bold statement to say that you could give a cognitive assessment to every child every year. Then we could really move the needle on the reading challenges. So how did these cognitive skill deficits impact reading? Talk us through that, because I bet a lot of our listeners don't understand that connection.
Donesa Walker:So one of the biggest areas that everybody understands and gets is attention. Okay, so really, the reality is, everybody says, oh, everybody's ADD. The reality is, executive processing is one of the key underpinning skills for everything that we do in the learning process, and that includes your ability to have good working memory, which means you can multitask, you can task, switch back and forth, you can pull that information from what you're learning and linking it to the information that you already have. That is a key skill that affects so many different things, and it affects it is the weak skill in so many different disabilities and neurodivergent changes, from autism to dyslexia to ADHD. So many people. It's because of the working memory, and so we see a lot of programs and I'm going to talk about online programs a lot of digitized that say we changed the working memory.
Donesa Walker:Working memory is only one key to that. The biggest issue that I see a lot with my kiddos and even adults, it's the processing speed. Processing speed is a key piece to that too, and it's one of the hardest things to move, probably. A famous saying is he walks to the beat of his own drummer. So we talk about processing speed being slow, but processing speed affects a lot of things. It affects the speed of traffic. So what I like to people is, if you think of it as you can have a race car brain and on the racetrack when you're thinking about you know great thoughts and creative thoughts and all these kinds of things, you're zooming around that racetrack, but if you get out on the regular road and you don't change the tread, you just end up in a ditch. Okay. So you have to change the tread or have that, what I call cognitive flexibility to be able to move in between settings of what you're doing. And that's one of the biggest skills that we ignore. Is that cognitive flexibility that's affected by your executive processing. Okay, and so if you can get through that and then you move up that line, so your problem solving, your logic and reasoning, do you have good logic and reasoning?
Donesa Walker:So a lot of kids with neurodiversity struggle with that logic and reasoning or that problem solving. Or in reality, I see a lot of kiddos that mom and dad have solved a lot of problems for them and did not let them sit and have to think through the problem. They didn't have a board box at B-O-R-E-D because that was the thing when my kids said I'm bored and I would say go get something out of the board box and I just dumped stuff in there that was loose in my junk drawer or whatever, and they had to go create. That was the thing is. Just that type of thing is critical for that, and a lot of times we throw technology at that. I'm bored, okay, we'll go play a game, go watch a TV show Okay, instead of actually letting them stir through a problem and figure it out and I think that's really an important skill that we, as parents, often helicopter we want to solve the problem for them instead of making them solve the problem and watching them fail and be able to get up. A baby doesn't learn to walk unless that baby falls and sees that depth perception right, and so if they do, they have troubles, okay, and so this is the thing is that you have to be able to let them experience the fall, and a lot of us are scared for our children to fail, and that's a really important lesson to learn that falling forward is, learning to fall is a really good thing, and learning to pick yourself back up and that's great. So these are all these key things and that problem solving, and then you have your auditory processing and your visual processing and those are key underpinnings, like we've talked about, being able to hear those sounds and know those sounds, and with a ton of kids who had ear infections, they're prevalent. You know, this time of year especially, this is just it affects think about hearing underwater. And so there's different technology now that allows them. There's phonics, phones, there's, you know, different technology that helps children be able to hear through bone conduction and things so that they can learn to hear properly because for so long they haven't heard.
Donesa Walker:And you cannot undervalue the process of just listening. When I grew up, we would sit around and listen to my grandmother tell tales. It was a thing. We sat around and told stories. We've lost a lot of that because of technology, because we were busy. We're too busy to do that, and so a critical piece of that is reading to your kids at night, having that storytelling time, that creative storytelling time, where you say something that they have to do it and you have to say it back.
Donesa Walker:And fortunately and unfortunately, I love that book. I love where you say something and you have to go back and forth and play that game where they have to twist the story, and that's fun. It's a good thing Playing games like 20 questions. Get an empty box, put something in it. Let them ask you 20 questions so they have to think in their mind what in the world? So that thinking process so critical? And taking in those auditory clues and moving that into a thinking process where they have to do that, visualizing it in their head, picturing it as they're hearing the clues and picturing what that could be or not be as a teacher.
Donesa Walker:I remember I had this way of discipline in my classroom. I called it the mystery envelope, and the mystery envelope was index card that I had written something on and I put it in the mystery envelope, okay, and every time the class had good behavior, pure thing. Then they got to ask me one question. Okay, and so I taught middle school a lot. The questions had to be yes or no and I only answered it one time, so if you missed it, okay. And when the class solved it, they got what was ever in the mystery envelope, and so it was highly competitive.
Donesa Walker:It was so interesting to watch the kiddos who would go from one class period to the other class period and they would be walking out the room and say what question did you ask? What question did you ask? And they were like we ain't telling you, we're holding our question, we're not telling you, because they didn't want to give that clue to that next class and that next class be able to solve it in advance. And so it was so funny because this is pre-google, this is. This is not what they can go and see, and it was not something I would have posted, but it's the fun thing. It's like AI can't solve that for you. It can't, nothing can solve it for you. But you thinking and you trying to figure it out and maybe get with your classmates and think what they're thinking and figure it out problem, solve it to get to that answer. And that's a key. That's a key thing of visualization and creating it. And then so any teachers or parents, the mystery envelope's huge. It works. It works really well. That's one one thing that creates their mindset and their processing and works on those skills. And all of that goes into the schema. All of that that goes into that filing cabinet of long-term memory and then linking it and pulling it back and the more.
Donesa Walker:When I was teaching, one of the things that was a key thing was learning styles, and I know that a lot of that has been debunked a little bit, but the reality is there are some value systems to the learning styles it is important to give kids, but if you teach them to only learn in one learning style and not to learn when it's uncomfortable, then you are basically creating a deficit for them. And I think of it in the terms of I had surgery on my right arm and I'm right-handed. I'm right-handed because my third grade teacher takes my right hand I mean my left hand to my desk. I was left-handed until third grade. Wow, and my whole third grade year my teacher would duct tape my hand because the prevalent thought at that time was left-handedness caused learning disabilities, and so she wanted me to be better, and so that was what she was going to do. Now people go to jail for that, but it was a little abusive.
Donesa Walker:It's a little abusive, right, but I did become a premier speller because of it.
Sandy Zamalis:I'm just saying it required you to really hone in your brain skills, because you were not writing with your dominant hand.
Donesa Walker:There was things that came from it. I'm not gonna bash her for everything, but yeah, like brushing your teeth with your non-prime example of cognitive flexibility it's a prime example of cognitive flexibility.
Donesa Walker:So I go back here I am as an adult and having surgery on my right arm, and everybody is. I told my doctor, I said I just need six weeks and then we're going to do the surgery and I'll be fine. And he was like how you're not gonna be able to write for for probably three months? And I was like, oh yeah, I will just do it with my left hand. And he was like I just looked this way, you're crazy. Okay, then that's because then I just went back and so that's the whole thing is, I find myself I'll just change hands midstream. One hand start, I'll just change to the other and I'll just midstream do that. And that's part of that process, as you just retrained.
Donesa Walker:Okay, we know that's possible. We know retraining the brain is possible for strengths. We know it's possible for so many other things like the handwriting and things like that. We just have to embrace that's possible to learn in a different manner. So, instead of saying I'm just a visual learner and saying I need everything to be presented and I need you to give me accommodations because I don't know how to learn in another methodology, why not train it? Why not become the learner, where you can learn in any method, in any way.
Donesa Walker:And I was an adult before I. Honestly, actually, the first time I went to a learning or X to be trained as a franchisee, hilariously enough, I cried balls like boohoo, but baby cried in front of everybody because I was not a good visual processor. I had good imagination and love to read, but it impacted my math OK, so I was not picturing things in my math. So I remember going and doing the training as an adult and the experience of what happened to me as an adult and thinking, oh my gosh, but it changed things in my life that I had just taken, that were always going to be weaknesses. I told you my husband was a game board. You could drop him off in Timbuktu and he'd find his way out in no time because he has a great sense of direction. And again, if you had dropped me in those same woods, I'd just sit down by a tree and cry because I had no sense of direction at all. I remember people who went to the franchise training with me who would laugh at me because I had no sense of direction. You know the elevator and all that direction to go to my hotel room. It's the whole thing that changed for me, and it changed for me because I trained that process. So, as I boohooed and cried through attention compute, going through doing this drill, it changed the way my brain processed information, and that's so crazy when you see that, as an adult, I remember in 2018, going and sitting in a.
Donesa Walker:I was in the hospital, uh, for eight months and I had eight surgeries and it was crazy and I lost a lot of memory and I owned this business at that time and I had that pre-test. So, going back to that cognitive test, I'm looking back, amy, I know so I'm just going back there, but I had that cognitive baseline, right. So after my surgeries and everything, I knew that I was foggy, right. I did that baseline. I was like, oh my God, I really lost a lot. So I did brain training for myself to get my skills back. It's incredible to get yourself back. There is nothing quite like it of being able to go from a weakness into a strength and being able to gain that back, and so I'm completely a believer personally, having experienced it as a parent, having experienced it and just the whole.
Donesa Walker:We know the science supports it and we see that it's not a learning arts thing. The science says your brain can be retrained. So we know that's there and that's possible. It's just us as parents, as a society, as a group of people, wrapping our brain around. This is our responsibility. Our brain health is our responsibility, just like any other health checkup. It is so important. Okay, if we're going to go to the doctor for a yearly checkup and he says you're pre-diabetic and you need to change your diet and you need to get these things going on, we should be doing the same thing for our brain. We need to be going because your brain's brain is your gut and if you're being affected by other things, then you are actually being affected in your brain. So think about the processes and say, okay, I need to take ownership of this. Whether my child is four or my child is 15 or my brain my own 50 year old brain needs to be fit. Okay, it's incredibly beneficial long-term for you, no matter what your age is, and it's going to impact us as a society.
Donesa Walker:Because, if we look at Dr Sandra Chapman has coined that term brainomics. I'm not sure if you guys are super familiar with her, but I love some of her research and stuff. Yeah yeah, it's just phenomenal If we start looking at it and many parents and people don't realize that your IQ points they're actually have a value. One IQ point is equivalent to $20,000 now on the NASDAQ. It's actually a traded commodity. Look it up. You blow your mind. Okay, that is actually a commodity that you can look up to see how much an IQ point is worth. That's crazy to think about that. But you can change your brain. You can change your potential. It's basically earnings potential over a lifetime, but still it is. It's enormous. So if we talk about the lowest quartile, how do we make a difference? We have to give them the potential.
Dr. Amy Moore:So I have one last question as we wrap up. So you mentioned Orton-Gillingham based programs and how they are based in the science of reading and as a reading specialist, as a dyslexia specialist, I would like you to speak to this. So we know that there was a meta-analysis a couple of years ago on Gillingham based programs that showed overall they were not contributing to statistically significant changes in reading frequency, and on the research on ReadRx. The LearningRx Reading Intervention Program shows, or has shown, anywhere from 4.1 years to 5.8 year gains in 24 weeks, statistically significant changes across all of those different reading skills and all of the cognitive skills tested for thousands and thousands of research participants. What do you think the difference is? Why has ReadRx shown statistically significant changes and Orton-Gillingham based programs in that meta-analysis did not?
Donesa Walker:Because it's the foundational approach. Okay, so note, this is the whole reason why I opened a LearningRx franchise. Okay, so go back and look, I had delivered Orton-Gillingham and I saw two steps forward, one step back, constantly for 20 plus years. Okay, and that was my biggest frustration is we're not moving the needle. Why are we not moving the needle with these kids? And it's because foundationally, the weaknesses are there of processing speed and memory and problem solving, and that executive function and all of the core cognitive skills were not being changed. The Orton-Gillingham methodology actually does change two areas auditory processing, which is good, okay, and it can change the auditory processing. But if the memory is poor, then you can't measure that change in auditory processing because it's two steps forward, one step back, right. So even though the child may learn the sounds, you spend two years trying to learn the sounds and trying to link those sounds and then you may not get the full measure of what that child potentially could do if you had addressed the memory weakness, the processing weakness.
Donesa Walker:And we know, like, with dyslexics and children who struggle with reading, dld and you know all these different diagnoses that have to do with the reading deficits, it's they have these developmental language issues. That's what dyslexia means. Dyslexia means broken language, and the majority of the people who go to interventions and reading like this are doing this because there is a deficit in the learning process, there is a weakness in the reading process okay, and so if you never address the underlying, it's like trying to lay asphalt over big old potholes in your road. So it may look like it's working for a while, but drive on it for a minute and it's going to break the asphalt right back up. In a year or so from now it's going to look exactly like it did before. And that's the reason why you're not getting significant, statistically significant change is because you're never addressing the underlying base. You're not really digging down to that bedrock and getting where the weaknesses are and addressing it from that foundational purpose.
Donesa Walker:And I think that that's the whole reason why I actually exited the public school system and opened a learning rec center was for that very reason, because I could not move the needle significantly for those kiddos and we needed that in Louisiana. We needed a huge win here and that's why I opened it. That's why I've been doing this for 17 years. That's the reason why I'm super passionate about getting into my classrooms and talking to my teachers and telling them we need to look at the foundations here. We need to be using this is how you can apply it in the classroom. When I talk to my parents, I do that and my society and my community that we really need to embrace the foundational issues and quit just saying we're going to settle for this.
Donesa Walker:Even while we're on here, I had someone text me and say I'm looking at a curriculum change. This is a curriculum instructor for our school and I'm looking at an OG methodology, and so my mind is spinning thinking, yeah, we're going to have a top girl. Okay, og has really great methodology. I actually am trained in it and I love it. But you have to get to that root bedrock or you're not going to have good, significant change and it doesn't matter which brands you go with. Okay, and there's a ton. There's like the whole thing is you have to get to that root.
Dr. Amy Moore:So you have to have a strong cognitive skill foundation of working in long-term memory attention, visual processing, auditory processing, speed, logic and reasoning all of those skills that you just walked us through. That seems to be the secret sauce that underlies the ability to read.
Donesa Walker:Yeah, and if you look at the books that are written by the researchers reading in the brain, if you look at those books they tell you, they show you that the brain lights up in different parts of the brain when you. The reality is your brain has to use so many different processes to read. So if you are weak in one of those skills, you are working at a deficit, whether you call it dyslexia or language development or just reading issues, and you think about it. Now we're at two out of five people struggling to read. 85% of people in prison are there because of a reading deficit or a learning deficit. We could change our whole world if we would start looking at the roots. Just is.
Dr. Amy Moore:Love it, Donesa, thank you so much for being with us today sharing your wisdom and your expertise and your passion about reading. This has been just an amazing couple of hours with you. Thank you so much for all the work that you're doing down there in Louisiana and across the entire LearningRx system to help get the word out about why we need strong cognitive skills in order to be strong readers.
Sandy Zamalis:Amy, I want to leave our listeners with something tangible that they can go right now and grab more information on. How can our listeners find out more information about this issue and this topic?
Dr. Amy Moore:Yeah. So for listeners who haven't heard about LearningRx before, LearningRx is the largest network of cognitive training centers in the entire world. We are in 43 countries, so we're LearningRx in the United States and America and we're BrainRx in the rest of the world. And the cool part is you don't have to live near one of our centers in order to take advantage of our interventions. We also provide them over Zoom, and our research shows that it's just as effective that way as well. And so we start with that foundational cognitive training program. It's called ThinkRx. That begins with an assessment so that Donisa was talking about where we can identify which of those skills needs to be strengthened, where those gaps might be she calls those potholes in the road. So that's what those assessments will identify. And then our centers create an individualized program specifically for your child, or even for you, that drills down on those skills that need to be strengthened. And then the reading program is called ReadRx, and it's a 24-week program that covers all of those foundational reading skills that we know are essential, based on the science of reading, and underlying cognitive skill remediation at the exact same time. And then, for kids that are struggling in math, we also have a math remediation at the exact same time and then for kids that are struggling in math, we also have a math remediation program as well, an early childhood program. When we can see that kids, maybe age five, that are already looking like they're struggling, we can get some early intervention in there for them. So, listeners, you can go to learningrxcom that's the national website where you can type in a zip code, find the center closest to you. There's an 800 number, it's 1-866-BRAIN-01. You can call and talk to an actual person. If you'd rather do that, then search the website and then, if you go to the resources tab of the website, we've got free stuff on there.
Dr. Amy Moore:So Dr Ken Gibson, who created this program really, he started creating the program back in the 1980s. It evolved through multiple iterations before it became what we know now as LearningRx. But he wrote a book called Unlock the Einstein Inside and we will give you that book for free, the digital version of that book for free, so you can download that. We have six or seven different cognitive training exercises that you can download and try with yourself, with your kids. Just lots of cool stuff that we give away for free.
Dr. Amy Moore:So that's really where I would suggest that you start. If you wanna see some of those exercises demonstrated, you can find Sandy on TikTok at thebraintrainerlady. She does some cool stuff on there and she talks about our research too. You'll see my name because I am the primary researcher for the LearningRx methodology and you know we've really looked at this with thousands and thousands of research participants and it's such a message of hope that we really can move the needle on reading fluency, decoding, comprehension, as well as moving the needle on attention and memory and processing speed issues all at the same time.
Sandy Zamalis:It's a message of hope. It really is. Yeah, don't give up. It's a message of hope it really is, yeah, don't give up For sure, and I love that.
Dr. Amy Moore:Donesa's message was that we can't rely on the school system to do this for our kids, that even if our kids go to public school, it still falls on us to make sure that we fill in those gaps.
Dr. Amy Moore:And one of the interesting findings in that latest report the nation's report card was that the number of books in the home was directly correlated with the test results. That speaks volumes. No pun intended, right, and so I love that. She mentioned Dolly Parton's program, and I think there are other lending library type programs too, so you don't have to actually buy the books, just check them out from the library or sign up for one of those programs and then really expose your kids to experiences that build their filing cabinet of information. Schema is a mental framework. It's what we know about each thing in the world, right, like what we know about the grass, what we know about the oceans, what we know about communities, like really anything that you can possibly know about, is called a schema or a mental framework. And so the more we build that, the more it contributes to fluency and comprehension in reading and learning too.
Sandy Zamalis:Amen.
Dr. Amy Moore:Yeah, all right listeners, thank you so much for being with us today If you liked our show. We would love it if you would leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts so that we get ranked higher, and getting ranked higher means we can reach more parents like you guys. We'd love it if you would follow us on social media. We @thebrainymoms on Instagram and Facebook. If you'd rather see our faces, you can find us on YouTube at @thebrainymoms. And that is all the smart stuff that we have for you today. We hope you feel a little smarter. We're going to catch you next time.
