Dr. Wendy H. Weiner
www.conservatoryprep.org

Students at Conservatory Prep Senior High spent time learning about the diplomatic work of Madeleine Albright and her use of pins to further her messages. After reading her book,

Read My Pins

, students actually were given the opportunity to create their own pins conveying messages they thought should be shared.

Madeleine Albright served as the United States Secretary of State and was the first female to do so. Students learned about her career and travels; and her habit of wearing pins during meetings which subtly conveyed a message of what she felt needed to be said. For example, Conservatory Prep English students read about the pin given to Madeleine Albright as a gift from the widow of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was slain because of his support for peace. She wore this dove pin while speaking about Middle East peace negotiations to convey the need for ending violence and to encourage reconciliation between historic rivals in Israel.

Students were then given the chance to create their own pins using a special technique creating a plastic mold of their design. Autumn Osler created an especially poignant pin design of two hands, one in the design of the U.S. flag and one in the design of the Japanese flag, holding hands showing support for the recent Tsunami victims. Students thought the exercise and way of showing non-verbal peaceful opinions was an “interesting and useful way of communicating thoughts and ideas.”

For more information contact Wendy Weiner, info@conservatoryprep.org, or visit www.conservatoryprep.org.

Conservatory Prep Senior High was developed for the right brain learner in grades 8 – 12. The school specializes in meeting the needs of bright, creative individuals who perform best in an arts-integrated, multi-sensory environment, where active learning takes place.

The SACS (Souhern Association of Colleges and Schools) accredited, Conservatory Prep Senior High, is now enrolling for its 6th year for fall 2011. The school is located inside the David Posnack J.C.C in Davie, located on the corner of Stirling and Pine Island Roads.

For more information and to schedule a personal tour, contact Dr. Wendy H. Weiner at (954) 680-5808 or through the website www.conservatoryprep.org

So, at Conservatory Prep Senior High we do not administer exams. The students actually do much more. This week at school we have our ‘final presentations week’. In each class, the students reviewed the topics they had learned over the year and then the topics were divided amongst the students. The assignment is to write a paper (complete with bibliography) on their assigned topic and then teach their topic using visuals and a hands-on activity to the rest of the class. One student has chosen to make a film presentation, another created a short play and still another is working on a video game. Throughout the preparation week, the students helped one another, which only reinforced what was learned throughout the year. And what do we expect to happen during final presentation week? We expect the students to learn from one another. We expect the students to show mastery by being able to teach and explain. Most of all, we expect them to be better prepared for the real world.

by Wendy Hirsch Weiner, Ed.D.

The results after 3 months have been astounding. Students come to class every day and are eager to learn. Two students formed a book club, another started volunteering for a local politician (since he has a love for politics), a few others took up significant leadership roles in their out of school clubs and organization and still other students increased their community service hours. Several of our teachers remarked that when a subject was of great interest to a student, the student often asked for additional reading material, a contest to join or other ways to expand their knowledge in the particular subject. After going through this experiment of no homework, we found that students were much more productive, happier and are developing a love of learning.

Dr. Wendy H. Weiner
Conservatory Prep Senior High

Dr. Wendy H. Weiner

Even if your child’s school does not offer a career day, create your own. Find a career interest inventory and discuss with your child what he or she may enjoy doing. Then, start calling around. Many companies are eager to have a teenager for a day to learn their business. For some of our students, they eventually were able to get part time jobs from their career day contacts.

Dr. Wendy Hirsch Weiner

(CNN) — For Carlton Davis, “the” always seemed to come out as “hte.” Frequently having problems in school, he once threw a typewriter out of his fourth-floor window at college after making the “hte” mistake yet again.

Abby Schwartz can relate. She would often mix up the letters d and b, sounding out certain words to make make sense of them. Things have gotten better, but she’ll still make the occasional “b-d” or “5-2″ flip. Davis, now 66, also still mixes up the digits of phone numbers.

“(Reading) would be slow. It wouldn’t be enjoyable. I would lose my place,” said Abby, 13, of Lexington, Massachusetts. “There were times when I would yell at myself: ‘I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.’ “

Abby and Davis, like an estimated 5 percent to 20 percent of the population, have struggled with dyslexia, a condition that, broadly speaking, hinders a person’s ability to interpret language.

Scientists have recently made headway in understanding what’s going on in the brain of a person with dyslexia, which has not been well understood. New research suggests it may be possible to tell from a brain scan whether a dyslexic child’s reading ability will improve over a few years. It goes along with the general trend of personalized medicine, in which genetic tests, brain scans and other tests can increasingly help predict the conditions for which a particular individual is at risk.

And a separate recent study found that some dyslexics may have a heightened understanding of space, despite an impairment in language.

In dyslexia, also called developmental reading disorder, the brain doesn’t properly recognize or process symbols. Children with this condition may find reading comprehension difficult because they don’t connect sounds with letters and can’t recognize words well. Celebrities including Whoopi Goldberg, Cher and Henry Winkler (the “Fonz”) have made their dyslexia publicly known, and great artists such as Pablo Picasso are said to have had it.

Some children with the disorder can “compensate,” or read fairly normally, but perhaps more slowly than their peers, by adulthood. It is hard to know who will be able to improve reading skills over time, and how much extra help is necessary.

A study led by Fumiko Hoeft, psychiatry researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine, used brain imaging to answer this question. Her study followed 25 children with dyslexia and 20 children without dyslexia over a 2½-year period.

The researchers found greater activation and connectivity in the brain’s right hemisphere among dyslexic children who showed greater improvement in reading after the 2½ years. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study this phenomenon.

In general, much of the language comprehension and processing that goes on in the brain happens in the left hemisphere, but there is some right hemisphere involvement also. Hoeft’s study suggests that people with dyslexia who go on to read fairly normally are using a part of the right hemisphere in reading tasks more than the average person would.

If made widely available, this kind of brain scan could be an important complement to the assessments — based on reading and behavior — already available for diagnosing dyslexia, Hoeft said. As this usage of fMRI becomes more useful and commonplace, the high cost per scan would go down, she said.

Rebecca Branstetter, psychologist who blogs at Notes from the School Psychologist, says this dyslexia brain scan could provide useful information, but it doesn’t highlight environmental factors — such as the quality of instruction in the child’s classroom — that could contribute to reading problems.

Abby’s father, Edward Schwartz, fears that this tool would just add to a child’s anxiety about the testing process. The potential to alarm a child isn’t worth it, and he doesn’t trust that this method would offer definitive information.

“The kids (are) much more likely to feel like they’re broken in some way,” Schwartz said. Abby, he recalls, “didn’t like it to be referred to as a ‘learning disability.’ She was happy when people offered her alternative ways to think about it.”

Guillermo Tilley, the father of 7-year-old Nate, who has dyslexia, similarly would not want his son to have the fMRI.

“It would taint my interpretation of who Nate is and his struggle with dyslexia,” Tilley said.

Of course, the results of the study are only preliminary. Participants included 25 children with dyslexia and 20 children without dyslexia, which is too small a sample size to prove anything, although still respectable when it comes to neuroimaging studies. Another important limitation in the study is that some children in the study did receive tutoring or reading interventions, to which they were not randomly assigned. A larger trial that controlled for remediations would offer more conclusive results. But this one found that receiving a remediation did not appear to affect improvement in reading abilities.

Here’s another insight about dyslexia: men with the condition may have enhanced visual-spatial abilities, according to a study in the journal Learning and Individual Differences. This was another small study — 20 dyslexic volunteers and 21 participants without the condition — testing how people identify shapes, navigate a virtual environment, and do other tasks involving spatial reasoning.

Davis, a noted architect and writer in the Los Angeles area, believes he fits that category. He gets thrown off by pure mathematics, but he’s good at anything involving spatial relationships and design.

And those kinds of skills should be taken advantage of in school, said Wendy Weiner, principal of the arts-focused Conservatory Prep in Davie, Florida, and mother of a dyslexic child.

Because of this, Weiner said, three-dimensional letters and numbers, perhaps made out of plastic or clay, help a dyslexic child grasp the shapes better. Holding a “7″ upright in your hand, you’re less likely to view it sideways as a “V,” she said.

The most important intervention is a direct, explicit teaching of phonics, or how symbols correspond with sounds, Branstetter said. The sooner it can be detected, the better. A child’s personality can also factor in: Some persist despite frustration better than others. Parents should speak to their school psychologists about the best plan of action, she said.

For Abby, a breakthrough moment came at age 9: She started reading voraciously, and today reads well above the seventh-grade level. She’d had good tutors and plenty of support from her parents, but it also took self-confidence for her to make herself read on her own, she said.

As for Davis, he’d never heard of dyslexia until a friend brought it up when he was 34, and then went through training at a learning development center. Using computers for writing has helped him tremendously — especially spell-check.

“I know a lot of people who have trouble reading, as I did when I was a kid, are dyslexic,” he said. “It is an issue that certainly holds back a lot of kids, because of their inability to do certain things.”

So, what is this film about? The following is an excerpt taken from the website : A concerned mother turned filmmaker aims her camera at the high-stakes, high-pressure culture that has invaded our schools and our children’s lives, creating unhealthy, disengaged, unprepared and stressed-out youth.

Featuring the heartbreaking stories of young people in all types of communities who have been pushed to the brink, educators who are burned out and worried that students aren’t developing the skills they need, and parents who are trying to do what’s best for their kids, Race to Nowhere points to the silent epidemic in our schools: cheating has become commonplace, students have become disengaged, stress-related illness, depression and burnout are rampant, and young people arrive at college and the workplace unprepared and uninspired.

Race to Nowhere is a call to mobilize families, educators, and policy makers to challenge current assumptions on how to best prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens.

In a grassroots sensation already feeding a groundswell for change, hundreds of theaters, schools and organizations nationwide are hosting community screenings during a six month campaign to screen the film nationwide. Tens of thousands of people are coming together, using the film as the centerpiece for raising awareness, radically changing the national dialogue on education and galvanizing change.

In order to sign up to attend the movie at Conservatory Prep Senior High, you may buy tickets online

We will have a lively discussion after the event on the topic of education in South Florida.

Dr. Wendy Hirsch Weiner
info@conservatoryprep.org