In a previous blog, I mentioned that I was really impressed with the professionalism and “professional conscience” of a certain educational psychologist who I like to send clients to. Since I don’t want to embarrass this kindly and modest gentleman, I will not mention his name. To be sure, anybody who has been around in the public school system would know who I am talking about because this gentleman has worked for the B.C. Ministry of education as an auditor of School District Special Education Services.

Given such an impressive bio, one would expect “big fees” for his services. I was pleasantly surprised! The fee was half of what most providers of psycho-educational assessments would charge. The reason for charging less was simply: why make the children “antsy” and the parents pay more when the job can be done within three hours of testing!

I thought, now here is a person who makes sense.

For my clients with LD children, getting the educational psychologist’s assessment is more a formality than a necessity. As someone with academic credentials at the Ph.D. level, specializing in learning disabilities, I am qualified to diagnose a child for learning disabilities.  When I send a client’s child to the educational psychologist, I have done the diagnosis already and know exactly what to expect. In fact, for my Ph.D. dissertation, I was diagnosing LD children using the low achievement approach to identifying learning disabilities. Unfortunately, in British Columbia, as in many places around the world, there is still a great deal of entrenched thinking regarding the definition of LD: an outdated IQ-achievement discrepancy formula is still widely used.  When the assessment has an IQ component, we must have an educational psychologist to do the IQ testing.

As my Ph.D. supervisor, Dr. Linda Siegel, used to say, excessive testing for children is not good for them: do only what is necessary and leave it at that! Thus, I try to satisfy the school’s requirement for a psycho-educational assessment through exposing the child to the least testing possible while getting the job done.

So, it was. By chance, while having a conversation with my Italian hairstylist at her salon, the topic of psycho-educational assessments came up and she told me of a client that she has who seems to fit the profile of the psychologist I have been so impressed with. At an instant, both our eyes met, and we blurted out in unison the same name. “By George, it is Dr. ____!”

I guess birds of a feather do flock together!

What prompted me to write this blog is the autistic and ADHD son of my friend.

I have long put out a disclaimer that I don’t want to deal with autism or certain cases of ADHD. Why? It is because I was trained to teach college level English for academic purpose to students who are English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. There is big difference between teaching academic track students and vocational track students. I enjoy teaching the academic tract students more; that is just my personal preference.  When I think about autism and ADHD, I tend to think about the enormous amount of energy spent on “babysitting” and dealing with what I consider to be “lower level” matters such as behavioral problems. I just prefer to spend time teaching academic English to ESL or EFL students. I love teaching dyslexics who are often extremely bright and fun to be with.

It wasn’t until recently that I came to realize that a language-based problem such as dyslexia, a reading disability, is often overlooked in those who have profound behavioral issues. The attention is mostly on the annoying and distracting behaviors; the parents, the teachers, and the other professionals working with the child is literally “putting out fires” trying to contain the behavior problems that the learning issues are left unsolved until too late. That is, for most of the child’s school-life, time and energy is devoted to constraining the troublesome behaviors and not much teaching/learning actually happened.

In the case of my friend’s 19 yr. old son, he has been causing trouble for the teachers since elementary school. He is known by his misbehavior more than his ability to learn, which is unfortunate.

As I got to know my friend’s autistic son, something dawned on me: this boy also has a reading disability— dyslexia— but the attention has been mostly focused on his annoying behaviors! Since this boy is already out of the public school system and is in vocational training, his mother had to pay for a tutor to give him extra help.

The tutor I selected for him is a licensed personal trainer as well as a professional writer. In other words, this tutor is not going to be intimidated by the lad’s inappropriate behavior and, at the same time, he is also good in English and able to teach reading, at least, in the initial stages. In a few months time, the autistic and ADHD boy showed marked improvements in his social behavior. His tutor has been very kind to him and he took the behavior-challenged lad under his wings like a younger brother; sometimes, he would even bring him along to go on outings with his buddies!

As the inappropriate behaviors subsided through the work of the male tutor who was often like a big brother, I launched the next stage of our intervention. This time, I have arranged for a tutor who is trained specifically in teaching those with language-based learning disabilities. This time the tutor is a female and I had to make sure that the autistic lad has made enough progress in his behavior before I introduced the new tutor!

One thing we, that is, the mother, myself, and the tutors, have all noticed is that the behavior and language ability of this autistic and ADHD lad improved at about the same rate. It was as if one was feeding into the other.

I have some theories about why this is happening but I will save that for another blog. The lesson that I want to pass on here is this: we must not neglect the language domain when an autistic and/or ADHD child is “kicking up dust and spewing steam” in his/her bad behavior. Often, when the problems in the language domain are addressed— and autism being a communication disorder—the behavior also improves.

Learning disabilities (LD) such as dyslexia and dyscalculia often have an accompanying comorbidity such as ADHD or ADD. These complications will make intervention delivery more challenging.

Our experience has been that given we have a competent tutor with the right personal qualities — for example, a vibrant sense of humor with ample of patience — even the most difficult students will often settle down to learn out of a respect for the tutor and a genuine liking of him or her. The learning will increase and the annoying behaviors from the student will decrease. That is why I always say that an effective tutor has to be many steps ahead of the student at all times or else he or she will not be able to inspire the student and to motivate change for the better.

Of course, not all cases are that simple. I am a special education expert and, generally, I prefer to solve learning problems through adapting instructional content and teaching strategies. However, in the extreme ADD cases, medication prescribed by a psychiatrist is necessary to control the situation so that a child can focus his/her attention and be able to learn. While I do not get involve in the medical side of things, I do work together with the medical professionals such as psychiatrist and family doctors to ensure there is continuity and coherence in the intervention delivery. The idea here is that, as professionals, we cooperate together to complement the work of one another. The team at our office will try to enhance the effectiveness of the intervention by cooperating with related professionals.

For example, we also work extremely well with the schools by collaborating with the classroom teachers and special education teachers. We try to create a “seamless” service delivery system to increase effectiveness; saving resources for the school and the parents who pay us privately for our services is our primary goal.

The answer to the question of whether we take ADHD or ADD cases is this: we have had a great deal of success with LD cases with a comorbidity; but we do reserve the rights to decide on each case on an individual basis. Considerations such as client-specialist compatibility and the severity of the ADHD or ADD will be the deciding factors.