Webinar; Understanding Dyslexia: Identification and Intervention

Hello everyone, we're excited to have you here with us today for Understanding Dyslexia: Identification and Intervention. Before turning it over to Dr. Jordan, I would just like to take you a little, a minute to tell you a little bit about Parallel and who we are. At Parallel, we know that no 2 brains are alike, and 1 in 5 will struggle with learning and thinking differences. And different thinkers do great things. And that's why we built Parallel, to change the way children are understood, diagnosed, and supported. So with Parallel, each student is matched with their own care expert team, and we start with a free consultation, and then we put together an action and success plan with custom-built evidence-based services. So we support students with a range of support. We can start out, you know, some of the things we offer is a complete neuropsych comprehensive psychoeducational evaluation. We have skill-based tutoring. So if you have dyslexia, we have learning specialists who are certified in different methods that work with students with dyslexia. We have executive functioning coaches to work on organization, time management, other executive function skills. And we have behavioral therapy and counseling and speech and language therapy as well. So I encourage, you know, everyone to check out our website today, parallellearning.com, or just call us directly, 914-377-5655, to go ahead and get started with a conversation with your VIP dedicated care specialist and let them know you're watching the webinar today so we can give you a discount. So again, we know that every kid deserves to see their differences as strengths, and, you know, we want to set the foundation for what's ahead. So we are helping each child receive— get to their full potential, instilling confidence and empowering them. So now I'd like to kind of go over Dr. Jordan. We're lucky to have him as Parallel's Chief Clinical Officer. Um, Dr. Jordan is one of the leading clinical psychologists in the country for child and adolescents and is based at NYU. Um, he has experience with psychological assessments and social justice issues in the mental health space. He has conducted research for over a decade now on teleassessments, um, specifically for children and adolescents, and has authored the only book on the topic, The Essentials of Psychological Tele-Assessment. He's widely cited and respected in the industry, and he is the founding director of NYU Center for Counseling and Community Well-Being. But we're lucky to have him as, you know, our clinical advisor for over a year now and most recently named Chief Clinical Officer. So with that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Jordan. I'll remind you, you know, after this consultation, please go on our website, either call us directly or go ahead and schedule a consultation. Let them know that you're watching the webinar so we can give you a special discount. And I'll turn it over to you, Jordan.

Thank you so much. And this is— we're going to have time for Q&A at the end. So if you're watching this live, please feel free to put your questions in the Q&A. And I believe Blakely will come back at the end and help me sift through some questions and so I can answer them the best that I can. Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening. We're going to— I'm going to take you through a crash course of dyslexia specifically, and we're going to talk about what it is, how to identify it, how we look at it, and evidence base behind treating it, how we remediate or think about going about dealing with dyslexia. So I want to start with reading. Reading in particular is a weird thing. We all do it. We all train in it early on. The idea behind reading is that there are these weird symbols, which we call letters, that represent sounds. That's the fundamental— our symbols represent sounds, and these sounds can be put together just like the symbols can be put together to be meaningful. And most kids do learn this pretty quickly. They do pick it up relatively quickly. The sort of neurotypical brain absolutely starts to automate this process. They learn it, they pick it up, it becomes very automatic for them, even when it's more complicated, even when it's letters in the middle of words. They, they can link the letters to sounds, link the sounds to meaning, especially when they're put together. Phonological awareness. This is something that we care a lot about in psychology and in education. Phonological awareness, and you'll hear it a lot in the dyslexia circles, has to do with multiple things. It has to do with rhyming and alliteration. So rhyming is obviously the ends of words being the sound— being the sound, I'm reading the word sound— being the same. So sound and found rhyme. The ends of those words are the same. Alliteration has to do with the beginnings of words sounding the same. Segmentation of sentences, how we break up sentences into different words. Understanding syllables, sill-la-bulls, right? We need to be able to break down those syllables and squish them together to make meaningful words. Blending and segmenting words. So we can blend syllables, but we can also blend what we call phonemes, which I'm going to talk about in a little bit, which are the most basic building blocks. So found has one syllable, but it has multiple phonemes. F, ow, nn, duh, right? It's got all 4 of those sounds that we have to blend together. We have to be able to tear them apart as well. This is really useful in learning the prefixes of words and suffixes of words. We have to be able to take apart words, and we become really good at phonemic manipulation. I'm looking at the word dung, D-U-N-G. If I take the N out of the middle of it, I get dug. This is important. Again, we get used to this. This is how we understand, especially in a very complicated language like English, where we don't follow a lot of rules for every word. We're very mean in our language. We need to be able to do this. We need to be able to manipulate the phonemes in words to learn new words, to understand what they are. And this becomes automatic. Phonological awareness, phonological processing becomes automatic for most kids. Dyslexia, though, is when we have a problem with this. So dyslexia is considered a learning disability. I know that seems pretty basic. The neurodiversity movement, if you are familiar with it, has to do with thinking about different ways brains work and how they can be positives. So we have a lot of research, for example, on the autistic brain and the strengths that come along with the autistic brain. The ADHD brain tends to be more entrepreneurial, creative, good at divergent thinking. Dyslexia is a little tougher because at the moment the research does not have a lot of clear evidence of strengths of the dyslexia brain. This doesn't mean that they don't exist. It just means that we haven't studied them and found them consistently in the literature. It's been suggested that dyslexic brains may be better at simplifying tasks and simplifying the understanding of different material or visual-spatial strength. There may be some strengths there. But in general, we live in a world where we've decided that reading is the way we learn. I have a daughter who's in— just started middle school, and she's turned that corner. From learning to read to reading to learn. She can now read as well as I can. She just needs to learn more information through her reading. And even though our world has lots of ways of getting information, we've decided, probably rightfully so, that reading is a primary way of gaining information, of learning, of growing individually. And dyslexia is a roadblock. That's why it's a learning disability. It is a roadblock to reading. So there may be some strengths. We haven't really identified them clearly in the literature, but in general, it's a roadblock, and we do want to lift that roadblock. We want to remediate or intervene. We want to do something so that we are trying to lift that roadblock to being able to read and ultimately being able to learn. It does affect reading primarily. We'll talk about other areas that it does tend to affect as well. But in general, this is a reading disability. And it has to do with automaticity. I'm going to say that over and over in this webinar is we need to become automatic. Our reading becomes automatic, and automaticity is really important. Otherwise, we have to sound out every single word. We have to work on phonics. We have to look at every single word and piece it together. Before it becomes automatic, and that becomes really cumbersome and it gets in the way. It takes too long, and so by the time I do this at the end of a sentence, I've forgotten what the beginning of the sentence actually said. So it's automaticity of these reading fundamentals, including all of that phonological processing that I talked about, as well as what we call rapid automatic naming. This is how automatic we are at looking at letters, looking at words and naming them. How quickly can I look at a P and see, and in my mind say, that's a P, P, P. I know what that stands for. How quickly and automatically do I then name actual words? Do I have a repertoire of vocabulary words that I can name quickly and easily? That is rapid automatic naming, and these are 2 of the biggest difficulties that we find in dyslexia. And ultimately, obviously, the, the, the ultimate goal of reading is to be able to understand, right? Reading comprehension. So all of these problems with the basic building blocks of reading ultimately affect reading comprehension. Which can in turn affect other subjects. We know that a lot of math is built around word problems. It's not just being able to do the math, it's being able to read something and apply, oh, this is the math it's asking for. I have to figure out what it's asking for, which of course, if you are having trouble with reading comprehension, is going to be much more difficult. But it also affects Focus, memory, emotional functioning, self-esteem, fine motor skills, everyday living activities— all of these things can be affected in dyslexia. We know that if you're struggling in school, it can certainly affect you social-emotionally. We also know that difficulties with social-emotional functioning can affect you in school. Kids are one system, so we need to understand that entire system, how everything is cyclical and interplaying off of one another. A note about reading, and this is just to combat a little myth about dyslexia. Our world is 3D, right? So we spend the first 4, 5 years of our lives after we're born learning what our 3D world is. Our brains really start to understand the world this way. What that means is this is a chair. No matter what direction this chair is in, it is that same chair. It is the same thing no matter which direction I look at it from. And we train our brains early on to, to understand the world this way. Reading asks us to dismantle this and think about things very differently, right? These are all very different letters. B, D, P, and Q. There is a directionality to letters, to writing, and reading asks us to dismantle this 3D view of the world that we've built for the first 4 or 5 years of our lives and start thinking in this very linear directional way about letters. What that means is that most kids struggle to write letters backwards, words backwards when they're learning to read and write. Almost every kid will struggle with this early on. This is not necessarily a hallmark of dyslexia, although in the media we see, oh, writing backwards, that's dyslexia. Dyslexic brains may not automate it, right? It may not be as automatic. They may not take it in and learn it automatically in this linear way, as quickly as non-dyslexic brains, but it's not a hallmark of dyslexia. It's usually a hallmark of practice. Most kids just need to keep practicing to become more automatic at understanding the directionality of letters, the directionality of words. So back to what is dyslexia. So it usually shows up in school, right? This is where we're going to learn to read. This is where we identify that as a problem. And it usually shows up as real struggles with the early reading. But not every problem with reading is dyslexia. Dyslexia is a type of reading disability, but not every reading disability is dyslexia. A kid can have difficulty just with comprehension. I'm overseeing an assessment right now where this is the case. All the phonics, the phonetic understanding, the phonemic Proficiency is all fine. All the building blocks are fine, but comprehension and reading speed are real problems. That's not dyslexia. It is still a learning disability. It is still a reading disorder, but it is not dyslexia, which means it needs careful evaluation from a trained professional. It needs someone to really drill down to figure out, is this dyslexia? Because we need to approach it differently if it is not dyslexia. So in an evaluation, what we do in a dyslexia evaluation, we start by looking at these basic reading skills. We break it down into these component parts. We look at all that phonological processing stuff that I talked about a few minutes ago. We look at phonemic awareness. Phonemes are those basic building blocks, the, the sh, k, ah, all these sounds. Are you aware of all of these sounds? How quickly and easily can you access those sounds? If I tell you a word and say, what's the first sound in this word, can you identify it? That is an awareness of the phonemes. Phonics skills has to do with tying those phonemes to the weird little squiggles, to the symbols, to our letters and our letter combinations. So most kids are pretty quick to see ah as an A, and it takes a little bit more time to see sh as an SH. Those are phonics skills, and they need to be built deliberately and become much more automatic. And ultimately, we look at word reading. Are you being extra labored in every single word, or do you actually have some words that you recognize? Do you see the and read the really quickly and easily because it's a very common word? We become automatic in noticing it. We don't have to go with, uh, the. We don't have to do that phonemically. Or phonetically, because it becomes automatic. So we look at that word reading as well, and we look at that rapid automatic naming. So we see how quick are we to identify those letters and sounds, how rapid, how quick are we at that automaticity of naming things. We then of course go to the higher order skills, fluency, which has to do with how accurate and smooth and quickly you can read meaningful text in general, sentences or even letters at the most basic. How fluent are you? And ultimately understanding the comprehension of text. How well do you understand what is being read? We also look at orthographic processing, which is our fancy pants way of saying the skills that relate to spelling. So orthographic processing has to do with your ability to spell. So put those symbols together to represent the sounds that they're making, as well as to notice when something is misspelled. That is all part of orthographic processing. So we look at that in depth as well. And a good evaluation should also look, as we talked about, at social-emotional functioning. Again, because we know some reading problems may not be just due to a difference in the brain. Some reading problems may be a problem with stuff going on at home. So this kid is just not able to engage in school in the same way, or having a terrible teacher and hating this teacher so much that you willfully do not learn. This can happen. So social-emotional things can impact our reading. Problems with academics, problems with reading can absolutely affect us social-emotionally. It can affect our self-esteem when we know we're struggling, especially in comparison to our peers that are sitting right beside us who are having an easier time learning to read. So we want to look at the interplay between learning and emotional functioning. So that's how we identify dyslexia. Now I'm going to talk about addressing dyslexia, and I'm going to talk about the evidence-based practice of intervention, of remediation, of teaching, whatever you want to call it. How do we address dyslexia? And I'm going to focus on 2 different areas. One is what we look at and what we work on, and the other is how we work on it. Both of these things are really important. So let's start with the what. There are 5 basic building blocks. There are 5 reading fundamentals that we focus on when we are treating or remediating dyslexia, when we are addressing dyslexia. There are 5 things we do. First, we practice with phonemes. This is the, the smallest units of language, the, the duh, duh, duh, duh. We want to make this automatic. D is duh. Daddy, duh. Uh, deficit, duh. All of these words start with duh, so we get really, really good and comfortable with the duh sound. We might, um, think about ing. I-N-G. Ing is a phoneme. So we want to get comfortable running, laughing, singing. We get kids really comfortable working toward automaticity. So we have to practice and practice and practice with these smallest units of language. Once we become comfortable with these, we move to phonics, and this is linking those phonemes to the letters and letter groups. So that duh duh duh daddy duh duh duh. We then pair that with the duh, the letter D, duh, duh, duh, duh. And we work on this to make it more automatic. We then work on fluency. This is reading out loud for speed, more than speed, accuracy and clarity. So how fluidly can you just read this word out loud? Just read these words because we've gotten our phonics a little bit more automatic. We now need to put those phonics together into words and become more fluent in reading those words aloud. The 4th thing we look at is that rapid automatic naming. We want to build your bank of memorized words. Automatically recognized words. The, the should be built really soon and early. I, a, an, these sorts of things we need to— even, even bigger words like because. Because is used so often, it's better to make that automatic instead of needing to sound out the phonics. Because, because, because. Because, right? We want to make that as automatic as possible. We want to build your repertoire, your storage bank of memorized words so that they become automatic. And finally, we work on comprehension. Once you've got those basics, we need to make sure you're understanding everything that's being read. So we, we work very deliberately on Comprehension. These are the 5 things that we do in an evidence-based treatment of dyslexia. It's what we focus on. Now, how we focus on it is different. First and foremost, if you can catch it early, it's always better, right? So if I need to work on phonemic processes or phonics, It's better if my peers haven't moved on to really meaningful text that they're working on comprehension. So you're falling further and further behind. If you can catch it early so that you can remediate the basic skills and then you can learn comprehension along with your peers, that's better. So early identification is better. But when it comes to the how, there are 4 evidence-based principles. For how we deal with dyslexia. There are 4 principles for the how we work individually with a kid who is dyslexic to get them up to speed, to help them learn to read in a way that means they can read to learn eventually. The first principle is that it must be systematic. So when we are dealing with the dyslexic brain, this is not just about practice reading. I'm not just gonna throw a bunch of books at you and say, just keep practicing, read it out loud to me. Let's just keep going over and over and over. We need to be systematic. We need to break it down to its component parts. We need to think about, okay, is this a phonemic problem or a phonics problem? Do you have the, the sounds, but you just aren't automatic in translating the, the letters into sounds? Or if you are automatic in that, is this a problem with rapid automatic naming where we need to build your bank of vocabulary, read vocabulary? And eventually we apply it to meaningful text. So we've got to be systematic in what we are looking at. Not just sort of throwing everything we can at a kid and hoping it sticks. We've got to be systematic in the way that we approach the intervention. Next, it's got to be explicit, and this is going to sound silly. We have to teach it for a kid to learn it. That's shocking, right? But this is actually a little different than general educational principles and practices. Because a teacher with 30 kids in their room, with 25 kids in their room, no matter how many kids in their room, cannot sit with every kid and practice every single skill. They've got to teach a lesson and then let a kid go and try it. In intervention for dyslexia, we do not try and fail. We start with modeling. So if it's phonemics, then we say R is er, er, er, and I would model er, raisin, er, rotate, er, and I would just say a lot of words. Then we use guided practice where we do it together. Once you are okay with the guided practice, then you can start independent practice. This is very different than most education where You teach or you model, and then you move to independent practice. And many kids just get it, right? They can do it. They can rapidly gain this skill. Dyslexic kids cannot do that, and we do not want to let them trial and error it and learn bad habits, because they may try and try and try and become automatic in the wrong things. So we need to be much more explicit, and that's why we need focused intervention for dyslexic kids. The third is multisensory. Now, this is a little different than learning styles. You may have heard of learning styles. The research has not supported that there are visual learners and there are auditory learners and kinesthetic learners. The research doesn't actually support that. It was a great theory and it didn't pan out. We all tend to learn pretty similarly. In dyslexia, we want our instruction to be multisensory though, and that means something specific. It actually means engaging these different systems at the same time, simultaneously engaging all these different systems. The visual— we know what visual is, we know what auditory is. Kinesthetic has to do with movement. And tactile has to do with feel. So these are a little bit different, but they're often talked about together. So as an example, we might look at the letter R while saying the letter R. R, R, R. We may draw it in the air like I'm doing now. That would be a kinesthetic. R, R, R. Or you may say rain, rainbow, and say words that start with R. And then we might make the R sound while tracing the letter R on a rough surface. That's the tactile. When we're engaging all of these different systems simultaneously, we're much more likely to make it automatic. It becomes ingrained in our body, in our soul— not really our soul— in our brain. It becomes deeply ingrained when we look at all these things together, when we, when we engage all the different systems at the same time. And finally, diagnostic. And this is, for me, one of the most important aspects of evidence-based addressing of dyslexia is that it must be diagnostic. What that means is that the professional who's working with the kid is constantly assessing, both formally and informally, where that kid is at that moment in that skill. Where are they automatic and where are they not yet automatic? I need to know very specifically. I need to hit that target right in the middle. I need to know exactly where they are so that I know where to intervene. And instruction has to be exactly what the student needs. In education and educational psychology and developmental psychology, we talk a lot about the zone of proximal development. How fancy is that? The zone of proximal development. What this is, is it's the zone, it's the area, it's the skill that is right above what a kid is able to do independently. So we have to assess what can a kid do automatically independently and what they cannot do, which is a skill right above that, that they cannot yet do. independently is the zone of proximal development. Proximal just means nearby. So it's the zone of nearby development, and that's where we need to then focus our intervention. We need to model right in that zone. We need to do guided practice right in that zone, and hopefully eventually get you automatic in that zone so that we then look at the next zone up. We do this in regular education as well. We look for the zone of proximal development, but The big difference is we don't do the explicit side of it, right? We look for the zone of proximal development, and I may model it, I may teach it, and then I let you go and work independently in that zone of proximal development. And you get to like play around and trial and error and figure it out, and you might get some supports. But in dyslexic intervention, that zone of proximal development is exactly where the professional needs to work with the kid. Individually, explicitly, right in that area, all ultimately working toward automaticity. Everything is toward the goal of becoming automatic in our phonemic awareness, in our phonics, in our rapid automatic naming, in our fluency, and ultimately, you know, our ultimate goal is in the comprehension. So we need to constantly be assessing where the kid is, what they can do independently so that I know the next step up, which they cannot yet do, is their zone of proximal development. And that's where I'm going to focus. That's where I'm going to model, guide you through the practice, and then once I feel comfortable with you doing the guided practice, let you try it independently. Simple, right? Every intervention has to be all of this though. At all times. We can't fall short in any one of these areas at any given time, or the dyslexic kid may struggle, may learn bad habits, may start to encode and make automatic the wrong things. Or if we're not diagnostic enough, we may be aiming too high. We may just be frustrating that kid's brain. By trying to work on comprehension when they don't have the basics yet. So our systems for evidence-based treatment of dyslexia have to be all of this at all times. Thank you very much. I am going to open it to Q&A at this point, and I'm going to stop sharing my screen so you can see me a little bit bigger and see Blake— Blakely a little bit bigger.

So thank you, Dr. Bateman.

Any questions?

That was really helpful, and we've got some questions. Um, the first one being, as you mentioned, socio-emotional well-being can impact individuals' academics, especially with concerns of dyslexia. How do we help support and empower our child to not get discouraged or lose motivation from the official diagnosis?

How do I best support my kid? Ah, oh, that is the age-old question, right? How do I best support my kid? So for me, it's— there are 2 prongs to this. And as a parent myself, I hate being my daughter's teacher. I don't want to be her teacher. I want her teachers to be her teacher, or if she needs extra help, I want to hire somebody if I have the resources to make that happen. So we want to get them the help, the specific help that they need. That is the first step. We really need to, if you have a diagnosis of dyslexia, we need evidence-based dyslexia intervention through your school, through private services, whatever you need. Help them get up to speed. What that leaves us with on the other side, the other prong, is the use of nothing but positive reinforcement, right? We don't, you know, chastise Or punish or yell when they get something wrong. We praise their effort, like, oh, what a great effort. It wasn't quite right, but you were brave for trying. And parents probably don't use this enough. I know it seems pretty basic, but positive reinforcement is a huge boon to our social-emotional development. Kids need praise. Kids need to know that they're doing good work. They're trying their hardest. They need you in their corner, especially as a parent. You've got to be on their side, be in their corner. So if you're addressing the actual problems with services, with school services, with extra remediation and reading help, then you are freed up to just be their cheerleader.

I love that. Um, love being a cheerleader, and that's what we are at Parallel for all of our students. Um, what if a child is in 6th grade, they've just been diagnosed with dyslexia by a private psychologist? What are the specific services and interventions that the, that the child should be provided by the school, either in a small group or individually, versus, you know, what's needed as far as external educational therapists?

Yeah, and this is a tough question to answer because schools and school districts vary so much in what they provide, how they provide it, what they can provide. What I will say is schools and school districts, I shouldn't say this in a recording, but schools and school districts are limited. They're very limited in their resources. So they want to provide kids the least possible accommodation and remediation to get them working at average. Like, they— we want them, you know, schools are very well-meaning and they want to provide extra resources to make sure that your kid can access the education, but they'll give the minimum possible. So with dyslexia, and again, there's a spectrum of dyslexia, by 6th grade a kid may have learned to compensate in some ways, with some of the phonemic awareness stuff, but may have trouble with fluency, may not be as automatic as they need to be. So some schools will have push-in paraprofessionals who come in and work on reading. They may have pull-out services, either small group or individual services with a reading specialist. If and when you can do that, we fight for it. When I do private evaluations, Personally, I really try to advocate for the kids that I'm working with. If I think they really need a lot of services, I'm going to go to those 504 meetings, those IEP meetings, and I'm going to argue, and I'm going to wield my PhD and my board certification, and I'm going to try and bully these schools into giving kids everything they can to help the kids. Oftentimes it's not enough. Oftentimes families find that they actually need to engage a learning specialist, an educational psychologist, an educational therapist, somebody outside who has that evidence-based background in remediating dyslexia. And that's fine as well. There are services you can get when and if you have the resources to do so to really help your kid. I, again, I probably shouldn't say this, but I tend to tell parents If you can afford it, if you have the resources, get the services outside of school as well. Even if you've fought and fought and fought and gotten a whole bunch of services within the school, it's not going to hurt to get that kid extra services outside of school to work on that automaticity. It takes a lot of practice. The quicker a kid becomes automatic, the better, right? The less they will fall behind.

Thank you, Jordan. And to Jordan's point, we'd love to offer any family, you know, 40% off your first month to get started so you can really see these support services in action to help, you know, also help financially too as you get started. The next question is, you know, speaking of our educational support, are students provided with these Kinesthetic, tactical materials. How does Parallel, you know, work with students since you're doing it virtually?

It's a great question. The question is really, does virtual work, right? How could virtual possibly work if I'm asking kids to like draw in the air or rub something rough or like touch the book or something like that? It absolutely works. And there's in education actually probably more than any other area, There's a long history of an evidence base behind being able to do this work remotely. So we, you know, we would think about what does this specific kid really need. If we're talking about that 6th grader who's working with fluency, maybe they don't need a book to trace letters that are bumpy, right? Maybe they don't need that. For a much younger kid who is having trouble making automatic the letters, they may absolutely need that book that has the bumpy letters in it, and you would just send it out, right? For some younger kids, we may want to enlist a parent or caregiver to help us out and sit next to that kid while we're working with them. That's especially great for younger kids who, you know, may need a little bit of extra support, but it also really helps parents understand exactly what their kids are doing so that they can further support them as well. So we would think diagnostically, what does this kid specifically need? And then we decide, oh, this kid actually is not a great candidate for virtual. If they really need a lot of handholding support, a lot of kinesthetic or tactile structure, and their parent or caregiver is not around to really help out with the sessions, maybe we would decide virtual is not indicated for this kid. For many others, it actually works out really well.

Thank you, Jordan. And to your point, you know, we know there's not a one-size-fits-all solution for how each student learns. What we've been seeing a lot is COVID gave virtual a really bad stigma for some people. And, you know, what I hear from so many parents at Parallel is that, you know, it's apples to oranges comparison. You know, we really have the learning specialists that are trained to work with students with dyslexia.

I'll say one more thing if I can.

Yes, please.

So speaking of the pandemic, I think about my daughter now in middle school who's probably better at computers than I am now. So the virtual world is not new to most of our kids at this point and offers a lot of tools, right? We have a whiteboard. We have things we can put on the screen that actually show movement of letters and B for butterfly, and we can put a butterfly on the screen, and we can put all these different things. There are a lot of tools we can use in the virtual space that kids are just used to now. So it may get a bad rap with some. With others, it's actually the world they're living in. My daughter's school, they sit down at computers and do their writing. You don't want to see her handwriting at this point, but in general, they are using computers. They're using an online resource for a lot of the work that they're doing.

Love that. Another question we have is, what is the earliest age Parallel can assess a client for dyslexia?

So we assess kids starting at 7 years old, and that's for a very specific reason. When we partner with a school, Sometimes we can do earlier because some of the assessments can be done in person by the school. But when we do an evaluation fully, a private evaluation fully at PARALEL, we're using what we call tele-assessment techniques. That's where my research is and the book and all sorts of studies. And what we found is that for kids under 7, it doesn't work as well. This, this, uh, tele-assessment procedure. Kids under 7 just interact a little bit differently with, uh, technology and with virtual assessments, and so it's not equivalent to in-person. So for under 7s, we recommend a formal in-person evaluation for dyslexia. Um, for 7 years old and older, we can do tele-assessment. Um, Parallel or, or anyone else who is fully trained in this, um, can do tele-assessments of dyslexia very, very specifically.

Okay.

identify it, and we can differentiate it from maybe a different reading disorder or some other learning disability or ADHD or whatever else may be going on.

Thank you for that. I think we are right at time. I know there's, you know, one question left unanswered, but I know we're at time. Quickly, if you can just pop in, Dr. Jordan, is Parallel able to provide psychoeducational evals that a public school would accept as eligibility for special education if they receive a diagnosis?

Absolutely. Yeah. So schools are required to look at evaluations, at psychoeducational evaluations, private ones from Parallel or anyone else. They're required to look at them. They're not required to use them to make a determination. They're not required to say, you got this diagnosis, you automatically get these services. But they are required— you can submit it and they're required to look at it. And yes, we do a lot of those. for a lot of schools for, for IEP and 504 evaluations.

Thank you so much, and cannot thank everyone enough for coming today. Jordan will be on monthly for webinars at Parallel. Again, I encourage you to take this information to go to parallellearning.com to go ahead and book a free consultation with your care specialist and get started today.

Thank you.