When we surveyed listeners, more than half of respondents said they wanted more conversations about teaching students with dyslexia! With that in mind, in this episode Susan is joined by Dr. Tim Odegard from Middle Tennessee State University. Odegard is a professor of psychology and holds the Katherine Davis Murfree Chair of Excellence in Dyslexic Studies. As someone with dyslexia himself, Odegard brings a unique perspective to this discussion where they debunk the idea of "the gift of dyslexia," discuss neurodiversity and talk about what needs to be done to change the system.
Show notes:
Quotes:
“It's not easy, but life isn't easy and it's not fair and you don't get to write the rules. But how you play the game and how you persist is what defines you as a human being.” —Tim Odegard
“Sure. You can turn lemons into lemonade, but all they're saying ism that it's a gift because you find a way to persevere, and any hardship could be that way, but when you're in the thick of it and you're actually living it, and you're just trying to get the ability to do your work and not feel like you're stupid. That's not a gift.” —Tim Odegard
“We need to change the dialogue and say, this is about what's right for all kids. And this isn't about just dyslexia, that’s the byproduct of doing what's right for all children.” —Tim Odegard
When we surveyed listeners, more than half of respondents said they wanted more conversations about teaching students with dyslexia! With that in mind, in this episode Susan is joined by Dr. Tim Odegard from Middle Tennessee State University. Odegard is a professor of psychology and holds the Katherine Davis Murfree Chair of Excellence in Dyslexic Studies. As someone with dyslexia himself, Odegard brings a unique perspective to this discussion where they debunk the idea of "the gift of dyslexia," discuss neurodiversity and talk about what needs to be done to change the system.
Show notes:
Quotes:
“It's not easy, but life isn't easy and it's not fair and you don't get to write the rules. But how you play the game and how you persist is what defines you as a human being.” —Tim Odegard
“Sure. You can turn lemons into lemonade, but all they're saying ism that it's a gift because you find a way to persevere, and any hardship could be that way, but when you're in the thick of it and you're actually living it, and you're just trying to get the ability to do your work and not feel like you're stupid. That's not a gift.” —Tim Odegard
“We need to change the dialogue and say, this is about what's right for all kids. And this isn't about just dyslexia, that’s the byproduct of doing what's right for all children.” —Tim Odegard
The byproduct of doing what's right for all children will be that we can find those of us with dyslexia, and we won't have to use a bloody IQ model to do it.
Susan Lambert:This is Susan Lambert. Welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast, from Amplify where the Science of Reading lives. This season, we're tackling the hard stuff. We were inspired by our listeners who have been asking about some of the most challenging issues when it comes to teaching literacy. When we surveyed listeners last summer, an overwhelming number said they wanted to hear more conversations about teaching students with dyslexia. So I'm pleased to say that for this episode, we're bringing on Dr. Tim Odegard, professor of psychology and the Catherine Davis Murphy Chair of Excellence in Dyslexia Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. On this episode, Dr. Odegard helps us understand what dyslexia is, and he shares how we can better serve young people with dyslexia. I think you'll want to bookmark this conversation with Dr. Tim Odegard. Enjoy. Tim Odegard, thank you so much for joining us on today's episode.
Dr. Tim Odegard:Susan Lambert, my friend, thank you for having me . It's been a while . I was waiting, when are you gonna ask me to be on your show?
Susan Lambert:And I'm so glad you could join us today.
Dr. Tim Odegard:I'm so glad to be here.
Susan Lambert:This is such an honor because I have been looking forward to both sharing your expertise and story, but also your message. And I think our listeners are going to love this episode. So before we get started, I would love it if you could tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and how literacy became important to you. And maybe, I think you have sort of a background story from when you were, when you were a kid. Do you wanna start with that one?
Dr. Tim Odegard:Yeah. I mean, I think that the main thing that drew me to this, which also was something that pushed me away from it as well, was, I myself struggled very, very much as did my sister and as does my son with learning how to read and spell words. We now know that all three of us had a predisposition because of our brain development, that we call dyslexia, that makes this a little bit harder to teach how to read and spell words. And as a result of that, I struggled really hard. What pushed me away from really wanting to focus too much on reading was that I was a casualty of the systems of public education. And so was my sister. And then of course, as an informed parent, my son wasn't because I got him help outside of school. But what happened to me was I was a little bright little eager kid. I couldn't wait to get to kindergarten to start learning how, and in fact, my mom had to send me to a little half-day school as preschooler just because I wanted to go to school so soon. That was not my sister, by way. Was my son. My son was very eager to get in there and start learning from all of those wonderful teachers that he had , and has. But I was not a good reader, but I looked like I was for a long time. I was in these little small reading groups where they would have these leveled readers with highly predictable words that kept repeating all the time. I would memorize them and I'd be able to pronounce them. But as I had to take the lead and start to lead my fellow reading club kind of kids in the reading process, the teacher started to pick up the fact that I really couldn't read. What I seemed to be doing was just hearing what other kids were doing and memorizing. They did some testing on me and they found out that I couldn't read, but they also found out that my IQ was low. And so what they thought was, I wasn't a person who fit the definition of dyslexia because my IQ wasn't high enough. So I was left as a casualty. So I received no special services ever, anytime through my public schooling a nd education.
Susan Lambert:The classic discrepancy model at work there. Right?
Dr. Tim Odegard:It is. Yeah. It really, really is. So..
Susan Lambert:We're not at work
Dr. Tim Odegard:Not at work. It really is a hindrance to so many people. I like to say that we're language minorities, like a lot of others, like our multilinguals, like our dialectical speakers. I think those of us who come from a blue collar background and don't develop the same levels of academic vocabulary based off of even current practices, could be seen as not being exceptional. In this exceptionality model that we seem to be clinging to very tightly as we try to go through this paradigm shift where we see if we can come up with a different way of conceptualizing what it would mean to give actual services that help all children with equitable access to education.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. Yeah. Well, you've become a real sort of voice for dyslexia, partly because of your experience and partly because of your training and your interest in university. And so, you know, one of the reasons we wanted to have you on is because we did this great big survey of all of our listeners, and we found out that more than half of the people that responded wanted more conversations about dyslexia. And so I think people, the awareness, people don't understand what it is. Some people can't even say the word still in their environment, but people, other people now are realizing how important this topic is. And so I wonder, before we get too far along, if you could actually give us a , I'm gonna put this in scare quotes or, you know, a definition of dyslexia. Maybe a little formal, but maybe something that's a little bit more relatable that people can understand.
Dr. Tim Odegard:Yeah. I take away of conceptualizing and defining dyslexia based off of my training exposure and the research that I've done and the research that I've been exposed to. I think there's three characteristics of dyslexia. I think that we struggle to read words. I think that we struggle to spell words. In the English language in particular, the spelling is gonna be an issue. Those deficits are gonna be seen in the English language and other languages that are very deep, or the relationships between the letters and the sounds that we use to write our words in language. You know, like "a" can have at least five different sounds associated with it, which makes it very, scary to think, when I see an A, is it a, is it a, is it a, is it a, I mean, what is it? That's just, it's a challenge. So the third characteristic is, we're really hard to teach. And so when we pop out is, is that you we're in classrooms and other kids are learning how to do these things, but we're not, or at least we're not at the rate that's gonna allow us to keep up. And be able to do grade-level work with any kind of efficiency or success. Some of it's come with some upsides, like my ability to learn and make inferences seems to be kind of astronomical. I remember when I got into graduate school was mainly because of my percentile rank being in the 95th percentile for analytical reasoning. I decided that I wasn't gonna go to law school because I just didn't wanna go to law school. But that kind of reasoning fits really well with both scientific pursuits as well as law school and other types of kind of analytic reasoning type of logical kind of things. Those gifts allowed me to actually always look kind of just fine. Even though I was struggling in the background. That I was spending 10 times as much time to get through the work and the readings and just beating myself up with just work and work and work in the background. That work masked what was really undergirding what I was doing. And the harder the kids work like that, the more they take on themselves, the less they're seen as needing any extra help in school to begin with. Let me ask you this question, because I think that's real. Like, that's really important what you just said about that you worked really hard behind the scenes. What were you thinking about at that point when you were a kid and memorizing words or working really hard? Did you think, I'm never gonna learn this. There's something wrong with me? Something was wrong with me. I thought something was wrong with me. What else would I have thought? I was never allowed to think that there was anything that was like dyslexia or a label for anything that would say that, you know what, there's lots of kids who struggle to read and spell. They look a lot like you too. And you know what, this can help you understand. This reminds me of a conversation I had with my child , when he was first coming up and we got into this second part of first grade, and he was still really struggling. And he asked me, it's like, hey, so dad, do I have dyslexia? And he had done some independent testing. He was then getting a structured intervention that I've done research on and others have that's empirically validated, which means that it's actually been proven through research to be effective. And he's like, do I have dyslexia? I said, well, you know, you do, but what does that mean to you? He's like, well, it doesn't mean anything to me. He's like, well, do you want to use that label? No! And then he got to fifth grade. And he was still having these lingering problems with, you know, he could still tell that his ability to read out loud in class wasn't quite the same, even though his accuracy had greatly improved. He was still realizing that he was still struggling with spelling words that was impeding his written expression. And he's like, Dad, I think I have dyslexia and it helps me understand why this is difficult for me, and it really helps me. And that reminds me of a second story, which is then a couple years later, he just looked at me and he said, Dad, I'm really glad that I have you to help me understand this about myself, because you've already been and done it and lived it.
Susan Lambert:Wow. Wow. And so it's less of a label and more of a, oh, this helps me understand who I am. Thank you for sharing that story because I think that's one of those things that is really relatable to folks. You know, we hear things like , well, you'll get over dyslexia after you learn how to be fluent in your reading, or I think people don't understand, maybe I'll say it this way: people don't understand how much work it takes and that it lasts forever. Right? Like, this is just something that is.
Dr. Tim Odegard:I think so. I think especially in the English language, because you know, I was trained by very key people who also worked very closely with other key people. And their perspective is, is that they always bring in spelling, and it really is language-specific to English and other languages that are really more complicated when it comes to how the letters and sounds paired together. And because of that issue impacting the continued lack of accuracy for sustained period in the English language, it really does impede a lot more. I mean, others might have heard me talk about this, but I still to this day, in order to do my job, which has a lot of reading and writing involved with it, I use technology every single day. And because I run the world, because I'm the head of my own center and I get to determine what accesses I have access to, I get to determine what accessibility accommodations I get now. And I would remind you that I got none of those in my public schooling, but I use those every single day. You don't get an email from me that hasn't gone through a grammarly embedded check because spell-check is insufficient for me because I'll misspell a word to be a real word that'll be missed by Microsoft, or at least older versions. Microsoft's embedded, immersive kind of accessibility tools are much better at using the context to kind of suss some of that stuff out now. But there's lots of things that I use in the background to be proficient and capable of doing my job.
Susan Lambert:I think that's really important. And I wonder how much your current experience and your son's experience, because he has you, he's pretty lucky. That's not everybody's experience.
Dr. Tim Odegard:No, it's not. No. And I was actually just talking to some folks about that because I've been really trying to, I don't learn by talking to people. I learn by doing. It's just the way that I am. Maybe it's the byproduct of the fact that I just had to get in there and do the work to be able to learn all this stuff for myself, because, look, I mean, I don't think there's a gift of dyslexia because I don't think that, I mean, one more hardship isn't a good thing as my way of looking at it, but it meant that I was forced kicking and screaming to have to be very self-reliant because there was nobody else there to help me. And my mom and dad had limited understandings and capabilities of giving what I needed. Unlike I do for my son, I know exactly what he needs, or at least the host of things that we could try. So because of that , and as a result, it's allowed me to actually gain some insight. So I'm very much a go-getter, a self-starter and I get after it is what I do. But that's just the byproduct of the fact that I struggled so much and, look, there's lots of hardships in life. It doesn't have to be that way, and adding more hardships and insults onto people that already were. But I think we forget those parents. I think we forget about what the multilinguals, I think we forget about them with others that might be from a blue collar background, like my parents were. And that college degree, or at least the understanding or the ability to think that you can access systems and you've got the resources and the knowledge-base and the tool set to do that isn't something that my parents had. They struggled with it. It's not something, as I've been diving into understanding how we identify dyslexia when you've got a multi-language learner. I really find that there's just as much need to support those first wave of immigrants in here who often are the parents of those children with understanding and accessing stuff. And we're finding that we don't have really good resources and tools to provide to them. And that's gonna be ongoing need and a hindrance for us as we try to be more inclusive in this world of dyslexia.
Susan Lambert:That's a really good point. I'd like to backtrack just a little bit because I know the two of us have talked about this a lot, is this gift of dyslexia, right? People talk about the gift of dyslexia. Do you mind sharing a little bit about why you get frustrated with that with that term?
Dr. Tim Odegard:Yeah. 'Cause it wasn't a gift for me and it wasn't a gift for my son, and it wasn't a gift for so many other people that I've spoken to my entire life in my advocacy work for that. And so one thing that I like to say is just like, you know, I was also blue collar and definitely growing up, most of my childhood in the, my parents' house was very, you know, we lacked for sometimes. We were living paycheck to paycheck. I know what a single-wide is and I know what a double-wide is. Those are trailers and I've lived in those. So I know what that's like. And like that was one hardship. That's not a gift to be impoverished. Yeah, did it give me other ways and other ways of thinking? Sure. You can turn lemons into lemonade, but that's all they're saying, is that it's a gift because you find a way to, to persevere. And any hardship could be that way. But when you're in the thick of it and you're actually living it and you're just trying to get the ability to do your work and not feel like you're stupid, that's not a gift. It's only in hindsight that I hear adults look back and say that. It's only in hindsight once the kids have gotten into that private, very expensive LD schools because either they're lucky enough to have gotten one of the few scholarships or mommy and daddy or grandma or granddad or somebody else can pay to get you there. But that's a very select group of people. So I think that it's actually a pretty damaging and risky thing to say.
Susan Lambert:Hmm. Yeah. And you know, to be fair, we've had that conversation because my son also has dyslexia and it never seemed like a gift to him. I think if I ask him today, he would say, no, this is not a gift. Thank you very much.
Dr. Tim Odegard:That's a good point, 'cause when parents will come back to me and they'll ask me this, that, and the other, and I said, here's what I'm gonna tell you. And when I use my lived experience as a person with dyslexia, I said, now I want you to go back and I don't want you to talk to any adult or any other experts. I want you to go ask your son or your daughter. And then I hear back and it's like, I don't have to talk to anybody else. They said exactly what you just said to me.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. Yeah. Alright. We're gonna segue a little bit because one of the reasons that I, another reason ... lots of reasons why I wanted Tim Odegard on my podcast, but another reason is , there's been a lot of talk about neurodiversity and dyslexia and we're sort of seeing these two terms sort of as partners these days. And I know you've recently done some presentations on this that are brilliant. So I'd love it if you could talk a little bit about neurodiversity, how these two things sort of got connected together.
Dr. Tim Odegard:Yeah. Well, they got connected together because dyslexia is a type of neurodiversity. So neurodiversity in its broadest stroke is saying that as a species, as humans, we're gonna have different ways of developing and different ways that our neurobiology is gonna present in our environment. And how our environment is structured is gonna determine what is adaptive, what's gonna allow us to thrive. And we live in the 21st century where we are in a literate society and an information economy, meaning that you have to be able to read and write and spell in order to access anything that you want to use. So a neurodivergent mind or brain would be one that develops in a way that has differences and makes it difficult to access learning resources in your community and communicate with other people. It was posed and coined initially to talk about those on the autism spectrum by a research scientist who coined the term. And she really thought of this as a political and social movement to rethink and reframe how we talk about learning differences and people who were seen, by a deficit model, as being other than and different than.
Susan Lambert:Hmm. How did you initially feel about that term neurodiversity? Because I think I've heard you...
Dr. Tim Odegard:So I initially, when I heard it, I wasn't too thrilled because I didn't have the history of where it came from. That a person from our community of those of us who are neurodivergent had coined that, and she wasn't proposing this as some type of a research enterprise. She was proposing this as a way of saying that we may be different, but it's only because of the way that the world is structured and how we have to play the game that we're less than. And that in certain circumstances we may not be as less than you. And there might actually at some point in our, our history as a species a point that we're actually greater than you. That's it. It's that simple. But what it's turned into is, it's turned into this idea that those of us who are neurodivergence have these inherent superpowers right here, right today. And that is dangerous. And there also is no evidence that we've gotten in the past, since we've been doing research on dyslexia, that has any concrete data from well-controlled studies that would say that we have superpowers when we look at things within kind of the current way of thinking about them. That doesn't mean that some way in the future we won't find a new way of thinking about cognition, interactions with the world that would show that we actually do have upsides. But right now, the research isn't there. I've done it as a scholar looking at the research and I've got a couple of students working on some systematic reviews, and we may actually dabble and collect some new data. But as of right now, there's been quite a bit of research done on dyslexia. And there's zero evidence that we come with visual spatial gifts. We don't come in with extra gifts , this, that or the other. That's like saying that everybody who's an alcoholic is gonna be the next miles Davis. And that's just not logical. Miles Davis was a unicorn. He also happened to be a horrible addict that had a lot of issues in his life, just like Coltrane did, who was in his quartet. That doesn't mean that alcoholism means that you come with gifts and superpowers. It probably means a whole host of things other than that. And that you probably have a hard time because of your way that you function of just coping with the world around you for lots of reasons. But you wouldn't say that just because you're an alcoholic, you're gonna be the next Miles Davis.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. So that danger then you think is this stereotype, that people could get labeled with or kids could get labeled with.
Dr. Tim Odegard:Yeah. And as a scientist, it's just sloppy work. From a research science standpoint, that perspective, which was not Singer's perspective, that's not what she was saying. She was saying, "Hold it now." And others were saying, "Hold it now." It's only because of how we've crafted this game to be played that we're thought of less than and other than. And for us with dyslexia, it's only because we live in a literate society, that means that we have to be able to read, write, and spell to thrive, that we seem less than you.
Susan Lambert:Mmm. Yeah. And work is so much harder that way. So, you know, coming a little full circle. So that's very fascinating. So with that, I would love if we could dive into a little bit more about dyslexia to really help our listeners understand beyond just, you struggle with reading and writing, reading and spelling. What should we know about dyslexia?
Dr. Tim Odegard:Well, I think that I've already hit on it. It's very common and it's on a continuum of severity, which makes it very difficult to operationalize.
Susan Lambert:I think that's really important.
Dr. Tim Odegard:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what that means is, is that some of us are going to have less severe presentations of our reading and spelling difficulties and difficulties with learning those constructs. And how well we respond to the interventions that are very direct and systematic that will benefit us. And you also have differences as far as severity that I'd like to point out with what else might be going on. What I mean by that is that, like I don't have ADHD, despite what anybody observationally wants to say of me, that is not actually, I have a lot of energy and I always have, I also have the ability to focus that, control that, and that's my choice. My sister has dyslexia, but she also has ADHD. And unlike me, that is not something that she can turn off and turn on per se. I mean, it really is impairing for her, and it makes it very difficult for her to function. So that meant that her ability to respond to and kind of accommodate and like persevere and to sally forth and conquer was a lot more challenging for her. And her trajectory was much different than my trajectory. She's happy, she's a fully functional, thriving adult in the world, she's not a scholar or an academic , but she's a human being who I love very much who I think makes a real contribution to this world in a different way. And I think that that's, I think if there's anything that comes out of a neurodiversity conversation is there's a lot of different ways to interact with society and make your mark. And I think that all of us can make our mark and that we should not be punished for thinking that we don't fit a normal typical way of how we're supposed to be successful in life.
Susan Lambert:Yeah . Okay. So, we now know that it's very common and it's a continuum. And I think, oh my gosh, I can't say it enough that that is just really important, that just, you know, it's an individual sort of thing in terms of dyslexia. What else should we know about it?
Dr. Tim Odegard:So it's hard to identify in schools or to really capture us because of that severity being on a continuum. Where do you put the cut point to make a up-down yes-or-no, you have something or you don't have something. That old mindset of having a disease state or not having a disease state. Having something or not having something black or white is a real hindrance to our service delivery. And actually making sure that we actually have protections for all students regardless if they fit this black or white, up or down, you have dyslexia or not. Like I didn't hit the up or down, does he have dyslexia? No, he doesn't. Why doesn't he? Cuz he's too stupid.Because his IQ test came back too low. So because of that, what's another thing that you should know about is, dyslexia does not fit well in our current identification systems that we have set up in the United States as part of our federal law. And that I think that there's a time to open up a conversation to reconsider how we do that.
Susan Lambert:What do you mean by that?
Dr. Tim Odegard:We need to really think about what it means to prioritize academic services and supports and give all children protections to a plan that makes sure that the resources are there to meet them. Current systems silo those resources and those people within certain types of divisions. Special education, MTSS, Tier Three, and how that plays out in public schools is really, really, really dangerous.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. That's interesting. We're gonna put that just to the side for just a minute and sort of come back to that when we're talking about the kind of instruction we can deliver. Let's go back to this. You're talking about identification for dyslexia. It's not black or white. It's not yes or no. How do we do that? How do we identify those kids that are at risk?
Dr. Tim Odegard:So there's been two different ways of doing this historically, kind of frameworks. There's a cognitive discrepancy model, and then there's an instructional discrepancy model. The cognitive discrepancy model was just what they had to do because there is no way to look into our brains at an individual level and say, oh yeah, he has it, he doesn't have it, because you couldn't do that. So what they had to do when they were starting to bring forth this idea of a learning disability category in the United States was they had to find a way to make it real. How can I identify it ? How can we define it? And they decided that it would be based off of the fact that, ooh, we can find these cognitive processes down here that aren't allowing them to do what they need. And they only seem to be really select and few, or maybe they've got this IQ so they got this great potential because an IQ is gonna be this indicator that they can achieve so much more based off of that. And of course my sister and I, was as good as it gets, we didn't have that potential, because our IQs were too low. And because of that, they didn't think that we had the potential to do more, is the way that I interpreted it, as an individual who was the victim of that mindset. So that's a cognitive discrepancy model, been implemented in two different ways, the IQ discrepancy, measure your IQ, it's way up here, measure your reading, it's way low. And then another one is to say, let's do a real extensive cognitive battery and let's just try to read the tea leaves and see if this is a person who looks like a little unique butterfly that we can find these two or three things that are out over here that's causing them to do it. So this is more of a causal approach, like what's causing the problem? We got another cause and that cause should inform what we do differently with intervention. So there's some harsh realities for those approaches. One , there's very limited evidence that knowing the cause, if that really is the cause, is gonna actually inform and be useful to differentiate instruction. It makes great sense in theory. It's a beautiful idea. It's a lousy, lousy thing in practice that has very limited evidence. And then the IQ discrepancy. Well that's really hazardous because of the fact that there's a lot of reasons why you might have a lower IQ. And we've learned through research that that IQ will change. So one, it can go up and it can go down. It's not something set and static that once you measure, it never changes. And of course then that just is the fundamental principle, then how did they know that that was my potential if an IQ test can actually go up and down based on my environment? So in testing we get these things called standard scores. Which means for your age, where do you fit on the distribution? And it's thought that you'll always stay at that same point on the distribution with your intelligence. Well what have we seen now in several different studies that have tracked kids longitudinally? Those kids who started off fitting the discrepancy model who didn't get good intervention and didn't learn how to read their IQ scores, dropped almost a full standard deviation. 15 points. If they had been identified in college or tried to be identified in college, they would've not received any protections or services in college for an IQ discrepancy because their IQ discrepancy wouldn't have fit any longer. But if you had measured them back at five or six, it would've. But you know what happened is that thing that we say is a stable indicator of a child's potential and upside isn't, it goes down based off of your environment or it goes up based on your environment. And so that is not a reliable means of having an identification model. If something's sand, we don't want to build off of that. You know, there's a parable about that. We build on something solid. If it really is gonna work, that IQ measure should be a solid, stable, reliable indicator for your lifetime of what your potential is. That's the logic. That logic doesn't hold up. Some people have said in the research literature that the problem with the IQ discrepancy is a statistical problem of, how do we get that? And there's all these things about measurement error. No, it's not. It's the fundamental conceptual framework problem that the assumption is, is that IQ can be measured a single point in time and tell you what your potential upside is for your entire life. And that has been fundamentally demonstrated to be a falsehood. So those two models don't stand up to much scrutiny when you think about them conceptually or statistically or practically.
Susan Lambert:So then what, what are we to do if, if those don't hold up?
Dr. Tim Odegard:So there have been other people that have said that we should use a second approach theoretically, from a framework standpoint, which is instructional discrepancy. So what we do is from this mindset is we start at conception and we start to identify people who are at a higher risk of a problem. We use this, let's say with heart disease. We knew when I was conceived, when my son was conceived, that we were elevated risk for heart disease because of our family history. Okay. So that put us at increased risk. I knew when my son was conceived that his, what we call odds ratio, his risk of having reading and spelling difficulties and being hard to teach, was already an elevated level at conception. We knew that. We knew that when he was struggling, well he never struggled, but they would've known if they'd been measuring my language development early on that I was presenting with and my sister were presenting with risks indicators. My son never presented with those language deficits because I am a trained academic language therapist. And I was in there actually doing preventative-based work. So we actually never saw some of those things because I was intervening. However, when we got to first grade, he still presented and couldn't read and spell words very well and he was really hard to teach. But I'd been intervening and I had put in place, let's say some really solid ways for him to phonologically process or process the sound structure of language. He had that upside. He responded extremely well to intervention. And I would say that my hypothesis would be that all the preventative work that I did to help his language development and especially his oral language development with how he processed the speech sounds of language that I didn't get, that my sister didn't get, I think it set him up to have a better actual trajectory and response rate to the two full years of five-days-a-week intervention that he received to be where he is now able to be functional without any accommodations in schools and being able to make his grades and have As and Bs.
Susan Lambert:Mm - hmm, mm-hmm.
Dr. Tim Odegard:So I think that that's it. But we start early, we're gonna be looking for these indicators and it's gonna be prevention, prevention, prevention. Until we get to the point to where, then they present with the primary characteristics of dyslexia, which is they can't read and they can't spell very well. And they're expected to be able to read and spell based off of what you would expect for their age. And importantly, state standards. And all state standards across this country, at least in the United States, will say that by, you know , first grade, at least by the end of first grade, you know, we expect kids to be able to read and spell some words. And my son was not able to read and spell those words that he was supposed to be able to read and spell based off his state state standards. And also on normed-based testing was well below average. The funny thing is he was exceptionally bright with his IQ. He had two college-educated parents. He lived in an enriched environment and unlike me and my sister, nobody thought that that kid was too stupid to have dyslexia. Yeah. I view dyslexia as intergenerational. I view it as something that I will be dealing with in my generational body for eternity. Because I had it, my sister had it, my son has it. If I have any grandchildren, they're born with a higher odds ratio of having it, and their children and their children and their children would be at an increased odds ratio until we learn and have another paradigm shift that there might be something that we could actually rewire genetically that could get passed through generations, which we call epigenetics, that might change that. I know that H [name] has some NIH funding research right now looking at those topics. If she gets to the point to where she can share some of those with you guys, I don't know when, those would be fabulous to get.
Susan Lambert:Fascinating.
Dr. Tim Odegard:But the issue is that I view dyslexia as an intergenerational thing that presents, and that my destiny was not good from the services that I got. And because of a difference in the environment of my son, he actually was in a much different place and actually would've been identified in an IQ model. An instructional discrepancy model also says that why you would identify my son is because he was in school, he was receiving support, and he wasn't learning how to read, and he was profoundly behind where he should have been. Now I short-circuited the circuit cause I didn't wanna wait for him to fail more. Because I know that there's social-emotional casualties like myself and my sister as a result of that. And I didn't want my son to be that. I wanted him to be able to be set up for success. So I gave him the highest dosage I could give him and I controlled exactly what he got based off of what I had already demonstrated with my colleagues to be an empirically validated way of helping kids like him to read and spell. And that's what he got. And he now is able to have a lot more access to the information and resources in his school setting. His schools could have done that for him possibly. But I didn't want to take the chance of that because of my issues. And the fact that I wasn't gonna let what happened to me happen to my son, not on my watch, not for my child. And that is a parent talking there.
Susan Lambert:Yeah, for sure. A passionate parent. If we rewind a little bit, you were talking about, I think you said it three times. Prevention. Prevention, prevention. Right, so putting the systems in place first. And to me that sounds like, for people that are in classrooms, in kindergarten, first and second grade, whatever. To me that sounds like quality instruction for all students. And then when those kids, you don't see them making progress, that's the intervention moment.
Dr. Tim Odegard:That's right. That's right. That's what the instructional discrepancy is. And that takes something a lot, that's a different challenge. And that fundamentally is flawed as well unfortunately in our country. Now, why is it fundamentally flawed in our country? We can look at the NAEP data, we can look at ACT data, we can look at data from universal screening that I've been working with several departments of education starting in pre-K and kindergarten to look at. The majority of the kids in our schools aren't set up for success on day one, and the majority of the kids in our schools don't wind up in third, fourth, fifth grade and they don't come to be in colleges actually proficient readers and writers. And that means that I can't tell if I'm using effective instruction that is meeting the needs of most of the kids. The logic of an instructional discrepancy is that we have base systems of instruction and screening and data use that would allow us to identify and intervene and help those that we could help really , really early so that the ones who are gonna be like the five to 10 percent who have that neurobiological predisposition and are really, really hard to identify and are really hard to teach, will bubble up and we will see them. And that will mean that we will have all [these] excess resources because what do we invest our money into? We invested our money into early identification of risk, great highly structured programs of instruction, and preventative intervention to get most kids reading and proficient so that they can go on and be mainstreamed back into the classroom. But that isn't what we have in this nation because if we did, then that would mean that most of the kids who wind up going and taking these high-stakes tests would be doing a lot better than they are. We haven't gotten, state testing isn't showing really good gains as far as being able to read some short passages and answer some multiple-choice questions about them. It's not showing great gains on other assessments where we do a national report card and we do some different checkpoints and when we look at the reading deficits, my colleague John Sabatini and his colleagues have demonstrated that it's because they're not fluent readers or they're not even accurate readers. And so we know where this is coming from now and we just gotta open our eyes and get our head out of the sand and do something about it . But the problem is, is that the issue with the instructional discrepancy is twofold. We still have cut points that we have to determine about where would we put the cut to go in and provide intervention or preventative kind of thing . So we still have that thing that we have to deal with, which is the statistical challenge. But we have a structural and systems challenge now. We don't have the right petri dish to grow our kids in. Our kids are in dirty mucky swamps and we don't have the clean environment they need to thrive when it comes to the literacy development. And that is the fundamental challenge that we have to address . And that's why dyslexia parents are so up in arms. And what we need to do as parents-parents right now is we need to change the dialogue and say, this is about what's right for all kids. And this isn't about just dyslexia. The byproduct of doing what's right for all children will be that we can find those of us with dyslexia and we won't have to use a bloody IQ model to do it.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. Let me ask you this question, and I think, I think your answer to this next question is gonna be somewhere in what you just said, but if you had a magic wand to fix the system, Dr. Odegard, what would you do?
Dr. Tim Odegard:Wee, what would I do? What I always do. I would strip away all the excess and I would start from the basics as far as, what do I need instructionally in schools? I would prioritize a fixed solid gaze on literacy for the long term . I would set and institutionalize procedures and policies that would say that regardless of what the administrator does and what the new superintendent is or what the school board says, this is what we have to do. I would establish real standards for what instruction should look like in classrooms and have real standards for what pre-service teacher training should look like. For that I would standardize things and then I would do a long-term commitment to evaluate and see if that really is what we need societally. And people could say "No, we've already done that. That was Reading First." No, it wasn't. We have lots of data points to say that Reading First was actually done pretty poorly. We also have evidence from quantitative synthetic reviews that what works when research scientists have done them doesn't work when we put them in schools. Systemically schools are struggling to implement what, when we come in with our large federal grants and have our graduate students do and are left alone to do it. What I would do, I would allow teachers to get what they need and focus on being instructional teachers and not have to do all that other stuff. I look at it really simply as a person in higher education, our goal as a state-funded higher education institute is to drive the society of our nation and to drive the economy of our nation and to drive the souls of individuals. That's my job as a professor. That's my role. All this other extra stuff that my university does, not what I think that my responsibility is. Now mine at my center is that I'm supposed to be a resource in the state of Tennessee, and it's actually for the country and the world when it comes to, how do we do foundational literacy to set all kids up for success? And then how would we identify and support those with dyslexia and what are we learning about that? But that's 'cause I'm in the center and I've got a specific mandate from the legislature of Tennessee and that's what they've asked me to do. I'm in my position.
Susan Lambert:Yeah . Can you tell our listeners a little bit about the Center for Dyslexia? Because you're doing some amazing work and there is some great resources for educators out there.
Dr. Tim Odegard:Well, talking about those parents, one of them, the person, my benefactor, Kitty Murfree, Katherine Davis Murfree, had a son who just was all bright and exceptional, and they were from one of these nice kind of families that were pillars of the community. And it's like no reason why one of the pillars of the community's kids wouldn't be able to read and spell very well. And she just wanted to get answers and she wasn't getting any answers. And the further that she dug, the less information she could find. So being an empowered person and the pillar of the community of Nashville, and then of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, when she married into this and happened to have Murfree as her last name, which is what the city's named after, pillar of the community to say the least, she went and she lobbied and she got resources and funding for two different things. First it was for an endowed chair position, which I hold here, which is the Dyslexic Studies, with my task being that I was also supposed to, the person that was before me, Dr. Diane Sawyer , not the news journalist, the reading expert—
Susan Lambert:Thanks for that!
Dr. Tim Odegard:— was who it was and she was mandated and she established a resource center and that is the Tennessee Center for the Study and Treatment of Dyslexia. And I would like, I'm very pleased to say that we've been able, through the advent of the widespread distribution of the internet, of the ability for us to telepresent like we are right now, to capture video, we actually serve and help all over the world now with access and resource. But first and first foremost, we're here for Tennesseans. But as a byproduct, it's kinda like as a byproduct of having good stuff for all kids, you can actually help other people. So once you do right for the right people that your stakeholders are, all of a sudden it opens up. And I was strategic in like re... well it's exactly what I just said, I just stripped my center down to its bare bones. What do we really need and how do we build back? And so it's like most cycles of implementation, you build up and then you kinda have to rethink and sometimes you kind of go back, you're always kind of cycling through these ebbs and flows of initial implementation, you know, then to full implementation and then back as you kind of realize that what you thought was gonna work wasn't working kind of in a new context. So it's always been my approach. It's not the only approach, but it's one that I like.
Susan Lambert:And what kinda resources do you have out there on the Center for Dyslexia, for these folks all over the world and for our listeners?
Dr. Tim Odegard:So since I got here, what I really wanted to get out there, and then when we got the pandemic, was we've got e-resources now. We have a video archive of trainings from people like Suzanne Carreker and Elsa Cardenas Hagan, Marcia Henry, Jill Aller and others on a whole host of literacy topics. So those are available free. We have access to print materials, which are open access, that you can come into. Some are parent guides about, well, what could I do with my kid at home to help them with their reading? What could I do with assistive technology at home with my kid? How can I navigate the school system to do that? I will say right now those are all in English language and my center's team is currently exploring what is it gonna mean to be equitable with our multilingual learner communities? And it's not, from our opinion, gonna be simply translating those into some other language. Because accessibility is gonna need to be able to be accessible to them. We have teacher resources, which are English language as well. We have access to lesson frames, we have access to organizational things, we have implementation tools there. We also have resources around workshops and trainings. We're gonna do one on secondary identification and intervention over the summer that you guys can access. Low cost , it's geared towards educators primarily, and we're gonna have it in a high-flex model where you can actually Zoom in and be here virtually—
Susan Lambert:Oh, nice!
:—and have access to it, or you can come to our campus. We also do our large endowed Fox conference that was endowed by the Fox family. That'll be in the next spring. And we're gonna have a topic of language diversity as our topic and our speakers are gonna be Julie Washington, Emily Solari, we're gonna have Tiffany Hogan and Julie Walters and myself. And we're gonna talk about the complexity of language and language minority status and how that is really more inclusive of groups than you might have thought. And how we should really think about, not as after thought, all of our minority language learners when we think about that. They all need to be thought of as kind of similar, and that just because we say that, let's say a little child who might be a multilingual learner would benefit from the same instruction as a child with dyslexia, it doesn't mean that they have dyslexia. And what they need is what they need. We need to teach the kids how to read and spell. And I say if I had a magic wand, whatever prevents us from doing that and allocating resources and protecting that service for children is a problem. We want to prioritize that. And so that's where we're at. So those kind of resources we have. We're also developing a set of modules that institutions of higher education can adopt and use as supplements to bring in to enhance the Science of Reading curriculum they have. So we are currently developing them out to have learning modules around dyslexia, its identification, its intervention. These are geared for higher educators.
Susan Lambert:Great.
Dr. Tim Odegard:It's all mini-lecture-based where you have short mini lectures of 10 to 15. We have a video production crew that's world class here. We have Continue the Learning with resources that we bring in from places like the Reading Rockets, from the Reading League, from IDA, from a host of different things. And then we also are gonna be doing structured, we have structured literacy in this one, as well as the screening identification process for all learners , and we'll be adding to these iteratively as we go through and we're gonna make these available and pilot those in our own College of Education here, and so faculty who are teaching our reading classes in this are gonna be adopted and using those to supplement in. So they're gonna import in the experts and their students will learn from the experts and then they'll have a facilitator guide, just like I would if I adopted a text as an instructor, that will have these resources that they can choose to use. So that's gonna be our initial approach to doing this. And we're reaching out to others and trying to find collaborators. We're talking to a few other universities right now and other centers to come collaboratively and also some not-for-profits. I want to , I envisioned a coalition of the willing coming together to find multiple ways to bring our unique strengths and skills and talents to the betterment of higher education and to elevate the pre-service learning for everybody.
Susan Lambert:Hmm . It sounds like you got a lot going on there.
Dr. Tim Odegard:Yeah. I don't sleep very much.
Susan Lambert:That's amazing!
Dr. Tim Odegard:But you know, this is passion for me. I mean, I was a casualty of something that we shouldn't have been doing in the first place and some people think that we should to this day. From a conceptual standpoint, it makes a beautiful sense and in the perfect world it makes beautiful sense, but it doesn't in practice. And unfortunately I could say the same thing about the instructional discrepancy model, too. It's a beautiful idea, but because of the systems we have in place right now with the instruction we provide and where our gaze is as a society, it doesn't work.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. Well, Dr. Odegard, Tim, thank you so much for joining us. All of this has been so helpful and very interesting. I just wonder in closing, if there's any piece of wisdom or advice you would want our listeners to know.
Dr. Tim Odegard:I would say to the kids out there, It's not easy, but life isn't easy and it's not fair and you don't get to write the rules, but how you play the game and how you persist is what defines you as a human being.
Susan Lambert:Thank you so much for that. Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Tim Odegard, professor of psychology and the Katherine Davis Murfree Chair of Excellence in Dyslexia Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. We'll have links in the show notes to the rich resources from the Center for Dyslexia at Middle Tennessee State University. And please subscribe to Science of Reading: The Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We'll also be grateful if you rated us and left us a review. You can find information on all of Amplify podcasts at amplify.com/hub. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. And for more information on how amplify leverages the Science of Reading, go to amplify.com/ckla. Next time on the show, we're diving into another topic that listeners have been asking about: how writing can best be used to strengthen literacy.
Steve Graham:What we see with exceptional teachers is they have their kids write and at least through the grades one to six, when students write, the quality of their writing gets better and their reading comprehension gets better.
Susan Lambert:That's next time on Science of Reading the podcast .