The Gift of Dyslexic Thinking

 A study conducted in Great Britain examined potential cognitive gifts that people with dyslexia may possess.  It found, that far from being a limiting condition to life success, in fact dyslexic thinkers are our future.

Dictionary.com defines dyslexic thinking as, "“…an approach to problem-solving, assessing information and learning often used by people with dyslexia that involves pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, lateral thinking and interpersonal communications” 

 They possess the innate ability to see the big picture, to have the big ideas that will become the most valuable commodity in our future. 

The idea of dyslexic thinking has become accepted by many industries and businesses as a strength and certainly not as a disabling condition.  LinkedIn has included the term as an option for people to mark as a strength.

Listen to see if your child may be a dyslexic thinker.

Here is a link to a report on the study: https://www.madebydyslexia.org/MBD-Intelligence-5.0-Report.pdf

And here is information on strategies for 2e learners: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1185416.pdf

Thanks to soundimage.org for the free access to the AI generated music used in this podcast (https://soundimage.org/) 

Transcript

Today I'd like to talk about something called dyslexic thinking. 

There has begun to be a re-framing of what dyslexia means that goes beyond a reading disorder to encompass a much wider range of traits, many of which are essential in our changed environment, due to AI.

For this podcast, I am using study that was conducted by an organization called Made by Dyslexia, a charity in Great Britain founded and funded by Richard Branson, the Virgin chair. 

The study is called Dyslexic Thinking 5.0 (a new school of thought, rethinking the intelligence needed in Industry 5.0)

Made by Dyslexia has been doing research on how common cognitive traits may affect seemingly unrelated neurological functioning.  A number of organizations including Microsoft, LinkedIn and GCHQ which is British Intelligence were involved in the study.

The purpose was to look at dyslexia not as a disabling condition but widening the view to include what strengths may be associated with it. And further, they equated those strengths with the most in-demand skills that are and will be most important in the coming decades.

In the context of this study the term dyslexic thinking can be thought of as an umbrella idea that encompasses terms such as twice exceptional or 2e, neurodivergent.  In fact, a dyslexic thinker can be a fluent reader and a highly competent user of language!  It’s a cognitive profile that defies many prior labels.    

The study used as a premise that dyslexic thinkers’ neurological profiles are much more complex and nuanced that had been thought previously.  

Let’s look for a minute at who and what is driving this idea of dyslexic thinking.  

There has been a movement, primarily from tech companies, to better quantify and define the range of skills that dyslexics bring to a work environment.

For instance, Dictionary.com became the first to include “dyslexic thinking” as a definable term.  Their definition is, “…an approach to problem-solving, assessing information and learning often used by people with dyslexia that involves pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, lateral thinking and interpersonal communications”.

A good way to illustrate what this means is to look at the actual learning profiles that are described as dyslexic thinking.  This is a person who is often referred to as having a “spiky profile” on IQ and other assessments.

IQ related areas like processing speed, verbal comprehension and working memory control the speed and accuracy with which a person responds to their environment.  But strong visual spatial skills are very common in this group.

I sometimes see where an IQ score for a child that is 15 points or more higher when their working memory and processing speeds are removed from the equation. 

These in turn determine what type of thinker a person is.  It happens that dyslexic thinkers have very high scores in some of these areas but may also have very low scores in others.

This creates a profile where a student may struggle to become a fluent reader, but is solving complex puzzles, or is a Lego champ, or can look at a design or visual instruction and get it right away.

However, as mentioned, even a fluent reader can be a dyslexic thinker.  The commonality is the spiky profile.  I have met children with very high decoding skills but very low working memory capacities.  The result is proficient reading with little understanding or memory of what was read.

One of the major strengths that this profile exhibits is in the definition, “pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, lateral thinking.”

The lateral thinking part is a critical skill or talent for dyslexic thinkers.  Here’s the definition from Wikipedia, “Lateral thinking is a manner of solving problems using an indirect and creative approach via reasoning that is not immediately obvious. Synonymous to thinking outside the box, it involves ideas that may not be obtainable using only traditional step-by-step logic. The cutting of the Gordian Knot is a classic example.”

This is a person who can look at a problem and think about it in a way that encompasses more possibilities than other people may see, they can use intuition, past knowledge, and being able to see how patterns may play out.

In other words, they are big thinkers who see what others cannot.

Conversely, a linear thinker usually has consistent IQ scores over the range of skills tested.  I was an accountant at one point in my life, and my IQ profile fits that as my scores are in a narrow band.  I am the proverbial “pencil pusher”, the steady thinker, but without the ability see larger patterns.  I tend to see the trees while a dyslexic thinker is looking at the forest.

How this fits in with AI is that it will alleviate the need for dyslexic thinkers to have to be fluent readers, or accurate note takers, or good at arithmetic.

A good example is the improvement in reading pens over the past few years.  What was once a toy for children now is a sophisticated piece of technology.

A reading pen simply reads any text it is run over.  There are all sorts of additions that can make them a virtual reading assistant for the user.

AI generated notes from meetings is another example.  They organize the information from the meeting, has action steps and lots of other helpful features for people who have problems reading, processing and organizational weaknesses.

NEW PART (DELETE PART 2 FOR THIS): Let’s change things up and look at this from a broader perspective for a moment.  The report uses the term Industry 5.0 because the authors believe this is part of the fifth industrial revolution.  However, many people see It as an integral part of the emerging fourth industrial revolution, which is widely recognized.

The fourth industrial revolution is a theory that was proposed by Klaus Schwab who's the founder and executive director of the World Economic Forum.

The basic idea is that the Internet of Things, the interconnectivity of machines into humans through AI means that the mundane tasks of language-based strengths will become more marginalized. 

This has been called the beginning of the imagination age where diverse thinking will be prized more than language-based competence.  

The one area that does not favor some neurodivergent individuals, particularly with autism, is that they may have significant communication challenges.  This makes learning communication and social skills for people with autism significantly more important based on the fact that interpersonal communication skills will have great value. 

What common areas of strengths do dyslexic thinkers possess.  

The first is a strength in analytical thinking.  Indeed.com has a good definition.  “Analytical thinking is a method for analyzing a problem and finding a solution. This is a way for processing and breaking down complex information. Analytical thinking is helpful in identifying cause and effect relationships and making connections between two factors.”  

Creative thinking.  Creative thinking includes areas like risk taking, flexibility, and open-mindedness., Resilience, flexibility and agility.

Motivation and self-awareness.  Motivation comes from having a vision, a purpose, an idea that needs to be explored.  Self-awareness among dyslexic thinkers is the ability to put their challenges into compartments.  This allows them to make the accommodations needed to make them less of a problem, which allows a greater concentration on the big picture.

Curiosity and lifelong learning.  This means being willing to learn and improve how you do what you do.  Every task can provide some information or knowledge that can useful, and these people take advantage of it.

Now, how are schools handling this new and extremely important trend.  In the United States, at least, there is little evidence of a recognition of the need at the school district level, and that, of course, is where change really happens.

The report says, “Our education systems prioritize easily tested skills like rote memorization and recall; spelling grammar and punctuation; but these are the skills most likely to be taken over by AI”.

What dyslexic thinkers need is an environment that recognizes the priorities we’ve been discussing, not the skills we are teaching in the way we are teaching.

A 2021 reportby the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found creativity among 15-year-olds to be lower than that of 10-year-olds.

Andreas Schleicher, Director of Education and Skills at the OECD, warns that current education systems prioritize creating robots over nurturing human abilities. He says the world must focus on human skills that complement AI, creating “first class humans, not second-class robots”.

He states: “They are what make us human in a world of artificial intelligence… Our assessment systems must make the invisible visible — the creativity, the curiosity, the empathy, the trust, the persistence, visible and tangible for educators”. These are the skills the world needs, and these are the skills that dyslexics are hard-wired with.”  

Based on the results, it found that when students are encouraged and supported to develop their own solutions to problems, they form a deeper connection with the subject and are more likely to find purpose and satisfaction in their learning journey.

So, what to do about this if your neurodivergent child is in a traditional program, or even a non-traditional one that focuses on the old ideas of the past century’s educational practices?

Many of the concepts below were developed through Universal Design for Learning (UDL) research and practice.  I have other podcasts that look at UDL and there are lots of resources online, particularly CAST, which is the primary research organization for UDL.  UDL is the most efficient way to include the ideas we’ve talked about into your school. This is because the effectiveness of UDL is widely recognized and is becoming more common in more schools.

  | Strategy | Application in educational settings
 | Emphasize the strengths of dyslexic thinkers  first | Provide opportunities for student choice; allow the student multiple ways to respond to new content
 | Address the needs of  dyslexic thinkers | Explicitly link new content to previous learning; teach organizational skills
 | Support the social-emotional needs of  dyslexic thinkers | Allow additional time for task completion to alleviate anxiety; help dyslexic thinkers develop self-advocacy; teach stress management techniques
 | Recognize the difference between of dyslexic thinkers and gifted underachievers | After assessment data and other evidence is gathered, consider if the student is a dyslexic thinker or a gifted underachiever; provide the appropriate support(s) including counseling support, learning support, and/or gifted support.  A gifted underachiever usually has a narrow band of IQ scores, just at a higher level than the average person.
 | Collaborate and communicate to provide optimal support of dyslexic thinkers | Invite gifted support personnel and disability support personnel to plan meetings; create a balance of activities that will offer both challenge and remediation

 In conclusion, if you are the parent of one of these kids, I would encourage you to educate yourself and them on the hidden gifts they may have. If your child has an IEP, take a look at the last triennial report and learn how to read the IQ and academic testing, particular.

There are lots of sources online that can help you interpret the information.  We at Matrix have a training that explains how to interpret scores and how they relate to real world experience.