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A different shaped heart conversations about disability awareness
How A Dyslexic Researcher Turned Law School Lessons Into A Breakthrough Method For Reading And Writing
Russell Van Brocklen Sunday, November 2, 2025
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On A Winning Heart today (Sunday, November 2, 2025), Best-Selling Author, Win C welcomes Russell Van Brocklen. Dyslexia touches as many as 15–20 % of all learners, yet most families still hear “wait and see.” Russell flip that script. As the Dyslexia Professor, Russell translate structured-literacy methods proven most effective for struggling readers into bite-size actions parents can use tonight. Your audience leaves knowing exactly why multisensory routines beat generic worksheets and how to start seeing progress before the next report card. To learn more about Russell visit https://dyslexiaclasses.com/
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Welcome to a winning hunt, you guys. Today with me I have Russell, and I'm gonna let Mr. Russell take it away and share his story.
SPEAKER_00:Hi everyone. Uh my name's Russell Van Brocklin. I'm a New York State dyslexia, uh New York State Senate dyslexia funded researcher. And my story, the most interesting part starts when uh I was finishing up college in the late 90s, and I wanted to know how laws are created, not some course I wanted to know. So I signed up for the New York State Assembly internship, and I went there and I said, Here's my neuropsychological evaluation. I have a first grade reading and writing level. And the director just looked at that and said, This is not going to work. This will not work with this internship, how it's set up. So he went to the speaker's office, they formed a committee, and they decided to move me from the legislative office building over to the Capitol in the Majority Leaders Program and Council's office because they had three administrative assistants who could help with my reading and writing, uh especially my writing. And it was much better for me because that was a graduate internship, much better. So, did that for the academic portion? We had to do a major research paper. Standard accommodation for me back then was to do a very long presentation with a tough QA section. At the end, they recommended 15 credits of A minus. Goes back to the State University Center at Buffalo, to their political science department. They reviewed the accommodations and said, We don't like this. So here's your 15 credits of F. Do you have any idea what that does to a gray point average?
SPEAKER_01:Wow. Wow. That's yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So in now remember, I'm the only undergraduate who's in the Majority Leaders Program and Council's office. They already had a grad student there. So I'm treated like a graduate student. So I was offered a lot of really interesting jobs once I was gonna, once I finished college. But instead of doing that, I was supposed to be a bureaucrat for the New York State government. Instead of doing this, I wasn't supposed to do this. So I got so sick and tired of the discrimination that I asked my professors, the ones that I uh that I trusted, how do I go to where do I go to grad school to force myself to learn to read and write so I can show other students? They said law school. So I went to law school. I went to see a dyslectic professor called Professor Warner. Second day contracts, he calls on me. And this is where I've learned later that dyslectic students, once we enter graduate school, we own the place day one. And this is that that was critical for how I help other dyslectic students overcome the reading and writing issues. So he calls on me. What they typically do is they use the Socratic method. They would call on a student, they wouldn't know the answer, they'd ask them a few more questions, embarrass the kid, move on to the next one until you eventually assimilate it. Didn't happen to me. He asked me questions, I answered. Then he asked harder questions, I answered. Then he's looking confused because he's not putting me down. And then we start getting really in, I mean, really intense. I'm yelling at him, he's yelling at me. It goes on five minutes, ten minutes. Finally, at 15 minutes, he said, Russell, you couldn't be any more correct. In the interest of time, I have to move on. I learned to read within the month, I learned to write within the next couple of years. To help other dyslectics not go through the hell I went through, I said, okay, we got these, let's take the ideal. Let's see what we can do with the best students and the best teacher. So I focused on dyslectic students who were highly intelligent, highly motivated, juniors and seniors. And what we found out is that they were writing at the middle school level. So we took their best teacher at the Averill Park Central School District, Susan Ford, and with one class period a day for the school year, the students increased their writing to average range of entering graduate school students. Not high school, not college, entering graduate students. Cost New York State less than 900 bucks a kid. All of them went on to college, all graduated GPAs of 2.5 to 3.6.
SPEAKER_01:I love it. I absolutely love it. Now, I presume, based on that knowledge, you're an entrepreneur, you work for yourself because I can tell you work for yourself because I'm excuse my French, you were sick and tired of the bullshit.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I was tired of the discrimination. And what um when I presented this material down in uh New York City, uh, they asked a very interesting question. Does this work for normal kids and younger kids? And I'm like, no way. This is because then they said that I then I needed to adapt it. So just you know why this was so successful is if you look at a book called Overcoming Dyslexia, second edition, from Sally Shea, which from Yale, she's a medical doctor. The back part of the dyslexic brain has basically almost nothing going on, but the front part is about two and a half times overactive. That deals with two things articulation followed by word analysis. So articulation, and then I use the graduate records exam analytical writing section. Analytical articulation, about the same thing. That was the breakthrough. But when I'm dealing with normal kids, I had to swap that out to word analysis followed by articulation. And what I would like to do is just kind of walk you through that process. So you're this is something that your kids that your fan that your listeners can apply tonight. So do you know any dyslectic uh elementary school kids who are writing what appear to be randomly placed misspelled words? Do you know any of those kids at all, or not really?
SPEAKER_01:I did. I did. Okay, I was a preschool teacher for 10 years, and I did I was in the special ed system myself for god knows 20 years. And so I did know about this luck there.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so tell me the make up a name for the kid who is writing randomly placed misspelled words. What's their made-up name?
SPEAKER_01:Let's say Joey.
SPEAKER_00:Joey. Okay, the first thing we need to do is find out what Joey's speciality is, his area of extreme interest and ability. So for Joey, what's his favorite thing to do?
SPEAKER_01:His favorite thing to do is play soccer.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, soccer. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna write out 10 things that Joey really, really likes, 10 things that he really, really dislikes. So now what we're going to do is we're gonna have you go to uh a laptop computer, not an iPad, not an iPhone, certainly not handwriting, and you're gonna type out hero plus sign. What are we talking about? And then Joey's gonna copy that. That's okay. Professor James Collins, strategies for struggling writers, default writing strategy of copying. Okay, so then what you're going to do is you're gonna exchange. Remember, we have hero plus sign, what are we talking about? We're gonna swap out hero for Joey. Joey plus sign, what are we talking about? Then we're gonna swap out what are we talking about for his favorite things top on his list, what he likes, which is soccer. Joey plus sign soccer. See how we got there?
SPEAKER_01:I love the analogy. I do see how we got there.
SPEAKER_00:But here I am. Remember, you've been a teacher for years. I'm going to try to fool you by asking you the simplest questions you will ever be asked. And then at the end of this, you're probably going to have an epiphany on what dyslexia really is. Do you think I can fool you with the simplest questions ever? Here we go. Here we go. So here's the question: we have to swap out the plus sign for a word to complete the sentence. So we have Joey plus sign soccer. So here's my question: Does Joey like or dislike soccer? Like exactly, you did it exactly. Perfect. Now go ahead and create the sentence. What is it?
SPEAKER_01:Joey likes soccer.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, you made the mistake. Do you see what you did wrong?
SPEAKER_01:I did. I do.
SPEAKER_00:What did you do wrong?
SPEAKER_01:I put like in.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, well, let's be very specific. Now that you know what you did wrong, what's the sentence?
SPEAKER_01:Joey dislikes soccer.
SPEAKER_00:No, you know, it's his favorite thing. He said he loves soccer. That's not the mistake. Do you see the mistake you made, or do I have you completely confused?
SPEAKER_01:You love me completely confused.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. So this is to everybody. You're about to have an epiphany on what dyslexia really is. When I asked you, does Joey like or dislike soccer? You said it exactly correct. Like, because that's what I asked. Yeah. But when I asked you to put that into the sentence, you did what almost every educated person does. You added an S to make it a proper sentence. Joey doesn't know how to add the S. Oh.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. I get it.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so Joey would have said Joey liked soccer. Now, if we were millionaires and we used one of those private schools at$75,000 a year, they would use an Orton Willingham multi-sensory structured language approach. What the heck is that? Well, it simply means you're going to see, touch, hear, multiple senses to try to get this to work. And yes, if Bill Gate had grandkids with dyslexia, this is exactly what he would be doing, and he'd be writing the check for$75,000 a year just for tuition.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And that's for four or five years. I'm thinking people don't, most people don't have house money to solve this. So what we do is we need a better way. So what we do is I'm going to ask Joey to read what he wrote out loud, Joey likes soccer. And I'd be like, Joey, does that sound generally correct? He's going to say, no, I'm going to say fix it. Joey likes soccer. We practice that at least 10 times for 10 things he likes, 10 things he doesn't like until it's correct. It's driven in. So what we're doing here is do you see how going through that process, it's a very simple form of word analysis.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:So what I've done is I've moved learning this process from the back part of Joey's brain, which has next to nothing going on, and Gen Ed students are going crazy, to the front part of his brain where he has two and a half times the neuroactivity.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Give you a little hint, he learns a lot faster that way. All right. Next, we have to do uh articulation. So we then we go because, and the reasons are articulation. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay, so give me a very simple reason why Joey likes soccer that's age appropriate.
SPEAKER_01:To kick to kick the ball.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. Joey likes soccer because he likes to kick the ball.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Now, do you see how we got a whole mess of misspelled words there? I do. Okay. So how do we fix this? We ask Joey to put a period down, and then we tell him if there's a major, and I mean major grammatical mistake, he's got to retype the sentence. Only do that for horrifically bad major grammatical errors. Number two, if there's a spelling mistake, he's got to retype the entire sentence. And so what's Joey going to do? He's going to say, I'm not going to make that mistake again. And he does. And then he keeps saying that and he keeps making the mistakes. So he's going to start concentrating harder and harder until around nine to thirteen times he could be concentrating so incredibly hard that you can actually see sweat coming down his forehead sometimes. And eventually he's not going to make that mistake. You make sure he gets it correct, and then you move on to the second like. And you keep doing that for the 10 likes and 10 dislikes until they're all correct. Then you go on to reason one and reason two, same thing. Reason one, reason two, and reason three. Okay? Now, what you've done, if this is a fifth grader, you're talking two to six grade. Typically. If you're talking about a third grader, it's the entire semester. But this is something that parents can do at home. All right. And you're going, and if the kid's writing randomly placed misspelled words, their writing is normally around kindergarten, beginning, first grade level. This will increase it to the end of second, beginning third grade level. Also, I don't teach reading. If a student can write it, they can read it. So again, if the student can write it, they can read it. So the reading tends to come behind it by about six months. Make sense? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Definitely.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. So basically, that is the third step of the model. Word analysis followed by articulation. But this comes back to the problem that I had when I went from the super motivated kids to typical students. I couldn't get them to do anything. Motivation of zero. And then I remember back to my time in law school, where I was, it just so happened I was really into it. And I was like, okay, I went and I talked to other successful professors, and they said, just about always, they were top of their class day one or soon thereafter, because grad school is their speciality. So I said, okay, let's focus on the kids' speciality, their area of extreme interest and ability. My favorite student I like to talk about with this is um uh I'm sorry, my favorite student that I like to talk to about this is Casey. I want everybody to know I never saw this before, Casey. I will never see this again. It's a one-off, just completely unique. Why? The most motivated kid ever. Casey was fifth grade, 10 years old, she turned 11 over the summertime, reading at the second grade level. So I assigned her the rise of theater Roosevelt, which she she wanted to learn about Theater Roosevelt. It's a book that's 900 pages that won the Pulitzer. It's grade the grade level is 10th grade to first year college, depending on who you ask. I told Casey, well, here's a modified way to do the reading. Maybe you do this 20 minutes a night a couple of times a week. Not Casey. She did two to three hours a night, six to seven nights a week. That's what that's just what she did. For six months, her mom, the parents could afford me for an hour a month. So I worked with her for 15 minutes a week. This was all her. At the end of the six months, she could read every word she was reading at the tenth grade level. So then I decided, hmm, let's see what happens if I gave her a book she doesn't like. Like by far the most popular book I teach is Walt Disney, The Triumph of the American Imagination, because the kids go to Disney World and they want to find out what's the Disney magic. It's two universal things. So she's going through that book for a couple of months. Her mom gave permission, and she says, I hate this. And I said, you know, how much does your motivation drop, Casey? And she said, about 50%. When I'm dealing with normal kids, it's about 75 to 80%. So let's recap that. These students like to spend all their time, you know, six months, a year, two years, on one book. The school wants to do a whole bunch of books outside of their speciality. So for most kids, you're down 75-80% right at the top. Yeah. Number two, the schools generally teach from the general to the specific. For a dyslectic, that's like grabbing fog. There's nothing to grab onto. We need to, we can't ask a dyslectic, what effect did Martin Luther King's famous I Have a Dream Speech have in the 1960s civil rights movement? It's like grabbing fog. Nothing there. We need to ask a specific to a general question. What personally compelled Martin Luther King to want to give his famous speech? And this tends to get a lot of people quite confused. Let me show you why. This is so critically important. If you ask a dyslexic in their specialty, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed? Key question, but with little to no organization, they're going to say yes. So what we have to do is to force the brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. So again, it's to force the brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. So this is again during the intervention period to bring the kid to grade level. We focus on their speciality, their area of extreme interest and ability. We focus on teaching them from the specific to the general, and then word analysis followed by articulation. How successful is this? I to answer that, I went and I found a volunteer parent. Her name is Kimberly. We met on December 27th, 2024. She's homeschooling her son Reed. She just spent 700 bucks to have the state of Ohio test her kids. Reed was reading and writing at the beginning third grade level. So if he were in public school for the next for the rest of the school year, they would have expected him to increase by two to two and a half points. That didn't happen. Kimberly spent an hour and a half a week with him. I taught her for half an hour a week. And at the end of that, Reed was increased by 20 points. Not two, two and a half, 20. His reading went from the 11th percentile to the 65th. His writing from the 4th to the 64th. This is the important point. Over the summer, Reed's friends came to him, said, We want you in public school for social reasons to be with us, to be with us at lunch in class. If this was January, they would have put him in special ed away from his friends. Unhappy kid. Now he's in sixth grade. He's do because Kimberly did what every parent dreams, and now he's doing just fine.
SPEAKER_01:Isn't that amazing? That is amazing. Now, I have a question for you. You have dyslexia yourself.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, I have the worst case of dyslexia you'll ever see. New York State specifically got this tested by a SUNY distinguished professor in psychology. I have a base reading and writing level at the first grade level that I can jump up to grad level when I turn my system on.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. Jeez. So you know the expansive first grade level turn the system on, jump up to grad grad school level.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And this is something I had to develop myself. I was that dyslectic kid, and I had to come up with all my own solutions. I just happened to connect it. One of the things that the New York State Senate required, so did the education department, is I had to connect it with current research. That was connecting it to Professor James Collins' book, Strategies for Struggling Writers. I took it from mild dyslexia to severe dyslexia. He approved that in under two weeks, and then I connected it to Yale's research in overcoming dyslexia.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. Good for you, Chief. That's a lot, but good for you. Now, what was your biggest struggle as a kid?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I couldn't take notes. I had to remember everything. I would go to class and they would be talking about uh, you know, what started World War II, and then the question would come up on a test or quiz weeks or months later, and I had to say, look back, oh, this is what the professor said at class, and I would just write it out what they said. Yeah. And they thought that was freaky because how do we how did I remember something that they said, you know, two months ago? And I said, Well, I don't have other options, I can't write this out.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Wow. So as we wrap this interview up, I know you have a ton of questions for me.
SPEAKER_00:Uh well, um, as far as I'm just happy that as a teacher, did this help you understand dyslexia any better?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. This help help me understand dyslexia. And I hope it helped my audience understand dyslexia.
SPEAKER_00:Well, the main thing that I wanted to get across you is like, remember when I asked, you know, does does this Joey like or dislike, you know, soccer? And when you add, I mean, I I was impressed that you actually answered it correctly, like. Because most people don't do that. They do they add the they add the yes. But when you you put it into a sentence, you are so trained to do it correctly, to do it properly, you automatically added the yes. Yeah. But that's the problem Joey has. So the the what I gave you there, does it sound generally correct? That's how we get the the grammar to autocorrect. Because when I did my original program, remember, I'm dealing with most advanced kids there are, the teacher, Susan's Ford spent very little time on spelling and grammar. It autocorrected from a mess to the clean at graduate level. So then the other one, having them retype it until it's correct, okay, and having them just keep doing that until they eventually get it right. When they're thinking when the more they get it wrong, they say, I'm not gonna make that mistake, and they make the mistake, the more that they focus and hyperconcentrate. That's where that magic happens. So now you don't have to be stuck for years trying to do spelling and grammar. Now, does it work perfectly? No. It's gonna get you to the point where Gen Ed teacher can start to do their job. How do you permanently fix it? You're not gonna like this solution, but this is the best one I found. You go to Amazon, you find the 10 or 20 most common grammatical mistakes that college students make, something like that. And then you spend literally, you tell a typical kid two to three times they get the rule. Dyslectic, it's 50, 100, 200 times. And then you slowly go through that list over a couple of years, and then typically what I find is I don't get them to uh basically to a uh B level in college, somewhere usually 2.5 to 3.6, usually we're under 3.0. And I tell parents you're gonna have to be happy with that.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. That was that is amazing. And that was amazing because yeah, dyslexia is a woman for those hard disabilities, a physical disability is a hard disability, but I can't imagine having I think my disability is hard, but I can't imagine having dyslexia and screwing up writing, screwing up the English language.
SPEAKER_00:Right, but remember, I just had Kimberly did this in a little under six months at home. She did she did this faster than the top than the dyslexic private schools. And if you'd like to learn more how to do that, it's simply just go to dyslexiaclasses.com. That's the dyslexiaclasses.com. There's a button there that says download free guide. Just answer a few questions. You'll get a document that says the three reasons your child's having trouble in school due to dyslexia. And then the most important thing is actually go and click on the link to actually set up a 30-minute appointment so I can speak with you and your child so I can find out what your kid's speciality is and find their book and audiobook. I tried writing how to do this, I can't do it. I got to do this with the kid exactly in order to make this work. So just go ahead and do that. It caught it doesn't cost you anything, and you will leave knowing what what book your your child should be using to overcome the reading and writing issues.
SPEAKER_01:Wow, amazing, amazing, Mr. Russell, amazing that you have done all this, and I hope you guys enjoyed another fabulous episode. I certainly did. I learned a lot, and I hope that you guys go to Russell's site and support his work and support your child in their educational journey because if you don't know any anything, you might as well start somewhere. And when it comes to this lexia, Russell is one of the experts out there. So I hope you guys enjoyed another fabulous episode. I certainly did. I learned a lot. And so where can people find you, Russell, if they wanted to find you?
SPEAKER_00:Uh, best thing to do is again just go to dyslexia classes plural. That's dyslexiaclasses.com. There's a button there that says download free guide. Click on it, answer the three questions that we ask, get your downloaded guide. But most importantly, go and set up as the appointment with me online so we can have a video conference. I can walk your child, I can answer them a few questions, find their specialty, and walk them through and say, is this really how you want to overcome your reading and writing concerns? And the vast majority of time it's yes, and there's no cost to that.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. So I hope you guys go to Lussell's website if you think your child has dyslexia. Now, could a doctor diagnose dyslexia?
SPEAKER_00:Well, there are a few MDs that know about it. Typically, it's psychologists. And if you're in New York State and you think your kid has dyslexia, go to your pediatrician have with notes from the from your teacher, from the kit your kid's teacher, and have them submit it to the insurance company because in New York, your insurance companies are supposed to pay$5,000 towards the neuropsych. Anything over that, it's on you. But you can you should be able to find that, and that'll give you the best possible information about where your kid is. But just understand what that is. It's a PhD psychologist with a lot of additional training, and it's like two full days of testing, and then they got to write it up. You're basically hiring them for most of the week. But that'll tell you exactly what's going on with your child.
SPEAKER_01:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:If not, if you don't want to spend, if you're not in New York, you don't want to spend the$5,000, set up a time to speak with me through that link I told you about. I ask two questions, and I can get you uh information that says if your kids ADD, ADHD, or mildly dyslectic or severely dyslectic. Or if they're severely dyslectic and highly intelligent and motivated, there's one more question and it becomes very clear. The kids are like, How did you know that about me? So I reduce the and that that general idea tells you how you should how your kids should be educated to get them to grade level and beyond.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. So I hope you guys really take to heart what Russell's saying, and I please. Russell's time and I appreciate you guys' time and listening. And I as I said, I hope you take um time to understand what Russell's trying to teach here. And we'll have Russell's information in the show notes. I'll put Russell's information in the show notes. And as I said, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Thank you, you guys. And I hope you will tune in next time. Thanks to you guys. Bye you guys.
