Customer Reviews

The Shut-Down Learner: Helping Your Academically Discouraged Child

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The Shut-Down Learner is a "must read" for parents, teachers at all levels, and for shut-down learners themselves. It offers great examples of shut-down learners who have overcome hurdles and become quite successful. The Shut-Down Learner is inspirational and, in my book, required reading for all who have a heart and care about others.

This book is groundbreaking and will be exceptionally helpful to the parents of and children who are shut-down learners. It offers new hope for struggling readers who show signs of dyslexia and children with ADD, who can't pay attention. Selznick offers a resource for parents and teachers that promotes insight and understanding, relieves guilt, and provides strategies for intervention. Many times a visually spatially oriented child is one of the kids who become discouraged in school. Dr. Selznick has identified shut-down learners and offered great insight into their challenges and accomplishments.

As a Shut-Down Learner myself, I am enlightened and encouraged. I now know that I am not alone. My challenges are actually shared by, and are the norm for so many others like me, who Dr. Selznick has described in detail. I wish I was aware of Dr. Selznick's findings and innovative approach to "me being me", when I was a kid!

The Shut-Down Learner takes the "disability" out of the phrase, learning disability. Dr. Selznic shows how not every child learns the same, but unfortunately is forced to be taught with methodologies that don't work for the spatial learner. Self-esteem falls when a child sees his friends "getting it". So these bright gifted children are left to feel stupid, not only because they can't learn the way others are learning, but because the expectations of the teachers are that they should be learning. A great book to understand your child..and to begin advocating for his educational needs.

I'm the parent of a teenage son with ADD. He's always hated everything about school, and is turned off and shut down to learning. I always felt that ADD wasn't the only explanation for what was going on, and I've searched for answers for a long time. I recently came across this book, and devoured it in 2 days. It's WONDERFUL - engagingly written, and so helpful. It has given me so much clarity about my son's situation, and strategies to help him. I recommend it to any parent who has a child with learning issues, who struggles with school, who hates learning. A must-read.

Reading this book has helped me understand the children, friends, and even old girlfriends that have been in my life throughout the years. The Shut Down Learner uses plain, down to earth, non-technical language, to describe, and relate to people who are more spatial and creative thinkers, but have problems with reading and writing. As I read this book, the judgments and prejudices I have had toward certain adults and children in my life started to fall away.

Our society praises book smarts and conceptual learning over street smarts and hands on, experiential learning. In almost all schools there is really no place for the type of kids Dr. Selznick writes about. This book starts to make room for these kids. Every parent, teacher, and school administrator should read this book. Every person studying to become a teacher should read this book. The Shut Down Learner will help parents and teachers identify and successfully teach these types of kids before major problems develop. And, finally any person who feels that they are or once was a Shut Down Learner should read this book.

The layout of the book is progressive, starting with a thorough description of the Shut Down Learner, then going on to describe approaches of how to relate and connect with Shut Down Learners. Finally, there are strategies and suggestions about how to successfully proceed with improving the school and family life of the Shut Down Learner and his or her parents. In particular, I really liked the profiles of actual people. I would have liked to read even more of these type of profiles, because they really bring alive the topic of the book. Also, the resources at the end of the book are very helpful.

I read this book in one sitting and thought it was wonderful. I can imagine so many other parents feeling like they finally understand why their child is struggling in school after reading this book. The style is very down to earth and in plain English, easy to comprehend. Dr. Selznick provides straight-forward guidance in helping both parents and children cope and get back on track in school. The illustrations add a lot too. This book should be required reading for all teachers in the early grades.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Having a lego-learner for a son, I really understood a lot of what he was saying. However, I didn't find it very informative in the way of helping me know how to help my son. It did make reference to several "wonderful" programs, but very vague, passing mention of them in general. It helped me connect better with my son, but not help him learn any better. :(

The Shut-Down Learner by Richard Selznick, PhD, is a very parent friendly book written for parents and teachers of children and students with learning disabilities, primarily dyslexia.

The Shut down learner is a visual-spatial child that has a unique set of strengths and weaknesses. Dr. Selznick refers to these children as "the Lego kid." The Lego kid does not succeed in school because others do not understand and value his strengths and everyone focuses too much on his weaknesses.

The weaknesses of these children are very low linguistic-verbal intelligence. They struggle considerably with reading, spelling and writing. Despite attempts from special educators and remedial teachers to help these children fail in these areas of weakness, the progress for these children is slow and often even unrecognizable.

The strengths of the Shut-Down Learner are excellent spatial and visual perceptual organization skills. This attribute is his most defining indicator and the author stresses this strength throughout the entire book. The SDL child can visualize things well. They learn through visualization and not through language.

The High-Spatial Characteristics include:

* Lego kid
* Loves puzzles
* Engages for hours with hands-on-activities
* Likes taking things apart to see how they work
* Enjoys hooking things up, such as entertainment systems
* Good awareness of visual detail
* Excellent visual recall
* Does well with psychological assessment tasks that involve spatial analysis
* Enjoys doing tasks and is movement-based

The curriculum is a major obstacle for these students. They will not thrive under the regular curriculum because of their severe language acquisition deficiencies. Dr. Selznick recommends Orton-Gillingham remediation as part of the student's education. This instruction will help these children overcome the worst of their deficiencies. The SDL child will also need heavy focus on the areas in which he can excel and have confidence in. These are the areas of visual-spatial and kinesthetic intelligences.

I did enjoy reading this book and would recommend it to parents and teachers of struggling readers. I do want to mention though, that not all children with dyslexia and learning disabilities are gifted in the visual-spatial skills. I work with many students with dyslexia who do not perform well in visual-spatial tasks and do not enjoy building with legos or taking engines apart.

Multisensory learning is the key factor and will benefit struggling readers. We all learn a different way, and we each have our own set of strengths and weaknesses. It is so important to always point this out to our children.

Dr Selznick comes across as someone who truly cares about helping children (read his heartfelt dedication to his father) and who wishes to make readily available his years dedicated to the education, assessment, and treatment of children who struggle with learning.

This book is a wonderful resource for both parents and teachers. Dr. Selznick connects with the reader from page one in a style that is more conversational than clinical. Easy to read and easy to understand, he offers clear cut, specific signs that will enable parents and teachers to pinpoint learning problems. He also spells out easy to implement tips that will enable parents to work with their children, keeping a positive attitude, and leading to better communication. Parents who understand how to help their children will be in a good position to advocate for their children with teachers and school administrators.

Dr. Selznick points out that as many as 40% of children experience learning problems. Based on that statistic, it makes good sense that The Shut Down Learner should be required reading for all education majors, not to mention it will be a valuable resource for any parent.

The Shut-Down Learner is a must read for all parents and teachers. Dr. Selznick provides valuable information in a straight forward approach with a light and easy style of writing. I feel that this book is especially important for ALL teachers to read. To me, as a reading tutor, it was very motivating and provided wonderful ideas that I could not wait to use on my shut-down learners!!!

I strongly feel that the Shut-Down Learner should be added to a Special Education course curriculum. It will provide new and seasoned teachers with a down to earth approach that will teach very valuable lessons. These lessons will continue to encourage both the teacher and the student for a life-time of success!!!!!!!!!

FINALLY, a book that gives a name to many of the kids I've worked with over the years! A must read for ALL teachers. The book provides insight into understanding the psyche of these "shut-down" kids. A must read for parents of struggling readers - the earlier the better! Strategies and interventions for parents to help their kids before they completely "shut-down". This down-to-earth book is written with honesty, sensitivity and a little humor and most importantly HOPE for these academically discouraged kids.