Episode 8: The Right Way to Write

Bonnie Singer, Ph.D. is the Founder/CEO of Architects For Learning, where she trains educators and consults with schools world-wide and she directs a staff in the Boston area that provides academic intervention, assessment, and consultation services. With expertise in language, literacy, and learning, she is passionate about working with students who struggle academically, especially with written expression. In her 30 years of clinical practice as a speech-language pathologist, she has worked with students of all ages, developing practical approaches to instruction that foster the development of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and executive function skills. In partnership with Dr. Anthony Bashir, she developed EmPOWER™, a method for teaching expository writing, and Brain Frames®, graphic scaffolds for language, literacy, teaching, and learning. Her research and publications focus on the relationship between spoken and written language, cognition, spatial processing, and self-regulated learning.

Website

• ArchitectsForLearning.com

Todd: All right. Welcome back to Full PreFrontal. Engaging in some amazing conversations exposing the mysteries of executive functions. I am here with our host, Sucheta Kamath. Good morning, Sucheta. Another exciting conversation on tap today with Dr. Bonnie Singer. What’s in store for us today?

Sucheta: So Todd, I have a favorite café in Paris. It’s called Bread and Roses. When I visit Paris, which I have done now six, seven times, I always make a point to stop there. A few years ago, I was there for breakfast and a lovely, lovely couple came in and sat next to me. We struck up a conversation and turns out, that was David McCall. He’s a celebrated Pulitzer Prize winner and has received many, many awards including National Book Award and Francis Parkman Award. He has written famous books like “Truman” and “Great Bridge,” “The Path Between the Seas.” Interesting thing about him is he’s one of those few authors whose books have never been out of print. His writing style and his approach to writing always has intrigued me. I wanted to share with our listeners today, he’s known for something called a Bookshop. It’s a little shed that he has on Martha’s Vineyard which he uses for his writing. It’s an interesting setup. It has only few, few, few things. He has a royal typewriter there, a green banker’s lamp, and a desk. In this day and age, he does not have any telephone there. There is no running water. David McCall describes or says, nothing good was ever written in a large room. He uses that place to flesh out his writing, his arts, and gets himself organized. It’s funny that he instruct his family members as they approach the shed to whistle so that they can alert him that they are coming.

I just found that very interesting because we’re getting ready to talk to Bonnie, who is an expert in writing and how it relates to executive function. And here’s a famous writer who talks about his own writing process and he has come to understand how complex the process is and what works for him. He has tweaked it. He has shaped it. He also gives an interesting story about his process of writing about Theodore Roosevelt. And in his book, he was writing about his asthma and he came to discover that there were a lot of missing pieces and there was no indication how Theodore Roosevelt developed asthma. So David McCall talks about this being a puzzle that he tries to put together. And he looks at what diary entries were made. He talks to main physicians. He goes back and investigates. So executive functions are those skills that go into putting that puzzle together where you have gathered information, you had to pull in together, you had to organize it, you have sequence it, and then you have to create a narrative that explains the cause and effect relationship or it explains your understanding. That understanding needs to be explained in a way that it becomes very simple, clear, and crisp for the reader.

So I’m very excited that we are getting into this conversation about writing and executive functions and language and its relationship to creating an output that converses what your own thoughts are.

Todd: Well, Sucheta, that’s fascinating. I’m jealous that you had a lovely Parisian breakfast with David. I do have had the pleasure of meeting him many years ago. I’ve read a bunch of his books. My favorite story about him, you mentioned his typewriter, the old fashioned typewriter. Someone went to him once and said, “Boy, you could write so much faster if you used a modern computer,” and he said, “No, no, no, no. In fact, I don’t want to write faster. I would still like to write more slowly.” Just a fascinating character. I have always been an admirer of David McCall. All right. This promises to be yet another great conversation with Dr. Bonnie Singer. I’m very much looking forward to it. Let’s get to it. Here is Sucheta’s second conversation with Dr. Bonnie Singer.

Sucheta: Today, a fellow speech language pathologist and an expert in language, literacy, and learning, Dr. Bonnie Singer, will be joining us. She is the founder and CEO of the Architects for Learning, where she trains educators and consults with schools worldwide. Dr. Singer received her Bachelors and Masters and Doctoral Degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders from Emerson College, where she has also worked as instructor and clinical supervisor. In addition, she currently holds an adjunct teaching position in graduate and professional studies at Endicott College. For her entire career, Dr. Singer had been interested in the ways in which language and cognition interrelate to support and constraint language, learning, reading, and writing. With her partner, Dr. Anthony Bashir, she developed EmPOWER: A Method for Teaching Expository Writing and Brain Frames: Graphic Scaffolding for Language, Literacy, Teaching, and Learning. Dr. Singer has authored numerous publications and methods for assessing and teaching writing, reading, listening, speaking, executive functions, self-regulation, higher thinking, and critical literacy. Dr. Singer is committed to the vision that students know how to tackle what comes their way in school and live to the best of their abilities. I can’t wait to talk to Bonnie Singer.

Welcome to the show, Bonnie. Once again, it’s great pleasure to have you for the second time. This time, I’m really hoping that we will be able to address some strategies and you expert experience in this field. So Bonnie, as you know, in general, the academic success depends on good strong listening, speaking skills, reading and writing skills. But above all, they really depend on the executive functions that are the backdrop to collaborate and orchestrate all those skills that showcase academic capacity. But what never really happens is getting specific instruction to learn to learn these skills. Do you have any thoughts about that? Why is educational system not in a place where it offers learning to learn training?

Singer: I can’t really speak for the entire educational system but I would say that these are just skills that in your typical person develop without having to be taught. Our neurology is developing, we’re getting more myelin on our axons in our brain, all the way through school. And so tom some degree, just by virtue of being alive and a developing organism, our executive function capacity is continuing to develop all the way through elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and into our mid-20s. I think that our executive functions are shaped by our experiences for certain. And so if you have people in your life who are engaging with you around the use of strategies and talking with you about how to approach tasks in efficient ways and how to develop systems for yourself to manage the complexities of life that get thrown at you, that helps you manage the complexities of life and have some fallback strategies.

So schools for a really long time have been arming kids with planners and telling them to write down their homework and engage in those kinds of project management skills that are necessary for later life and success vocationally. But the specifics, the nitty-gritty of ins and outs I think, of the way you’re thinking about training executive function skills is not just the background of your average teacher. It’s not their training.

Sucheta: Exactly. But you and I know or rather what we are seeing as years progress, that students are struggling for a variety of reasons. Ultimately, that impacts their capacity to take charge of their own education. And what’s holding them back is executive function-related self-management skills. How can we create a culture in schools that understands the interplay between developing brain executive functions and need for supported learning, in your opinion?

Singer: I think what drives most teachers is looking at the performance of their students. That’s predominantly where they see they get concerned or they are like, “He’s fine. He’s doing exactly what he needs to do.” So the door opens for those kinds of conversations with educators around students who need some kind of additional instruction or some kind of additional support in order to be able to meet the expectations of a classroom.

Sucheta: You have developed a lot of practical approaches to instruction and you are a big advocate of teaching explicitly and consistently. Can you share that, share with our listeners what that looks like?

Singer: Well, I can tell you the method that I’m most well-known for and have dedicated a good chunk of my professional career to developing is a way of teaching students how to manage academic writing. That method is called EmPOWER: A Method for Teaching Expository Writing and Brain Frames Graphic Scaffolding for Language, Literacy, Teaching, and Learning, was developed in collaboration with my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Anthony Bashir. It took us a really long time but the tenets of that were based on observations that I had of the students that I was working with privately just in individual language therapy. And those kids were coming to me basically getting a different message about how they should be approaching writing every time they turned around. So their second grade teacher was using different strategies and a different approach, then the third teacher who had different graphics and a different way of doing things and the science teacher did things differently, then the social studies teacher who was completely different from the ELA teacher. And so we had these vulnerable learners who weren’t getting it and were really confused because everybody kept telling them to do it a different way. So our intention was to try and stabilize the process that you need to engage in in order to manage your academic writing assignments and to come up with a universal set of steps, the internal dialog you need to have with yourself, that it’s universal no matter how old you are, no matter what grade, content area that you’re writing in. We have a framework that can be used instructionally for starting in second grade and it’s the exact same framework and the exact same set of strategies even if you’re in twelfth grade and beyond, writing a business plan. It’s the same conversation you’re having with yourself and the same set of strategies you’re going to tap into, whether you’re writing for science or social studies or language arts or your electives in film history or whatever, doesn’t matter. The process is the focus, not the actual content. The complexity of assignments will change. The curriculum is going to change depending on where a student is in school. But we wanted to just help take some of the mystery out of how do you walk yourself through a very complex task with lots and lots of steps and moving parts and really heavily arm students with how they can organize their thinking and their language.

Sucheta: So in other words, you are teaching them task management skills and giving them that organizational template which has complete transferability and it has that framework which can be expanded as you go through academic life from middle school to high school, it can be expanded. If you go from high school to college, it can be expanded. That’s such a wonderful and powerful way of teaching executive functions because those with good executive functions have the, I call it, laser vision or the X-ray vision to see the backbone of the way information is laid out or the way information is structured. And those who are able to create a structure for themselves are much more effective in producing, whether it’s writing or speaking or whether it’s managing a project. So sounds like EmPOWER does that. Can you give us an example of an assignment, how would EmPOWER look like for a student that you’re teaching?

Singer: Well, I don’t really care what the assignment is. The approach is basically what we did was boil down the whole writing process to 10 questions you have to ask yourself. Our intention was inspired by some really beautiful work by Carol Sue Englert and a number of her colleagues back in 1988, where she developed a framework for teaching that was very much focused on what’s the conversation that’s happening around this learning. She’s really committed to the way teachers structure conversations in classroom and how that promotes learning and independence or hinders it.

So we were heavily inspired by some of her work and this notion that whenever you’re going to do something complicated, you’re talking your way through it in your head. Many of the students that I had been working with, way in the early stages of developing this method, when we really probed what you are saying to yourself. You’re staring at this assignment. You’re sitting here feeling overwhelmed. You don’t know what to do. You can’t get yourself started even though you’re brilliant. When we really peeked behind the curtain and found out what it was that they were saying to themselves. It was really awful. They were saying really horrible things like, “I can’t do this. I hate this. I’m stupid. I got to get out of here.” That’s when you see kids in class going, “Can I go to the nurse? Can I get some water? Can I go to the bathroom?” All these avoidance strategy because they’re overwhelmed and they don’t know what to do.

The way we thought about it was from a very language way in. That’s our background, language. How can we guide the conversation that the student is having with himself or herself so that it’s a productive conversation? And you’re approaching this complicated task by just asking yourself these questions and you ask them in the same order every time and each question elicits the use of a strategy.

So my first question is the question kids always ask you, “What do I have to do?” That’s the first thing a kid always says to you and they’re staring at their homework and they don’t get it. “What do I have to do?” So then we teach them a strategy for dissecting the language of the assignment, figuring out what it is that they need to do, getting a good picture in their head of what that end goal game is so that they can actually get themselves started. That’s step 1.

Part of our approach is really change the conversation, structure the conversation but also give kids a set of strategies that really very explicitly help them organize their thinking, which thinking is very multidimensional. You have to take a couple of passes at that with writing. Writing is linear and sequential. It’s sentence after sentence after sentence after sentence, and you have to put those in a certain order and then you have to get your paragraphs together in a certain order. And if you don’t do it in a logical order, it doesn’t make sense. It’s very linear and very sequential but thinking isn’t.

So there’s this big gap between “I know so much about Christopher Columbus and I’ve so many thoughts about this. I don’t know where to start with this paper.” So we approach the organization challenge of writing through a couple of different passes, a couple of different sets of strategies that chip away at organizations. First, let’s organize your thoughts and your knowledge and then let’s figure out how to organize your paragraph or your essay and teach kids very explicitly about how text is structured and how it works.

Sucheta: You’re really talking about helping students use a mind tool of self-talk. How can I guide me as I navigate through the demand of a task of writing, where I have to produce organized ideas that I already have or knowledge I already have and then produce it in a way that will be satisfactory to the expectations of the teacher who’s asking me to write this essay or paper or whatever it may be.

Singer: Yeah.

Sucheta: So this self-talk is a very, very strong mind tool. Could you tell us a little bit about visualizing and do you see visualizing or using visual imagery as a tool as well? And do you make use of that in your teaching?

Singer: We do. We’re really, really inspired by some work by David Hyerle, who developed a set of graphics that were intended to capture patterns of thinking and cognition. I worked really closely with David Hyerle for a number of years —

Sucheta: He’s amazing.

Singer: — and slowly morphed some of his concepts really from my background, which is more language and started to look at what are some of the underlying things that we do with language all day every day? What are the patterns of just talking? So we boiled down into a set of six graphics away —

Sucheta: That’s what you call brain frames, right?

Singer: Yes. We call them brain frames. They’re basically a visual depiction of what it looks like to sequence your thoughts. And we sequence to tell a story. You sequence to tell somebody how to do something. You’d sequence to summarize something historical that happened in the past. We sequence with language all day long. We just don’t necessarily know that that’s what we’re doing and we make comparisons and we make contrasts and we sort things into categories. That’s why grocery stores are set up the way grocery stores are set up. It’s a whole bunch of categories. There are these invisible patterns of language used that are hiding behind the listening and speaking and reading and writing demands of school and just conversation the kids are engaged in all day, every day. We extracted a way to have kids be able to recognize those patterns and draw a picture of what they’re trying to do linguistically so they can plan out their organization of their thought.

Our regional work with these concepts was way back in 1995 and ’96. We were working with a very, very, very bright 15-year old boy, who was so scattered and disorganized in his spoken communication, he was extremely bright. It was so hard to understand him because he would start a thought then change a thought, get halfway through a thought. He never finished a thought. It was just his really disjointed, very disorganized way of expressing himself. And so we started working with him, Tony and I did the therapy collaboratively and really concocted how do we help him be more organized in his speaking? Because nobody can understand them. We started to play with some of these strategies and helping him to just draw the patterns of you’re looking at the causes and the effects of the progressive era in your AP history class, how you’re going to plan out, how you’re g explain that. We had such profound result out of this way of working with this student that we presented him as a case study at a national conference, the American Speech Language Hearing Association Conference in 1996 or ’97. I think it was ’97. The title of that presentation was “What are Executive Functions and Self-Regulation and What Do They Have to Do with Language Learning Disorders” and we made the case that language and executive functions are interconnected. And that the reason that the student was having such a difficulty expressing himself was because of some fundamental weaknesses within his executive system and then we detailed our therapeutic approach to helping him. By the way, he’s now a litigator for the Justice Department, so it worked. He worked for Barack Obama. I don’t think he still has the job right now but he ultimately became a very successful trial lawyer. At the time, no one would have guessed that that was the path he was going down as a career.

Eventually, the presentation, we were asked to write it up we published the paper with that same title, “What are Executive Functions and Self-Regulation and What Do They Have to Do with Language Learning Disorders” in 1999. Since then, we’ve been playing with this concepts of using some visual representations of the pattern of language to help kids organize their language both when they’re talking and when they’re writing.

Sucheta: What you with talking and writing as you mentioned using that mind tool of visualizing, conceptualizing, using visual modality, I do that in my work with the concept of future self. Giving students a videographic tool to see themselves and talk to themselves from their future self. I find that incredibly effective because the students who have no perception of passage of time and they don’t have this notion of self changing over time with effort and particularly self-enjoying benefits that you have afforded to that future self because of the work you have done, those are the ones who are not connected or motivated or engaged in the work that needs to happen. It’s a very interesting way of particularly making a change in the planning organization and goal management but towards a longer future which is not a paper in three weeks but really six months later or a year later how would you look like. If you remember the book Secret that talked about this, creating these thought boards that you can stick up your ceiling when you lay down. You see yourself in 10 years, that kind of idea.

Singer: Yes.

Sucheta: So Bonnie, tell me, as we get ready to conclude this conversation, what would you like to see in the world where you do this beautiful work that will make you believe or make you feel that you really made a difference?

Singer: I see it every day in the kids that we’re working with. They blow my mind and they make it worth getting out of bed every day. They’re small changes. Recently, I got an email from somebody out of the blue that I worked with 20 years ago, who, I diagnosed him with dyslexia when he was 6 years old and worked with him for a long time when he was little. He had a reading too and then I helped him with his writing. I think I moved, somehow disconnected with the student but he looked me up over 20 years later and sent me this most beautiful email. There’s a blog post on my website with a portion of it, where he just wrote to say thank you. He’s now a merchant marine. He makes six figures a year. He’s wildly successful and respected by his shipmates. We were reflecting on how hard he had worked as a student. He had some real learning challenges. He had ADHD and he had dyslexia. Just what that was for him, what kinds of sacrifices he had to make as a young student, sometimes to go to reading tutorials or extra special ed help or extra speech and language services in the summer, what kinds of things he had to give up. The thing that he said that just made me sob was, “I want you to know it was all worth it.” It changed his life and he’s an awesome adult. He’s awesome.

A lot of times you do this work, you pour yourself into little kids or big kids. We see a lot of kids now in college. We have a college program for kids with executive function challenges in my office here. So all ages, I’ve had the pleasure and honor of working with kids of all ages my whole career. To see their success is extraordinary. And sometimes success for a student is just the tiniest little shift. The tiniest little shift. I’m following this little boy with Mosaic Klinefelter Syndrome, which is a very rare syndrome with lots of challenges to it and he is just an extraordinary being. I went to his team meeting the other day and for the first time in the five years that I’ve been following him, I watched him read and then notice that he had made a mistake in how he was pronouncing the word and stop and self-correct. It was monumental. I wanted to stand on the top of the desk in the classroom and go, “He did it. He noticed.” That is huge. That his brain stopped then he noticed and he realized that doesn’t make sense. I can fix it. I mean, they’re tiny little successes that you see in students every day and it just keeps you going. It’s what it’s all about.

Sucheta: Thank you, Bonnie, for all that you do and I’m so happy that you shared those stories with our listeners. Yes. As you said, you are pouring all of you and life changes even if it is tiny bit, the direction that sets them on a path for success forever.

Singer: Yeah.

Sucheta: Before we let you go, should anyone have any questions, Bonnie, or want to learn more about your work, where should they go?

Singer: The best place is our website. It’s ArchitectsForLearning.com.

Sucheta: Thank you so much for making the time and joining me on this podcast, Bonnie.

Singer: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Todd: Wow. Another great conversation with Dr. Bonnie Singer, Sucheta. What a great chat that was.

Sucheta: It truly was. I think the reason I’m going to take a minute to give an overview of the whole process of writing because it’s such an important academic skill. It is extremely essential but not a lot of thought goes into how does it develop? How does it get mastered? So quickly, if you think about writing, to write, we need ideas. And where do these idea come from? They come from reading, then they come from understanding what you have read. The most important executive function that go into writing is one needs to use an internal personal filter to decide the relevance and importance of that idea that you want to talk about. So once you settled down on the right idea that you want to convey, then you need a little map, a map of writing. You need details to support those idea. Those details, again, come back from the text or the reading or understanding that you have done. Without details, you can’t really expand on what your understanding is. That’s what we do in writing. Finally, you need a method to elaborate that, using the structure that exists. We call it beginning paragraph. We call it body. We call it conclusion paragraph. We call it a punch line or the statement that we make in the thesis that we support through our writing and then we do a conclusion of it. This orchestration of idea expression is what collectively we call writing. Bonnie did such a good job of helping our listeners understand that.

Todd: And thank you for giving us an overview of that. Thinking on that, walk us through how reading, writing, and planning are connected to each other?

Sucheta: They certainly are very much internally connected. That’s her first takeaway; that language and executive functions are interlinked and reading and writing is what makes language, and planning and organizing is what executive functions are. There are enough smart students that can’t express themselves because of the problems of executive functions. The outline that I discussed earlier, what writing constitutes, the executive dysfunction makes it harder for these students to express their understanding in a sequential organized manner. That’s where language meets a plan and then plan is executed into writing.

Todd: Why should educators teach reading and writing explicitly?

Sucheta: Well, that was the biggest point that Bonnie emphasized and that the second takeaway. From my own experience of being in this field of training students to develop these complex abilities related to writing, the point that I see and Bonnie also shares with me, that teachers have no specific background in teaching executive functions. They are left to evaluate performance. When you evaluate performance, then you are deducing what made a performance a stellar performance and what made a performance a poor performance. Educational system have nothing formal in place to teach skills that are related to learning to write. So every teacher sees it differently and every teacher works differently with the struggling student.

So the struggling student who has fundamental difficulty in seeing the skeleton of written language, then is very much dependent on teacher’s instructions and the teacher instructs those parts of writing that pertains to his or her content knowledge. So history teacher maybe focused on teaching analytical writing, science teacher is working on analysis and thesis writing. The student’s job is to integrate the two and that may not happen successfully all the time.

Todd: Understood. Bonnie discussed how self-talk is used as a mind tool. What are your thoughts on that?

Sucheta: Yeah. Bonnie has spent a lot of time researching this field of self-guided, self-directed talk which means the student is talking to himself about what he is doing or what he is about to do. She in fact has put together this EmPOWER system which is an acronym of course, we will link it on our podcast website. EmPOWER is a system which is a 10 guided questions that a student can ask themselves to complete a writing assignment. So what this actually allows is it allows the student to externalize the actual process of executing a plan. This also stabilizes the academic writing process. So talking to yourself to go from step 1 to step 2, and then going from step 2 to step 3, instead on relying on external cues from a teacher, the student can guide himself through those conversations he can have with himself.

Todd: Bonnie also mentioned using visual aid. Any comments on that?

Sucheta: There’s a lot of work that has been done in the field of using graphic organizers as tools for writing. I began by describing the writing process and I said that writing is elaborating on the ideas we have. Many students with executive dysfunctions struggle in even conceptualizing their own ideas. So the brain frames that Bonnie talks about which is six graphics that she uses or that she has researched can be a great starting point that students can use to map their own idea before they get into elaborating and expanding those ideas and then coming down to the process of editing and evaluating the writing. So this visual depiction of the thought sequences can really help students who cannot do that in their working memory.

The most important thing that parents and teachers need to remember about this, that language is very pattern-centric and it has its own patterns that depicts beginning, middle, and end. We, in genitive neuroscience, call that schemas. Those schemas can be expanded and collapsed into compact things. When a good teacher or tutor or trainer focuses on teaching those templates, it can really improve or enhance listening skills, speaking skills, and eventually writing and then conveying ideas in many forms of writing.

In conclusion, I want to emphasize writing is a complex process. It calls on orchestrating many, many underlying cognitive abilities. We must teach writing and we must teach writing using aids or tools. In end, the important part of teaching writing should include how a student chooses the right tool for himself. That is how I see a successful writer emerging from the process of teaching writing.

Todd: And awful lot of really important stuff to ponder here. And as I said, Sucheta, great conversation with Dr. Bonnie Singer. Unfortunately, all the time we have for today. So on behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath, and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thanks for listening today and we look forward to seeing you next week on Full PreFrontal.