Remediation for Learning Differences/Disabilities
Individual U. works with both children who have diagnosed learning disabilities and children who have learning differences that fall beneath the threshold required for a formal diagnosis of any specific, clinical learning challenge. We remediate and enrich the academics, organizational skills, emotional intelligence, and learning flexibility of children with dyslexia, ADD/ADHD (attention deficit disorder/attention deficit hyperactive disorder), NVLD (non-verbal learning disability), Asperger's Syndrome, and other pervasive developmental disorders. Many of the students we work with also have gaps in their knowledge base, making it insufficient to serve as a foundation for future learning. Characteristically, these gaps may not be evident in the regular classroom environment.
Individual U.'s team includes both academic and integrative mentors who collectively architect a highly specialized approach that articulates goals and continuously responds to the changing needs of each student as he or she progresses. Our overall approach is to work with each child as a unique learner rather than as a student with a label. We start with a respect for what the child already knows and how he or she learned it, how he or she learns best, what engages him or her and what kind of visual, verbal, and conceptual supports he or she needs to help him or her make the connections. As needed, we integrate the development of organizational skills, social and emotional intelligence (EQ), ethical leadership, and meditative and movement training including soft chi-channeling practices, tango, and other dances. Students with NVLDs may especially benefit from our new initiative: Less Talk More Tango™. Employing dance and martial arts respectively, the two initiatives encourage students to come out of the fortress of words that protect them. In a similar vein, the Conceptual Drawing™ initiative teaches students who are too involved with details to see the larger goal and concentrate on the big picture. In learning how to work simultaneously with both details and overall concepts, students develop their ability to summarize, analyze, compare/contrast, infer, and predict.
At Individual U., we also find that students benefit from actively studying the nature of their learning challenges. As appropriate, team members, including our principal mentor, neuroscientists, and experts in social and emotional competency, work closely to teach each student highly individualized aspects of neuroscience, cognitive science, emotional intelligence, and ethical leadership. The goal is for each student to understand his or her own cognitive strengths and weaknesses in a way that will benefit his or her future studies and behavior.
At Individual U. we build relationships to engage parents, teachers, and schools in the work students do with us. This allows the concepts and approaches we impart to resonate in a student's most important social and academic environments. In cases where parents struggle as to whether their children need or could benefit from a formal psycho-educational or neuro-psychological evaluation, remediation, change of school, medication, or all of the above, Individual U.'s Eye to I.U.™ collaborative assessment tool may be of great help as well.
The Individual Universe™ Program
Academic Support during School-Stop, School-Refusal, School-Change, Illness or Emotional Stress.
While most of the students who work with Individual U. are currently attending school, we offer the Individual Universe™ program for students who are not currently in school due to a variety of special circumstances. This program is a unique opportunity to have a personal, immersive learning experience constructed around an individual student's universe of needs, learning styles, strengths, and sensitivities. The Individual Universe™ program is mentored by closely collaborating, diversified mentors, many of whom have taught at universities such as Cornell, Brown, Columbia, the University of Sofia, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and Harvard.
Individual U. is not a school and does not grant a degree or certificate, or confer academic credit of any kind. Rather, the goal of a person's work in our Individual Universe™ program is to attain the greatest degree of meaningful progress based on outcomes defined at the beginning of their program. This may include the acquisition of academic skills and funds of knowledge, technology skills, preparation for standardized tests and entrance exams and requirements, creative expression pathways, socialization skills and experiences, emotional competency, and physical, meditative, movement, or chi-channeling practices.
The Individual Universe™ program can vary in duration and intensity, but can accommodate any length of study - from a week to considerably longer periods.
The following describes an Individual Universe™ program designed for a hypothetical student with learning and attentional disabilities who has stopped school in anticipation of attending another institution. He also has some emotional issues and challenges with spatial modulation. Prior to school-change, he needs to improve his work in math and science and prepare for standardized examinations. The student expresses to Individual U. a desire to concentrate on writing, and the parents request physical training, fitness, and flexibility. The Individual U. assessment team sees a need for training in emotional competency (E.Q.) and also wants to design a program to teach him the value of communicating without words. Taking all this into account, the following two days would be typical in the weekly schedule of his unique Individual Universe™.
Day One:Since the inception of the Individual Universe™ program last year, students, families, schools, therapists, and educational consultants have presented us with a wealth of challenges, catalyzing an orderly, yet rapid and responsive, expansion of our offerings.
As schools have collaborated with Individual U. to have us create individualized, goal directed "special project" semesters for students with unique challenges, we have expanded our teams of academic, integrative, organizational, and adventure/travel mentors. We have been joined by mentors with remarkable skills in movement and chi-channeling practices, music, whitewater kayaking and rafting, as well as integrative mentors with expertise ranging from mind/body work to tai chi and yoga. Correspondingly, students who come to Individual U. in search of goals ranging from finding academic direction to creating a life path, have collaborated with us in creating programs that have taken them back into history via museum field trips, down rapids in distant locations, into timeless practices of movement and meditation, and on walkabouts in countries and cultures of specific interest. Students sent to us to resolve specific issues, ranging from a lack of intellectual curiosity to a failure to demonstrate personal authenticity, have been engaged in activities that bring the centering, insight, and integrity of some practices to contribute to progress in others.
Enrichment and Special Studies for Gifted Students
Individual U.'s mentors function at the highest levels in their personal careers as scientists, mathematicians, technologists, authors, poets, screenwriters, internet and digital communication leaders, yoga instructors, emotional intelligence facilitators, martial artists, and psychotherapists, to name just a few. It is their great pleasure to share their knowledge, skills, experience, and insights about success with remarkable students from all walks of life who can benefit from the learning methods of the highest achievers.
Many students come for enrichment at Individual U. to explore specific subjects or fields in which they exhibit a particular aptitude or interest. For example, a fourth grader with good-to-average general academic skills, extraordinary ability in science, and a focused interest in dinosaurs, might come to Individual U. to deepen his experience in paleontology, while expanding his perspective in the sciences. His overall science enrichment might bring him into close contact with a spectrum of scientists ranging from a member of the Russian Academy of Science to a former Harvard and Rockefeller University researcher from a Nobel Prize winning laboratory. The student's work might include an examination of great thinkers of science such as Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, or Hawking. Current topics ranging from the "death of science" and the revelations of String Theory to the Mars rovers and "near-miss meteorites" might be explored via NASA and TERC websites, print and visual media, conversations with visiting scientists, and virtual laboratory technologies.
Another example could be an inquisitive high school math student who proposes a method for solving cubic equations to his mother. She recognizes his gift for mathematics and wants to cultivate it. At Individual U., he might be paired with a MIT-educated math and physics mentor who considered the same approach in his own youth. Together they might explore topics ranging from absolute zero to special relativity and from imaginary numbers to the very real possibility of a career in Physics or Applied Mathematics.
The writing enrichment at Individual U. offers a third example. A high school student with aspirations to become a professional writer might come to the Collaborative Voices™ Program in which accomplished authors write in concert with young colleagues. She might meet with a group of 7-9 professional writers/mentors (novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, screenwriters, editors, psychotherapists, and talented student peers) who have read samples of her existing work in advance and prepared their own responses to writing prompts assigned to her. The group would then gather at Individual U. to welcome her as a colleague, fellow artist, and critic in a writing workshop.
The enrichment program also works with individual students who have achieved distinct success in their academic careers and who need to prepare for advanced standardized exams.
Specialized Programs in Writing
Individual U's mentors include professional nonfiction and fiction writers, poets, and screenwriters who help students foster their voices and address their writing vulnerabilities. Some students come to Individual U. to develop their process and organization for writing technical essays and academic research papers, while others need help mastering grammar and style. We work one-on-one with young creative writers who, for instance, could benefit from additional guidance and insight into their poetry or fiction. While at Individual U. students have worked to develop Web logs, anthologies of short stories, haiku, how-to-manuals, screenplays, and personal essays. In appropriate situations, writers experiencing challenges with productivity, authenticity, or fear of exposure are also paired with integrative mentors who have professional expertise with emotional issues.
Many students come to Individual U. because of the increased interest in writing competency on the part of middle schools, high schools, and universities. Because writing is now a critical component of standardized tests, including the ISEE, ERB, Revised SAT (for spring 2005), ACT (also 2005), SAT II, and admission applications, we work with many students to develop the requisite skills to excel on these examinations.
Individual U. also mentors parents and other accomplished professionals who want to write more succinctly and with greater clarity. Especially promising writers of any age may be appropriate for the Collaborative Voices Program, spending an afternoon as a colleague with 7-9 professional writers.
Our special Collaborative Voices™ Program offers a unique contribution to mentoring young writers in the process, sharing the experience of being a writer, validating a young writer's efforts, critiquing his/her techniques, suggesting authors to read and study, creating connections and opportunities for future study, and helping each young writer's inner voice have its say. While a number of Individual U.'s programs have a student working in concert with 2-3 mentors simultaneously, Collaborative Voices™ is unique in matching a student with a group of 7-9 professional writers/mentors (novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, screenwriters, editors, specialists in emotional insight, and talented student peers). The group reads samples of the student's existing work in advance, prepares their own responses to two writing prompts assigned to the student, and, on a given afternoon, gathers at Individual U. to welcome that student as a colleague, fellow artist, and critic in a writing workshop. In addition to their work, everyone also shares stories of success, sacrifice, starting out, starting over, writing, and rewriting, all the while creating a bond across age and experience.
Eye to I.U. Intake™*
Creating a fast-track collaborative knowledge base for facilitating functional success.
Eye to I.U. Intake™ is Individual U.'s unique, individualized, collaborative assessment tool for facilitating an opinion about a student's academic strengths, vulnerabilities, and potential next steps.
Some students struggle in school with only vague descriptions of their less-than-effective learning styles. Others exhibit clearly troubling behavior in some areas, but are average or may even excel in others. Many other patterns of both vulnerability and strength exist as well, creating a spectrum of learning differences and deficits.
In these circumstances, parents too may struggle as to whether their children need or could benefit from a formal psycho-educational or neuro-psychological evaluation, remediation, change of school, medication, or all of the above. Additionally, the pragmatic question of how to address immediate learning challenges during the time it may take to put such evaluations in place often needs to be addressed. The Eye to I.U. Intake™ collaborative assessment tool was created as a response to both of these challenges.
Depending on a student's age, the nature of the referral, and other existing information, Individual U. draws from its team of mentors and other professionals to create an immersive one or two day experience organized around individualized, relevant themes of interest.
The "take home" product is a detailed narrative summary, including important excerpts from individual team members and a spectrum of suggestions regarding potential assessments, remediation techniques, and professional contacts the student and family might benefit from.
*The Eye to I.U. Intake™ is not intended as a formal neuro-psychological or psycho-educational assessment or evaluation tool, nor is it the standard practice of learning specialists or educational psychotherapists. While team members may have training or private practice in psychoanalysis, emotional competency, and other clinical fields, their participation as team members is to benefit the team's insight, not to make any formal diagnosis or to practice medicine or any form of healthcare.
I.U. Direct™
Technology Assisted Away from Home Support
I.U. Direct™ is Individual U.'s one-on-one, technology-assisted program for organizing and supporting students who are away from home. Using web cameras, in concert with instant messaging and voice conversation, Individual U. mentors help these students succeed under a wide variety of circumstances.
College students, with learning or organizational challenges, especially those away for the first time, can be directed in navigating course selection and/or in adjusting to a variety of academic and other school-related issues via I.U. Direct.™ I.U. Direct™ can continue to support these students throughout their educations, as it does with adults in a variety of challenging circumstances.
I.U. Direct™ is also for younger students (grades 5-12) who are away from home (vacation, sports team travel, prolonged illness, long weekends) and need to keep current with assigned work or prepare for examinations, including standardized tests.
Individualized Education for PLAN, ACT, SAT I, SAT II, ISEE, ERB, NYCSST
This program is fully active and enjoying great success. We are currently developing more detailed information about this capability. If you would like further information at this time, please contact us directly. Please also see "The New SAT".
We Too™
Education for Parents and Other Adults
We Too™ is Individual U.'s one-on-one program for parents who would like to acquire a broad understanding of specific subject curricula, e.g. third grade math, fifth grade European or American history, basic algebra, biology, chemistry, etc.
Typically, the goal of these parents is to be more informed, more relevant, so they may contribute to and interact with their children's upcoming or ongoing school learning and standardized examinations.
We Too™ is also for those parents who wish to be even more "hands-on", desiring in-depth presentations of important core concepts in various subjects, often to support their child's ongoing remediation, or simply to understand a struggling child from a more knowledgeable perspective.
Finally, Individual U. recognizes that some "older kids" want to go back to school and finally get it right. We Too™ is for these adults who wish to develop subject competency or mastery in areas they avoided or perhaps never fully understood. For those who could "never do algebra", "would love to write better", or have any subject in mind they would like to make their own, Individual U. will provide the right innovative mentor to meet their learning needs.
The New SAT: A March Toward Success
Since March 2005, the College Board has been administering the new SAT examination. The exam has been designed with the admirable intention of more accurately rewarding a student's understanding of and ability in various subjects. According to the College Board, these changes will "improve the alignment of the SAT to curriculum and instructional practices in high schools and colleges." In addition, the predictive validity of the overall examination (the correlation between high SAT scores and freshman grade point average) is expected to increase.
As a consequence, the new SAT, and the writing section in particular, will hopefully reflect well on students who have put in their school, classroom, and homework hours, learned their concepts well, sought answers in their areas of difficulty, honed their process, mastered concentration and efficiency, and are, in short, ready and fully present. Conversely, the exam's design should, to a significant extent, be less of an advantage for individuals whose approach is to spend a few, albeit expensive hours, learning test-taking strategies disconnected from intellectual content. The exam should also be less affirming of those who teach students to approach examinations as a thing to get past rather than a chance to enrich and validate the ongoing academic effort that has preceded it.
At Individual U., preparing each student for the new SAT begins with an extended one-on-one and team interactive analysis of their funds of knowledge in relevant areas of study. By continuing to acquire knowledge about each student as a unique learner, we also develop a dynamic opinion of his or her ability to perform in circumstances ranging from supported work with no time limit to performance under pressure and test conditions. As appropriate, we mentor to each student's individual strengths and vulnerabilities and employ non-academic strategies and skills to facilitate a quiet internal environment, clear-mind, and consistent, optimal performance no matter what the external conditions.
We mentor a broad spectrum of students (ranging from the most gifted to those who are significantly challenged) for the SAT examination. For students with learning differences and disabilities, we examine not only their knowledge and performance skills, but the nature of questions and examinations, helping these students to broaden and deepen their appreciation of questions and providing a richer context for accurate response.
Students who come to Individual U. for the first time with a specific goal of preparing for the examinations will likely find themselves improving in their schoolwork, study skills, and personal strategies for success as well. Students who come to Individual U. throughout the year to be mentored by our highly-regarded professional writers and our MIT-trained math mentors may simply see the SAT examination as an opportunity to demonstrate the academic and integrative skills they have been acquiring throughout the year.
Over time, the "SAT" has come to stand for a number of different things - Scholastic Aptitude Test, Scholastic Achievement Test, and most recently, it was an acronym without specific meaning. With the College Board now clearly sending a signal that the new SAT will be more closely attuned to testing knowledge and long-term effort, marching orders for student success on the new exam are clear. Do your preparation, show your knowledge, be judged on your merit...and of course, choose your mentors wisely.
The Individual U. Guided Resource Center
Students are drawn to Individual U. for a wide variety of reasons. Some come for just a few hours to remediate a specific learning challenge, others may come for 6-10 hours a week to gain the skills and strategies necessary to deal effectively with their newly diagnosed learning disorder and its academic and emotional sequelae, while still others may be at Individual U. near fulltime for months working through life difficulties that have effected them globally.
In all the above instances, one-on-one remediation will no doubt play an important role. However, students also need a place to inquire, explore, and discover with print and online resources available. More importantly, they also need the guidance of informed, effective mentors on hand and involved to make the process fully beneficial. In addition, such an environment offers a safe and productive "resting place" between intensive remediation sessions so that parents of students involved in various Individual U. programs can know their whereabouts for an extended period of time without incurring the sometimes prohibitive cost of non-stop, one-on-one remediation.
September 2004 marked the opening of Individual U.'s Guided Resource Center. The Center is available by appointment daily from 8 A.M. until 10 P.M. weekdays and 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. weekends, for learning, reading, practicing yoga, tai-chi, meditative arts, Japanese cooking and Ikebana, exploring online, and letting students' minds and bodies just be still.
The Jean Splice Initiative™
Individual U.'s Jean Splice Initiative™, now in its second year, was created to support three populations of students with significant learning issues who are still in school and could greatly benefit from being "spliced out" of some portion of their current school circumstance and into Individual U.'s therapeautically sensitive remediation environment.
The first population (Jean Splice 1 Students) have vastly uneven academic capabilities, performing adequately, or even very well, in a number of academic subjects in their competitive independent school environments, yet below expectation or acceptable school standards in one or two others. For these students, particularly those failing mathematics at any level, the four to five hours spent weekly in their school classes only serve to widen the academic gap between them and their fellow classmates, heightening frustration and lowering self-esteem. Because there are limits to what an independent school can do in relating to the needs of a specific child, failure in one or two courses can lead to a downward spiral resulting, at best, in a need for summer school, but more likely in a mid-year or end-of-year school change. With the close collaboration of students' schools and parents, Individual U.'s Jean Splice Initiative™ briefly "splices" these students into our remediative, therapeutically oriented support system during those precious hours when a student would otherwise have been in a classroom studying the problematic subject matter. If these students' schedules present a sufficient block of time (e.g. a math class followed by a study hall or lunch period) they can come to Individual U.'s offices. In most instances, however, where the time available is only the 55 or so minutes allotted to that class on a daily basis, Individual U. sends its mentors to informal locations near a student's school where they can meet with that student and intensively remediate their funds of knowledge and performance skills in a given area. In this manner, working one on one with extraordinarily gifted and insightful mentors who have fluent command of their subject matter, students can work on the syllabus material provided by their teachers while filling in the lacunae that continually hold them back as their class goes forward. Individual U. is not a school, and students must meet whatever requirements are necessary for their work to be assessed and given credit as appropriate by their institutions.
The second population (Jean Splice 2 Students), while still attending their current schools, has entered a period of intended school change. In the best of circumstances, the current school is collaborating with both the student's family and the mentors so the student can get the most out of the current learning situation while successfully transferring to another school environment. For these students, scheduled school periods in subjects where the student can no longer keep up are both unproductive and damaging to self-esteem. In this situation, classroom time can be converted to highly constructive remediation time. For example, an eighth-grade student with a learning disability who is failing algebra and whose fundamentals are too weak for him or her to succeed even in the previous grade's math work can spend those four to five hours a week in a remediation program of "functional math." In this manner, the long cycle of math failure and disappointment moves toward closure. Given the fundamentals and a firm place to stand, that student can begin at a new institution supported by his knowledge of the subject matter and the confidence that he not only knows the material, but can "do it" on exams, quizzes, and in other pressure situations. As with all Individual U. programs, any formal evaluation of the work done in this initiative, or academic credit given for it, is at the discretion of the student's school.
The third population (Jean Splice 3 Students) who benefits from the Jean Splice Initiative™ is in considerably more difficulty. Still in school or perhaps on the brink of being asked to take a leave, these students, often from the confluence of learning disabilities and a significant emotional event (divorce, illness, death of a parent), show evidence that they may decompensate in the near future. Prior to Jean Splice™, the options for such students might have included "a few weeks home" (most of it non-productive) or preemptively removing them for hospitalization or attendance at a therapeutic boarding environment. Now, with the collaboration of insightful deans, pediatricians, therapists, educational consultants, and better-educated parents, such "at risk" students can be identified earlier and referred to Individual U. Here for a period of days to weeks, they can receive the highest level of individually crafted academic support in an emotionally insightful environment also offering meditative, martial arts, and other physical practices that promote general wellbeing. In such circumstances, Individual U. works closely with that student's outside therapists, physicians, and other support network members in whatever capacity might benefit the student and family. If and when appropriate, students return to their schools with academic syllabi that have been followed as closely as possible and with additional skills and strategies for self-esteem and success put into place and growing.
Students who cannot return to their schools due to emotional or other factors may continue at Individual U. for an extended period of time, in essence becoming participants in our Individual Universe™ program.
Individual U. Inward Bound™ Program
Students transitioning out of therapeutic wilderness programs can greatly benefit from an individualized program that offers both structure and flexibility in a supportive, embracing environment. Many students already long removed from the benefits of home and family during their wilderness experience would ideally have, as their next important destination on their journey, a daytime environment in which they could be part of a community. The Inward Bound™ program offers students a favorable alternative to therapeutic boarding school, and is committed to each student's personal affirmation, academic excellence, learning, discovery and progress forward. Inward Bound™ students are provided the opportunity to explore academic or other personal interests, remediate areas of academic vulnerability, be exposed to mentors with a broad spectrum of talents and interests, and develop emotional insight as well as movement, meditation, and other integrative practices to help calm their inner world and support them during future challenges.
A typical day at Inward Bound™ might include:
A student's individualized Inward Bound™ program can be designed to emphasize work in their areas of special concern and to provide special support as necessary. The program offers flexibility to accommodate the hours that each student has available on a daily basis and for students to leave and return during the day so that they might see outside therapists and other professionals that may comprise their support team. Help and guidance can be given to students in preparing for standardized examinations and in the application process to new middle schools, high schools, colleges, as well as in the exploration of employment or career opportunities. In situations where a student would benefit from more formal educational counseling, Individual U. works in close collaboration with some of the country's most respected and well-regarded educational consultants.