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your lazy students might not be lazy at all and and hopefully during this session during the next half an hour you will find out why before we start I I asked will and his colleagues to to set up three poll questions for you because I I would like to to get some information from you if we can get up if we get the first question up please will yes there you go so first of all talking about laziness in this session and received laziness how many of your students would you say are lazy or un motivated to learn English you can go

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from hardly any to the majority if will if you can read out the answers to me because I don't think that I can see them yes I can see them here P I'll let it settle for a minute yeah yeah yeah it's a lot of people here it's not knowing that they are lazy but this is about perceive that you you would go into the CL in a teachers room and you would talk about student then teach oh yeah that's a lazy bum you know that that type of student oh she's not very she's not very motivated to Lear

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English so we've got about 7% on hardly any um maybe around 10% is 26% of people are answering that one then 34% people say um around 20% almost half of them uh was difficult because it's all percentages percentages 25% say almost half of them and 8% say the majority of them it's basically between probably around 20 and almost half of it so basically between between 20 and 40 that's what people said now the the next question maybe something about yourself about your own experience

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it's interesting for me to know as well the average number of students that you teach on an annual basis so how many students do you do you usually see annually uh it could be that you're working in a school but not in summer that might be less but it can also be that you're working private language school with a lot of different groups and even do some summer camps so just for me for me to know and for you as well later on I'll let you know why if it is less than 25 or or even over

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100 we'll see what type of teachers we have in the room okay so so yes 9% say less than 25 12% say between 25 and 50 177% say between 51 and 75 23% say between 76 and 100 and 38% say over a 100 that's actually a lot of teachers that see over a 100 students on a yearly basis now my last question is probably easier to to answer this is the your teaching experience so basically how long how long have you been doing what you're doing are you a completely Noble teacher so you basically just finish

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your degree and just started or between two and five 6 and 10 11 and 20 or you're a veteran teacher and you've been you've been in this for over 20 years okay still lots of responses coming in I'll give it a sec okay 2% less than one 133% between two and five 15% between 6 and 10 26% between 11 and 20 44% say over 20 wow wow we've got very experienced teachers here Crums it's wow it's amazing it's it's if I mean if we add that between 11 and 20 so if we put basically everything

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above 10 I think that's more than half of the teachers will right that is yeah I didn't I didn't put it in my in my mind my working memory isn't that that good you'll find out later why but that's a lot of that's a lot of that's a lot of experience here it's is is that extra weight on my shoulder now it is I'm afraid yeah you got some experience watching you now yeah yeah now it's like yeah is is it true what you're saying no no it is no but it's lovely I I really enjoy that

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when that when that happens thanks thanks very much for sure no worries what I what I would like you to do now you have you have analyzed yourself as well the the number of students you see you see on an average in an average year and your your years of experience um I know you're not Math teachers but the math I'm going to ask you to do is not that very Advanced it's not rocket science I I'm going to ask you to multiply the years of experience so multiply the years that you've been

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teaching English by the average amount of students you've seen in room daysis so say if you've if you've had 10 years well say some teachers even more than 20 so say you've had 20 years teaching experience and you have average 100 students per year 20 time 100 is 2,000 and then realize that this number 2,000 that is the amount of students that's the number of students that you have seen in your career so in your career you will have seen 2,000 students 2,000 students pass through your through your

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classes now when you have that number in your in your mind and you remember what you responded to the first question which was about the received amount of lazy or unmotivated students in your class and say you set 20% I mean just for the sake of argument say you said 20% Which is more or less majority between 20 and 40 20% of 2,000 is 400 so you would say that you have seen 400 lazy students in your teaching career and now after 20 years there's this Dutch guy living in Spain at the global teachers Festival saying to you

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that maybe those 400 lazy students weren't lazy at all and we're going to find out why but it's completely normal that you would think they were lazy because this happens a lot it happens to a lot of students that are labeled as lazy as dumb as as unmotivated students like Tommy and I'm going to tell a little short story about Tommy Tommy is an 8-year old boy this is a true story so tomy's an nature old boy and one day he's he's in school and after school [Music] the the Headmaster WS up to me he says

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Tomy here's a letter I need you when you get home I need you to give this letter to your mom she should read this and when he gets home he gives the letter to his mother mother she reads it and and the poor mother she starts crying he says Mommy what does the letter say why are you crying and she said well actually the letter says and and the mother is lying she says the letter says we cannot teach your son Tommy because he is too intelligent there's nothing we can do for him he is too bright he is

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too wonderful we think it is better that you teach him yourself but he will find out later in his life Tommy that actually the letter did say we're very sorry we can't teach her some because your son is lazy your son is UN motivated your son is basically dumb so there's nothing there's nothing we can do so actually Tommy is is is one of that maybe 20% 25 perceived percent of students uh that are perceived lazy unmotivated and dumb and this is usually the label that students get when

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they are dyslexic and they are undiagnosed I'm GNA let that sink in for a second we said 20% 20% or even more of students perceive as lazy or motivated in your classes and now I'm saying that maybe these students are dyslexic because this is what happens with dis Lex St when we talk about talking about percentages when we talk about this Lexia the international dyslexia Association and many other sources usually work with the same with the same numbers they say that 15 to 20% of the population shows

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signs of dyslexia 15 to 20% when you were talking about receive laziness in your students you set many of them 20 to 30% or 20 even even towards 40% so here you go you see this correlation between the students that you might label as lazy but maybe there's something else and maybe there is a dyslexia beh behind that that perceived laziness of that student now if you look at this slide and if you look at it well you see shows signs of dyslexia doesn't say is dyslexic show signs of dyslexia because one of the

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main issues with dyslexia one of the big problems and and will mention it before as well I have only recognized my dyslexia I only know that I'm dyslexic for seven years more or less um the problem is that up to 80% of students with this even leave school without a diagnosis and this is from the British dyslexia Association so that is eight out of 10 dyslexic students leave school without knowing they're dyslexic and many of them will even live their whole life even die without knowing their dyslexic and these

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children will go through school all these years in school thinking and believing their thinking and believing they're un motivated and thinking and believing they're Dum and this is true and this comes up over and over again when you talk to this lexic students and you interview families of this lexic students as well now what I would like you to take away from this session this is this is why I created this session I would like you to take away three things just half an hour but I think we can take we can

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work on this first of all I would like you to take away what this Lexia is so to have a better idea of what the condition is I would like you to take away red flags so when you walk into the classroom you can start recognizing again the possible signs of dyslexia or the signs of possible dyslexia and I'm going to give you five teaching tips so five things that you can do with your students in the classroom and this is very important the teaching tips that you use for your students with dyslexia

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work for all your students it is never matter of this is for my 20% of dyslexic students and this is for the rest it is always what I do for my dyslexic students is adapted in such a way is inclusive in such a way that I can use it for the whole classroom it is not about putting extra work on your plat is it's all about taking work off your plates it's it's all about making the teachers life but first of all let's talk about what is this lecture it's it's a very complex condition to explain

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in a simple way because dyslexia includes a lot of different elements I'm going go over a few of them a bit later but if if I would have to phrase it in one sentence it would be this it would be the dyslexic brain processes information in a different way I'm going to explain what I mean with this so so to make it a little bit more visual for you let's imagine just let's imagine to make it for this for this argument to make it simple let's imagine that learning learning anything so also

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learning a language is nothing more than connecting two neurons in the brain yeah so it's it's Neuron a and neuron B are are communicating they're connecting I basically take information from neuron a from neuron B that that's learning okay now instead of neurons for my example I'm going to talk about Villages so I have Village a and Village B and what I do in my brain I take from one Village to the other one and I'm going to explain a very simple way I'm going to explain three different

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types of brains now the first brain to take information from point A to point B the first brain uses a Ferrari I don't know about you I don't have a Ferrari I I could never driven one but I do gather that a Ferrari should be able to drive up to 230 km an hour or or even faster so imagine you have an amazing fast for ferari and we we have an American Highway between Village a and Village B like these two two 10 sorry 10 lanes one way and 10 lanes the other way and no speed lane so we can really take our Ferrari to full

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speed partly any traffic from village eight it will be so then Split Second information is there again this is not a scientific way of explaining the brain but a very easy way to understand this is how in many times how many times the autistic brain works now don't already talked about the autistic brain I know how many times these students are actually very fast in processing information well this is because their their brain processes information Ferrari in many cases now the second brain the second brain processes

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information like this this is a family car this is a family car on a normal Road maybe maximum speed is 80 or 100 kilometers an hour I'm living in Spain so I'm going to say that this is a sea wherever you live you can change the the brand and and this just is a normal speed so to speak between Village a and Village B the the information gets there there's no problem whatsoever and this is what we could call a neurotypical right so CLA has talked a lot about neurodiverse brains which is about 20 20

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something percent of the population which also means then that the neurotypical brain is the rest of the population it's everybody who is not neurodiverse and the issue is that education in general so our educational system is based on neurotypical brains so so you have been taught te course or selt course you have been taught to teach neurotypical brains you have been taught to teach people who take information from Village a to Village b in a family now the third brain guess you will understand where this is going the third

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brain is being dyslexic and the dlex leic brain goes like this the dyslexic brain processes information on a bicycle and I like it because every time I I explain this and I have this lexic people in the room they all go like that really looks like my like my brain and to be very honest it does actually look like my brain as well um so my brain processes information many times slower it takes me more longer to process information but on the way on my way from Village a to be I also have more time I have the opportunity to look

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around so I can enjoy my views I can oh that's a beautiful Meadow oh it's a nice little Pond oh there's ducks in there oh there's some cows in there they're they're eating oh it's a beautiful Farm over there that I see in in the far and and oh maybe I can take a detour because I think there's some apples growing over there maybe I can take some apples and put them in my in my bag as well and maybe in the meantime something falls out of it I'm losing some information

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the way between a and b and then when I get to Village B and this is very important to to understand when I get to Village B I can enter Village B from whatever angle I like this is a very important concept for me to understand so if it's in a Ferrari like 10 lanes there's only one way to get into Village B if it's on a normal Road there might be two or three different ways to enter Phill B but if I'm on my bicycle and I'm a little bit anarchic I really can enter Village be from many different angles and this is

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this is both a weakness and a strength of a dyslexic brain so it's not that we can't do certain things it's just that we do it differently and sometimes we might take longer doing so now talking about red flakes which was number two on the list one of the main red flaks there are many there's a whole list of items that you can go through to to to screen for dyslexia to try to recognize this Lex this I'm going to give the most important ones and maybe the most important red flag is the

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unexpectedness I'm going to explain what I mean um unexpectedness which is also called the discrepancy model and the discrepency model is all about what the student um knows so I know that you know this and what the students can show you what the student can produce and I'm going to explain this same as with the analogy before I'm going to explain this with an example imagine that language learning is nothing more than a combination of learning grammar and vocabulary I I know it's more but for this example I just

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want to simp simplify this so it's learning grammar learning vocabulary I do both bang I I know in new language and imagine at the beginning of a course you have students and you just want to check their level just as an executiv just to see how where where everybody stands and I say to my students okay kids teens whatever we are going to do a speaking activity I want you to talk for five minutes to your part partner about I don't know your weekend just the weekend or or the week or whatever talk

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about this and you have this one student who just starts rattling away just starts talking and talking and talking and and who and with good pronunciation and intonation and pro amazing grammatical structure very rich vocabulary that you would go like wow where do this vocabulary come from even idiots that that are actually from a higher level so basically you would say this student is here this student is is top of class and and you actually wonder if that student might not have to move up a level but you don't and and maybe

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better that you don't because next class same group you say to the same group of students hey we're going to do another exercise and now instead of talking about your weekends your holidays we're going to write about it so it's the same topic basically same vocabulary synchromatic structures everything here but now we're going to do writing and at the end of the class you ask them for like a onepage writing at the end of the class that particular student hands in two mere paragraphs a very short

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writing two paragraphs very poor grammar very poor vocabulary very repetitive structures as well something that you would go like honestly do and and even with stupid spelling mistakes this is this is when the student is here actually almost bottom of the B and this is when you as a teacher would say hey but this student can do more if he wants to this is an argument that dyslexic students hear a lot you can do more if you want to and you say why well because I have seen it I have seen you producing this and now you are

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producing in that so maybe you are lazy maybe you are unmotivated uninterested whatever but the thing is the students can do more and this is the discrepancy model the student can do more if it is in a different format so the student can produce if it is in spoken format but cannot produce it if it is in written format it's that that unexpectedness that discrepancy which is one of the main red flags with screening for this Lexia other red flag as I said before dyslexia includes a lot of different

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elements as whole list of elements but the most important ones I'm going to go over them right now the first is phological processing now dyslexia is all about phological awareness it's it's the brain how the brain processes phology and and the understanding that language is built up of PS of small parts of the sounds that sometimes is very difficult usually is difficult for the dyslexic brain to process um and it is more difficult to process reading so it is the decoding of the written word

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that is more difficult for the dyslexic student it takes longer it's on a bike than than for neurotypical students which makes the dyslexic students a slower reader so usually dyslexic students read much slower than other students in the class in my case for instance wherever I am whatever happens I always read slower than the vast majority of people around it's not that I can't read is just that it takes me longer to do so we're usually also slower writers and maybe even worse writers than than non

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dyslexics not that we can't write it's not that we can't think it is it's a mix of again that whole process where where the reading is a process of decoding it is processing the written word into a spoken word in my brain with the writing it is taking a spoken word or Concept in my brain and transferred it to to a written word that is the encoding process that takes longer as well but it's also organizing the ideas in my hand of what I want to write on a piece of paper it's organizing it on the piece

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of paper making it in a sequence and then the actual physical writing which which is many times more difficult for his lexic students as well and then we have attention deficit then now you might say oh no no bu bu no no no you're you're you're overstepping your your boundaries here this is not you you shouldn't be talking about this that's the next talk that's figgy talk which is really good as well so you better stay which is about attention deficit um no dyslexia as well so

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dyslexia also has to do with attention deficit and what you will see and and when you have done the whole three sessions so by all means stay until the end you will see that there's a lot of similarity between uh autism dyslexia ADHD this is actually called comorbidity this is the overlap because there is a very high overlap between the three conditions when you have a autistic person or a person with autism it is very likely or it can be that a person also has ADHD when you have some AKG very likely that

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they also have dyslexia Etc so there is a very high level of comorbidity attention deficit very important for students with dyslexia we usually we find it very difficult to focus and to keep attention for a long period of time so anything that's over seven or 10 minutes and the last of my red flags is working memory so many students with dyslexia have a very bad limited working memory usually a neurotypical students can manipulate up to five or seven chunks of information in their working memory at the same time a is

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lexic student maybe two or three so when you give a lot of instructions at the same time do this and this and this and this and this that's five that's too much if we give them too much vocabulary if we talk too much if it's too much grammar if I write on the board and talk at the same time and ask them to do something in their notebook that's too much at the same time it's all to do with working memory and attention deficit now the beauty is that dyslexia is not all about weaknesses and what

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we've looked so far what we' looked at so far is all about weaknesses but Dr s sh W and she's one of the most renowned experts worldwide on dyslexia she describes dyslexia very wisely as a as an island of weaknesses in a sea of strengths or even an ocean of strength and and this is very much true because whenever you have a dyslexic student in front of you it is not only about the weaknesses it should also be about the strengths if it isud and it only has or only shows the weaknesses it might even

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not be dyslexic so this Lexia really has that strength side to it as well I'm going to over some of we're going to go over some of the strengths right now so you can you can see what they are but before I go there I do want to stress that usually the problem with dyslexia is that Society in general and the students as well we are so tremendously Focus focused on the weaknesses we are so tremendously focused on what the students can't do on on what what doesn't work for them that we completely

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forget their strength and I believe that if we turn that around and without forgetting the weaknesses we learn what the strengths of our students are and and we find that out we can use that to our advantage why we when we teach these students strengths of this lexic students first of all this lexic students are very creative very very creative when you got a dyslexic student in your class bound to be someone who can also draw very well or they can they come up with the amazing stories they're

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usually very funny they're very humoristic they they can come up from different angles they might be good actors they might be good singers they might be good painters they might be good at at at fixing things as well they're usually very creative they're usually at least average intelligent if not above intelligent actually one of the tests that you have to do when you when you're being diagnosed is an intelligence test so they have to make sure that your problems with reading and writing or

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maybe other problems do not have to do with your intelligence big picture out of the boook thinking dyslexics are very extremely good at this for us it is very it is more difficult to see or to to identify or focus on Minor Details but if if you give me the big picture if I can put it in context it's a very important if I can put it in context everything is much easier for me to understand plus with the creativity as well the out of the book thinking I can come up with ideas that maybe other people would not

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have thought of and for me it's completely logical to do so I can also solve problems that neurotypical people might fight more find more difficult to solve and then I could even feel like like how can you not see this I remember at at the school that I used to run for 25 years there would be many situations where where my colleagues would walk up to me and would say oh boo we've got a problem we've got this issue we've been debating for I don't know maybe one hour and it was three of them um and we're

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trying to solve this problem but we really don't know what to do can you help us and it would literally I'm not exaggerating it would literally take me four to five questions a little mindmap with which I would draw with those questions and two or three minutes to solve their problem I could look at it I would create the big picture for myself I would solve the problem I so yeah this is the solution and they would look at me as if I were some kind of Guru and there was a how on Earth can you can you

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see this how it's one hour and we can't and you can in two minutes and then I in the end would say well I process information differently I took this on a bicycle I took a detour I took it one way or the other so this is one of my strengths but there are many weaknesses that I have as well so everyone has something my side and this was 3D thinking these lexics are very good at 3D thinking and what I mean by 3D thinking I'm going to explain to you I'm going to give you an example that's

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probably better I'm going to give you an example um think of a car in your head just picture a car in your head when you've got it look at it from the other side now look at it from the rear look at it from the front look at it from the top look at it from the bottom now open the trunk look into the TR now if you with every instruction with every PR if you have had a different image in your head so I think it was about six or seven different instructions if you have had six or seven different images in your

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head that's a very neurotypical way of thinking of representing information in your head a very dyslexic person would have had a car in their head and they would have turned turned the car around or they would have walked around the car they would have literally manipulated the image in their head in a 3D right this is why many dyslexics end up working in Engineering in architecture in designing anything that needs those skills those 3D thinking and do you remember Claire before what she said

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about uh about7 about James Bond and his colleagues problem solving big picture thinking being creative out of the box thinking all strengths that you need for those kind of jobs as well so now we've looked at what this Lexia is that it is a different way of the brain processing the information it receives we have looked at the red flags the unexpectedness we've looked at the the weaknesses we've looked at the strengths we have seen that it is an island of weaknesses in a strengths and honestly

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when you do scream for dyslexia you have to to look at both sides the weaknesses and the strengths and now we're going to the next one we're going to the next section this is going to be about teaching tips so I'm going to give you five teaching tips I think we've got time enough for this five teaching tips that you can take straight away into your classroom Monday morning or if you work on Sunday or Saturday next class and use this with your students and remember this doesn't only work for your neurod

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diverse students or your dyslexic students this also works for the rest of your students number one let's text more visuals I'm not saying no text I'm saying less text okay it is good but I do say more visual so more visual material dyslexic students are visual thinkers we are much more visual than verbal thinkers and visual thinking also is faster so the brain processes information faster when it is visual than when it is verbal when it is text based I mean we do say a picture is worth a thousand words right and and it

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is true because it is much faster and the visual thinking that's one of the strengths of the dyslexic students the use of scholors is very important we use scholors for everything we do with with dyslexic students we use Scholars to highlight the important parts of text of an explanation or of a word so if you use a text we use Scholars we either highlight them like this or we change the colors of the letters the phon names it could be to highlight a phon name like here the OU is what phon name so

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that might be a spelling issue with my student it could be a keyw in a text I want to highlight the important words in a text it could also be an idiom that I want to highlight or it could be grammar I could highlight theing ending because that's what we maybe we are working on but and this is very important I have to be coherent I have to be coherent in the use of my colors and in the use of my visuals as well because this is not about filling the page with 10,000 cols it is not oh yeah oh yeah this guy buo

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he told us that this lexic students are very creative so oh we'll just Chuck in 20 images on the page and I'll just make sure there are at least 15 different colors just put the whole uh rainbow there as well just to make it nice and appealing for students with this Lexia no no that that's making it worse it's not it's not about overwhelming them it is about making it useful for them so have few visuals with very powerful ones and be coherent in your visuals over time and use your colors wisely not too

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much at the same time use it use it very very wise holistic approach holistic approach is all about how you explain things to students how you teach students I always give the same example if you give me an exercise and the exercise has 10 questions and I have to fill in the gra the gaps with maybe grammar yes so maybe conjugation verbs and it's 10 questions that have no relation to each other so it's 10 individual questions about random different things that is more difficult for me to

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process than when you give me a text a text that is all connected so that that's all coherent it's text about one one topic with the 10 gaps so for you as a teacher I'm still doing a grammar exercise because I'm still doing that in the same text but for me it is much more easier to do this because it is in a context I can see this and if it is individual questions which is which is smaller which is more detailed it's much more difficult for me to do this it's it's an example of how

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we can work holistically with our students there many more things we can do but just to explain what I mean this one is element chunking you will hear this over and over again today I think you heard it from from Claire it's very likely that you're going to hear this from from Vicki as well chunking is all about how you break up what you do in class how you break up your material for your students remember what we talked about before remember that we talked about the working memory remember that we talked about the

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attention span so junking is all about helping these students digest the information so we want to give them chunk chunks that are that are chewable that are digestable for our students that's what we do I usually say one concept at a time one concept for chunk chunk is done a brain break new chunk brain break new chunk Etc and the last the very last um teaching tip for you is giving very very very clear instructions yeah there before probably Vicki will say it later as well because this works for all

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neurodiverse students giv clear instructions is element for students with this Lexia why because remember these students process information on their bicycle and I told you at the beginning they can enter Village B from whichever angle they like from whichever angle they like so when you give them instructions you think it's clear for you definitely not because they can interpret in five six seven eight or 10 different ways that you would never think of so make sure that the structures are very clear the steps are

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very clear and maybe even ask your students to reflect back on you and say these are the instructions what do you have to do what have you understood by the instruction that I just gave you and then see what their reaction is that's it that leads us to Tommy remember the story at the beginning the true story about Tommy so Tommy's mother started teaching him um for many many years in different ways she actually used the strategies that we were just talking about because she knew that he

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was a holistic thinker she could see that he was very good at thinking out of the books he was very creative he was inventive she would use very different strategies because actually he was an inventor and one of the things that he invented over his life very prolific life one of the things he invented was from light Po so obviously now you go like well maybe it's not this Tommy maybe it is this Tommy that I was talking about actually I was talking about the life of Thomas ala Edison who was very dyslexic who was kicked out of

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school as a child his mother taught him uh in a very different way with very different teaching strategies and this is what made him such a wonderful and beautiful and amazing inventor so next time you see see a lazy or perceived lazy students in your class maybe think is the student lazy or maybe is the student not lazy and maybe I have a neurodiverse brain sitting right in front of me thank you very much and as I always like to finish everything I do long live the dyslexic brand I'm not wearing it

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right now because it's a T-shirt and it's although I live in Spain it is not that warm right now thank you very much