[00:00:00] Dr. Patti Stoudt: If you’ve ever done rock climbing, some of the first things you need to identify is where to put your hands, where to grab hold, how to manage it, and how to navigate a path with handholds. A diagnosis is nothing more than a handhold. It helps us know where to grab. It helps us know how to plan a path. It helps us know how to navigate.

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[00:00:26] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. It is my very great pleasure today to welcome Dr. Patti Stoudt to join us for this conversation about children who learn differently. I am so excited to make her acquaintance via video. I know you’ll be excited for what she’ll have to say today. I walk in the special needs world because I believe that there is no such thing as special needs. We all have special needs, but many of us learn differently. I want to see that the playing field is leveled, so I’ve invited Dr. Stoudt here today to help us do that. I’m going to let her introduce herself.

[00:01:06] Dr. Stoudt: Hi. I usually just say, “I’m Patti,” and then I’m done, but I think maybe we need a little more information. I’m Patti, and I’m happily married to Paul for 45 years. We started on our homeschool journey when our oldest was in kindergarten. It was kind of a last minute, the week before school starts, I do not recommend that you do that, because we had signed him up for the local Christian school. The district contacted us– In Pennsylvania, the district provides transportation no matter where you go to school, and they said, oh, we’re going to put your kindergartner on the high school bus. We said, well, maybe not, and decided maybe homeschooling, can he know his shapes and colors, kindergarten stuff?

We decided to do that for a one-year experiment. 20 years later, we ended our one-year experiment when we graduated our youngest. As we took the journey along, the Lord allowed me to use my teaching certificate. I have a teaching certificate for Pennsylvania for early childhood education and deaf education, K-12. In Pennsylvania, the law requires each family to see a certified teacher or someone else that matches the qualifications listed in the law for a year-end evaluation, which is basically a portfolio review. While I was at home with my children, I was able to say, “I have a teaching certificate. Come on to my house. Play with my kids and celebrate your year.”

Now that was 29 years ago that I began that, and I’ve met amazing people along the way. Partway through that journey, the Lord told me to go back to school. At 50, I went back to college to get my doctorate through Liberty University, and my focus– Here’s my dissertation. I got it out. It’s nice and thick. I got to interview 30 families for homeschooling children with special needs under the specifics of the Pennsylvania law. I have the honor and privilege to work with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of homeschoolers. I do quite a bit of testing in North Carolina where my son lives, and I do evaluations and testing here in Pennsylvania and some other places along the way. I guess that’s about it. Last week, I finished 415 homeschool portfolio reviews here in Pennsylvania, so I’m tired.

[00:03:39] Gretchen: [laughs] I bet you are. My goodness, 415, that is quite a record. That is amazing. By reputation, it has been interesting because when I talk to homeschool families, so many of them know you or know of you, and so I’m just excited to have this conversation today. We have so many things I would like to talk about. Maybe the best place to begin is how do you feel, how is it advantageous for a family to homeschool a child who learns differently?

[00:04:14] Dr. Stoudt: Show me a child that doesn’t learn differently.

[00:04:17] Gretchen: I knew I could count on you to say that.

[00:04:20] Dr. Stoudt: If God calls you to homeschool your child, he teaches us in his word to teach our children when we walk by the way, when we rise up, when we lie down, so which of us are not homeschooling? It’s just some of us part-time homeschool and some of us full-time homeschool, but we all start with homeschool when we’re teaching them to potty train and all that other fun stuff. Some of us continue it on a more academic road afterward.

As far as children with special learning needs, and the vocabulary in this field changes regularly. I can promise you, I am not politically correct. I do love every single individual as an image bearer of God, so forgive me if I do a faux pas with my vocabulary. When I was doing my research for my dissertation, I came across one term that I really fell in love with, and that is special education needs, a child with special education needs. I use the term S-E-N. I don’t turn it into a word. I just type SEN when I’m dealing with– like I’ll say, SEN approval. Oh, in Pennsylvania, we need to have a pre-approval for the objectives for a child with SEN, Special Education Needs.

[00:05:43] Gretchen: I like that, because that defines what we’re talking about without quantifying the individual, which is really awesome.

[00:05:51] Dr. Stoudt: Which of us doesn’t have strengths and weaknesses in our learning? Some of the things I found in research, why– Your original question before I got snarky on you was, what would be some of the advantages or reasons why it might be positive or advantageous to homeschool a child? Well, some of the reasons I found in my research through educational theory were that– There’s a man that I learned, I love. He’s an educational theorist from Russia from back in the early 1900s named Lev Vygotsky. Part of his theory is the idea of private speech.

Now if I say something to you, everybody out there in podcast land, I want you to instantly say out loud, wherever you are, what comes next. Ready? I before E–

[00:06:47] Gretchen: Except after C. [chuckles]

[00:06:48] Dr. Stoudt: Okay. The only reason you can do that is because someone had you practice private speech, mental rehearsal, whatever you want to call it, brain practice. That’s a really strong educational practice, but not all of us can sit and say everything out loud when it comes to mind when we’re in a classroom with 25 students. However, at home, it’s very normal for us to talk to ourselves. One of the advantages is to be able to practice private speech. Another is to be able to get up and walk around and work with the wiggle. There’s just so many, but let’s go to the very basis of special education. That’s a federal legal document called an IEP, an Individualized Education Plan. How much more individualized can you get than homeschooling? I rest my case.

[00:07:48] Gretchen: Absolutely. I love the fact that you talked about work with the wiggle. I think that’s so important. There was a lot of times where academics were accomplished at my house with a child on a trampoline for the entirety of the lesson because that was where I could get their focus. In fact, I have a coworker who says that one of her children said to her, “You have a choice,” at seven. He said, “You have a choice. I can move and learn, or I can sit still like you want me to, and I won’t hear a thing you say.” He’s a college student now, so obviously they made it work. [chuckles]

[00:08:26] Dr. Stoudt: During my research for my dissertation, I came across Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It looks like Maslow, but because it’s Russian, it’s Maslow. He basically says we have to meet the child’s basic needs of security and safety before we get up the pyramid on level four to start real learning. I had one student I interviewed- the mother I interviewed during my dissertation. She said she sent her son, with severe dyslexia and other learning disabilities, to first grade, and she said, “You must behave and stay in your chair.” When he came home the first day, she said, “What did you learn?” He said, “I stayed on my chair.” “But what did the teacher say?” “I don’t know. I stayed on my chair.” He was so busy focused in that safety bottom level of staying on his chair, he had no ability to take in information and process it in a learning capacity.

[00:09:21] Gretchen: I started my homeschool journey in 1995, kind of similar to you in the fact that I started in the middle of an academic year overnight because I didn’t like the fact that the third-grade school system said my daughter didn’t need to memorize her multiplication tables. I was like, “Hold the phone. That’s wrong.” Long story short, 21 years later, we have four homeschooled grads. My fifth one was homeschooled until high school, and my last one was homeschooled up until middle school. The point is how you get here doesn’t really matter; it’s that you’re here, and now what are you going to do with it.

Now what I’d like you to do is to talk about diagnoses because in the last 10 or 12 years, I see more and more families who see a diagnosis as a limit and their children can’t get past that limit. I’m really anxious to hear you talk about how we can surmount that as parents attitudinally so we know how to serve our kids.

[00:10:31] Dr. Stoudt: If you’ve ever done rock climbing, some of the first things you need to identify is where to put your hands, where to grab hold, how to manage it, and how to navigate a path with handholds. A diagnosis is nothing more than a handhold. It helps us know where to grab, it helps us know how to plan a path, it helps us know how to navigate, but it certainly is not a tattoo across the forehead that says for the rest of my life, I have to have this label. A diagnosis helps parents, A, confirm or affirm their suspicions they’ve had all along. It’s never a surprise. Unless you live in the river in Egypt called denial, parents have a feeling. Now it is harder with the first child because you have nothing to compare with, but if you’ve been around other children that have typical developmental milestones, you can get a feeling something’s going on here. A label should not be something to be feared, or a diagnosis. It should be a handhold to know how to grab and how to plan a navigation path here forward.

There are so many resources out there. One of the best ones out there is understood.org. They have so many resources for parents to figure out, what does this diagnosis or label mean, and what are some good strategies to try to overcome the hurdles in front of my child? The more hurdles we learn to navigate together, the stronger they are for adulthood. We don’t want to avoid that, but we do want to have a handle or a handhold to know how to best proceed. What is it I’m dealing with? What are some strategies I can research and learn?

Now some parents do experience guilt. Maybe I shouldn’t have had that particular medication during pregnancy, or maybe I shouldn’t have– what could I have done? There’s a grieving process when finding out your child has special needs. It’s okay to grieve. The child didn’t die. Usually, we acknowledge grief as part of a death process. Some of our dreams might come crashing down, so we grieve the changing of our dreams, the changing of our path. Then we embrace that child, still an image bearer of God, and we say, “Wow, I wonder what amazing things God has for this child’s future. What do I need to do to back up, grab the handhold and move forward on a new path?”

[00:13:13] Gretchen: I love that. I love your analogy of grabbing a handhold because information is power. I don’t want to see it be limiting, because when we take that and we make it as a limit for ourselves, we’re missing out on the best parts of our children’s growing up, and they’re missing out on their potential.

You said that you do testing both in Pennsylvania and in North Carolina. Tell me a little bit more about that, because I think that’s one of the hurdles that a lot of parents feel like, oh, my child wouldn’t do well in testing, so I can’t homeschool them because I’m afraid those tests won’t reflect what they can do. Can you talk a little bit about that point of view?

[00:14:01] Dr. Stoudt: In Pennsylvania, the homeschool law requires testing in grades three, five and eight. Hint, three plus five equals eight, just so you can remember. In North Carolina, families are required testing every year. Each state has a different law, so first, you want to get to know your law. Second, you need to know, are there any limits as to what tests are given? Generally, they are nationally normed, standardized achievement tests. Wow, was that a mouthful. In order to pass the test to be able to use that test, you need to make sure it’s a nationally normed, standardized achievement test.

When we do testing, we always say, what’s the purpose, and we choose an instrument that best meets that purpose. Check the law first. Usually, it’s achievement test. Usually, it’s not to hand in results; it’s to keep them on file. Usually, it’s some kind of arbitrary way to say the child really is making educational progress. Instead of being measured against 25 other students in the classroom or hundreds in the school or thousands in the state, the child is really measured against himself.

We want to see measurement. The people – here comes my pet peeve – that say, “Just do it and get it done. Go on there and just click, click, let the child click, click, get it done to satisfy the legal requirements,” hey, if you want to throw your money away, it’s all right. I don’t, but why not stop and say maybe there’s some value here. Since I don’t have to show anybody else– In Pennsylvania, yes, the evaluator will see it, but pick an evaluator that will celebrate with you and not chide you.

The testing that I give is called the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement. It’s a nationally normed. That means they gave the test to lots of children across the nation in the cities, out on the farms, all different ethnicities, all different age groups, all different ability groups, all different religious background groups. We can get a general idea across the nation that students six-tenths of the way through fifth grade usually can answer these questions. It’s a nice broad general thing.

No, not everybody can function the same on a test, so I say, let’s get a baseline for this child. Then let’s see how this child makes progress from that baseline, measuring against him or herself. That’s it. Will they know all the questions? No. I don’t, and I’ve had 10 years of college and a couple degrees. It doesn’t matter. Those don’t matter, but what does matter is, are the results showing what mom is seeing at home? If mom is seeing, “I see a math struggle at home. He loves reading, he loves writing, but he really doesn’t love math,” or opposite, and the scores on a graph show [celebrates] he loves reading, loves writing, hates math, great. It’s just affirming mom and saying, “Yes, you’ve got a handle on this. You have a finger on the pulse.”

It should be an affirmation and a celebration, even if there’s a little bit of disappointment, saying, “I wish he were higher.”

[00:17:30] Gretchen: Another thing I think is always important for parents to remember is, it’s one day out of your child’s life. Nobody has ever asked me any score that any of my kids ever got on an achievement test in the 12 years the six of them went through school.

[00:17:49] Dr. Stoudt: For North Carolina, that’s the truth. Now I have a bunch of really amazing families down in North Carolina, which is interesting, who could go online and do one of the online tests, timed or untimed, probably a little less expensive than what I charge, but I hear that I charge about half the rate that some of the people in North Carolina – sorry, people – down there charge.

I’ll go into the home, if the parents invite me, and sit there and get to know the family and just have fun and celebrate their life and their year and their amazing children. It takes about an hour per child, some of the older children take longer than an hour because they want to answer those deep, dark math questions that I don’t understand, but it’s really untimed. It’s flexible and relaxed. I can do it in the home environment where, especially, children with special needs are familiar and comfortable. There’s so much flexibility.

There are other tests and there are other options. There’s the pencil up, pencil down, color in the dots kind of test. The one I use has a flip chart and it’s mostly interview. That’s changing now. The new version that just came out is electronic, and I’m not crazy about it, but anyway, as long as they still produce for the WJ-IV, I’m going to keep giving the WJ-IV. Anyway, most of the states offer options of testing, and the one-on-one interview style tests are much less stress on the child than either online or booklets, “Open your booklet, pencils up,” like we’ve done when we were younger.

[00:19:27] Gretchen: Right, and in all honesty, I actually homeschooled my kids when I lived in Maryland. My husband and I lived in Maryland, I almost said something wrong, but lived in Maryland for 28 years, and my three oldest children and my grandchildren still live there. We were not required to test in Maryland, but I had family members who were certain that I was not doing the right thing, so that test was the rubber stamp for me. I was a certified Stanford tester, so we did pencil up, pencil down, fill in the bubble for a number of years. I also know that nobody cared about those tests beyond the answers that we got in that particular year.

What would you say to a parent who– because I held these parents’ hands who were just absolutely flummoxed over the fact that their child did not do well on an end-of-year achievement test. What do you say to them? Because I’m certain I really want to hear this.

[00:20:28] Dr. Stoudt: First of all, I say, why are you testing at the end of the year? Now some of the tests, depending on the test you choose because it is a parental choice, do need to be year-end because that’s how they’re normed. The test that I give, I can test in the fall. A lot of my families love to come to me during the fall because then they can do course corrections if there’s not a really good match with the curriculum and the child’s learning style. Just because it’s mom’s learning style and she likes that curriculum doesn’t mean the child is best developing or thriving under that. We’ll have a chat.

That was where I was going with my last question and didn’t finish it, was part of the one-on-one test is the consultation that comes afterward. I find out all the amazing curriculum programs and materials that these other moms discover, and then I can be a repository and say, “Hey, have you tried this one? Have you tried that one?” We can do a lot of cheerleading and coaching with the consultation that comes afterward.

To the question of those results, let’s not get all upset and frustrated. Let’s look at them as a measurement. If you’re going to do them every year, try to do them about the same time every year, but you don’t have to wait for the end of the year unless you choose that kind of test. I don’t know. It’s hard for me to answer that. A lot of the questions about testing depend on which test you use, and I have a little bit of a bias towards the Woodcock-Johnson.

[00:21:57] Gretchen: I think it’s a terrific measure, and one of the things it gives you is information. Like you said in the very beginning, if you have information, you have a handhold and you know how to then adjust accordingly, which really does make a difference. What else do you want to share with our families today?

[00:22:16] Dr. Stoudt: You’d shared with me some questions that parents had asked beforehand-

[00:22:20] Gretchen: Yes.

[00:22:20] Dr. Stoudt: -and some of them were specific strategies or things, ideas to use with children with more significant special education needs, SENs. Somebody asked specifically about Down syndrome. Well, I’ve met a bazillion – not quite – children with Down syndrome and each one is very unique, uniquely abled, unique limitations, unique frustrations, so again, that’s hard to answer. There is a nice program out there that some of my moms who have children with Down syndrome have shared me, and that’s So Happy to Learn. I don’t know a lot about the program, but I hear that it works well.

The other one I always recommend, and this has nothing to do with who is sponsoring this podcast, this show, and that is Math-U-See. My first encounter with Math-U-See was probably 28 years ago. I had a mom who was a math major, and she had a boatload of children. I won’t say numbers because it might help you identify some of my people. I was testing her oldest four every year, and three of them were miles ahead on the test and one was miles behind on the test. She came to me and said, “I’m a math major. I know my math, but I don’t know what to do with this child. I came across this thing called Math-U-See. Should I try it?” I said, “Why not?” She did. From February until May, when I tested the child, the child caught up, if there is such a thing. I mean, these are arbitrary references.

The thing is it teaches a different way to think math that’s weird to some of us. It has the blocks and the manipulatives, and I always say, “Use your blocks.” I say, “It’s Math-U-See, not Math-U-Guess.” [laughter] I talk that way for real. They said, “Can she use her blocks during testing?” I said, “Well, last I saw, a block never gave anybody an answer, so yes.” The child came in after three months on the program, three years behind in scores from last year, and sat down with the blocks on the desk, never touched them, and with the confidence that she got and the new way of thinking math, scored on level. I realize that that contradicts what I said earlier about, what is delayed, what is on level, but it is a point of reference, and it is a point of measurement of progress. This child showed significant progress.

It’s really not that one program, but finding the program that connects with the way your child thinks and learns, or maybe – as one of my favorite phrases – is a casserole of programs that helps your child just learn to think it through, even if it means you making some changes, mom. There are so many neat programs out there. The problem with going to a curriculum fair is everybody has every answer to every need you ever might have, and you can spend a million dollars and have piles of curriculum and never use them all. Think it through carefully and ask lots of parents, what do you use? Did you always use it? What did you use before? Why did you change? Get some reasons behind it, how to think it through. You doing that will teach you how to help your child how to think it through.

[00:25:45] Gretchen: I love that. What you just said, actually, I would like you to address another thing that we often hear at conferences, and that is a parent who comes up to us and says, “I need your help. My child is behind.” Can you talk about that word? I don’t like that word. That’s one word I wish I could have every homeschool parent lose from their vocabulary. Tell me your perspective.

[00:26:09] Dr. Stoudt: One of my favorite phrases is help me understand, so help me understand what you mean by behind. Behind on your expectations? Behind on, you’re planning to enroll the child next year and you want to catch the child up to grade level? Help me understand what your expectations are, and also where you’re feeling pressure. What is your source of pressure? Then is it something we can back up and learn how to relax and embrace, or is it a very real situation? I have to go back to work next year. I have to re-enroll. Okay, then let’s work with that.

I helped to homeschool one of my grandchildren who has dyslexia. She was going to a very academic-rigorous school and pulled out for an unknown, undefined amount of time. We chose to make curricular selections to parallel with the school in case we blended her back in, she would not be at a disadvantage. We didn’t have all the freedom to do all the creative homeschool stuff, but we had a reason. Help me understand your situation. What do you mean delayed, behind compared to what? What yardstick are you using to measure, and where’s your pressure coming from?

[00:27:32] Gretchen: Those are terrific questions for any parent to ask when they have a child that they perceive is not on par with their peers, because that really does make a tremendous difference. Okay, Dr. Patti, what else? What have I missed asking you about that I should have asked you about?

[00:27:53] Dr. Stoudt: Can children with special needs graduate from high school? Should we graduate them at age 18 as a typical, or can we continue to homeschool until age 21 or beyond? The answer to those questions lies in your state. I happen to be in Pennsylvania. Some people really resent Pennsylvania’s law, but Pennsylvania is the only state that offers a plethora of state-recognized diplomas to homeschoolers. Yes, I can help parents graduate their children with special needs with a diploma, but everything is very individualized like an IEP, but we don’t need that because homeschooling is individualized.

What will the child need to commence to doing what’s next? What does the child need to be equipped to commence? Let’s get this child on an equipping program. Then can we graduate that child? Yes. There are some more rigorous academic diplomas that would be a challenge, but there are options other than that. There’s now, starting back, I guess, 11 years ago– how’d that happen? We have a supervisor-issued diploma that the state will stand behind.

There’s so many different options for graduation, which we could do a whole different program on, but it is possible to help children with special needs, again depending on their individual needs, to graduate. Yes, we can legally continue to homeschool them under the paperwork parameters of homeschooling until they’re 21. We could stop paperwork at 18. It depends on where you live and what your compulsory attendance laws are, but in all honesty, when are you going to stop teaching your children? I look at it as having a lifestyle of learning.

William Shakespeare said, [mimics] the whole world is a stage – I don’t know how his voice sounded. I didn’t meet him – but Dr. Stoudt says, the whole world is a classroom. Let’s get out there and get learning, and let’s have a lifestyle of learning. Let’s not try to replicate a school room in our house. Let’s meet the child where the child is. Let’s get familiar with what the child has already mastered, what he’s not yet solid in, and where he needs to go that he hasn’t started.

Vygotsky calls that the ZPD, the Zone of Proximal Development. If we meet the child in that ZPD and strengthen him and scaffold him like they do with washing windows, all right, we already washed that. We need the support here to wash these windows. We don’t need to worry about those windows yet. There’s so much there all on Vygotsky and his theories, I mentioned him earlier with private speech, but that’s real education. Let’s meet each child where he is and take him to his next personal level.

[00:31:04] Gretchen: I love it. As you all can see, Dr. Patti is just a wealth of information. I don’t believe we’ve even begun to plumb the depths of what she could share with us and tell us. We’ll have to invite her back again. I want to say thank you so much for being here today. This was a terrific conversation. I really love the fact that you and I have connected on so many levels. It’s gratifying to know that I’m out there talking to parents, seeing a lot of the things that you say. That makes me feel like, yes, I do have a little bit of a good handle on this for parents. That’s amazing.

Dr. Patti, thanks for joining us. Thank you to all of you who joined us today for inviting us into your living rooms. We appreciate it. We’ll look forward to having you in our living rooms again soon. Thank you all so much. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.

[00:31:58] Dr. Stoudt: Thank you.

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