An alternative approach to dyslexia focuses on the individual profiles of children with learning difficulties, former teacher Martin Murphy tells Pádraig O'Morain
Teaching honours maths and physics to children who were in danger of failing English put Martin Murphy on the path to developing a system which is producing remarkable results for people with dyslexia.
Now the former Clonkeen College, Dublin, teacher has written about the subject in his book Dyslexia, An Explanation (Flyleaf Press).
At first, as he searched for an explanation as to why children who were excellent at maths, physics and chemistry should be poor at English, "my arrogant assumption was that they had bad teachers," he says.
But when he tried to work with these children on English, he concluded that the nub of the matter was not that there was anything wrong with their teachers but that these children learned differently from others.
Indeed, he goes so far as to say that all children have different ways of learning.
He then put into practice an approach summed up in the following quote, attributed to American philosopher and educator John Dewey, and which he has adopted as his mission statement: "An artful teacher sees a child's difficulty in learning to read not as a defect of a child, but as a defect of his own instruction."
He studied the topic in the United States, Australia and other countries. Now he sees children with their parents and each child is screened for 41 different thinking skills.
" No two children think in the same way, he says.
"We look at 41 different learning profiles. Imagine the number of cocktails you could make with 41 different bottles of spirits."
Parents and children go away with a 28-day programme based on these learning profiles.
A consultation costs € 425. Usually only one visit is required. If subsequent visits are needed they are covered by the original fee.
Features of the programme include putting information, including spellings, directly into the child's long-term memory by encouraging the child to make a mental video of what he or she is reading.
This process also involves the children spelling words or doing mathematical tables backwards as well as forwards.
Does it work?
"I have seen it work with some almost miraculously," says Christina Finch, a resource teacher at the Educate Together school in Lucan, Dublin.
"Others are still having a bit of a struggle but are improved. I have never seen a child stay exactly the same or get worse."
Murphy's success, she believes, is based on his insistence that each child needs his or her own individual learning programme.
"You can't say every child with dyslexia will learn this way or that way," she says.
"What may work with one child will not work with another. The challenge is to find methods and techniques for each child that comes along.
"If it's not working you have to look for a different way of doing it."
Quite apart from bright children with dyslexia, she has seen children with borderline intellectual disabilities benefit from his method.
"The biggest benefit from a child's point of view is self esteem. A lot of them, by the time they get to me, are shattered.
"They have figured out they are not doing as well as everybody else. They get used to not listening to what the teachers say because they don't understand it."
Doing Martin Murphy's programme brings "a burst in self esteem and confidence."
That is vital, she says, because "half of my job is to get them to believe in themselves.
"Their confidence and self esteem represents such a high percentage of their ability to learn."
Martin Murphy can be contacted at 01-2840563. His website at www.dyslexia-at-bay.com contains a number of chapters from the book.