Photograph by Tessa, a Brehm student
Our daughter received a diagnosis of Non-Verbal Learning Disability around age 11, but nothing really changed in her education and therapies until she got to Brehm. Finally at Brehm she had faculty and staff who understood her needs! They saw past her verbal strengths that masked her core visual-spatial weakness and knew how to help her build skills in her weakest areas. They addressed her needs with perfectly targeted instruction and then lots of practice throughout the rest of the program, with appropriate support as needed, so that she could generalize new skills.
Deb Browne, SLP who has written the past two blog posts, is an expert in addressing the needs of students with NLD. She uses all the best practice approaches for helping students with NLD, including Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking curriculum and Sara Ward’s strategies to improve executive functioning, and she applies the curricula and strategies in creative ways targeted specifically to each student’s needs. When she found gaps in the best practice approaches, she developed her own cutting edge approaches. For example, she leveraged concepts from Lindamood Bell’s Visualizing and Verbalizing curriculum, which is targeted at improving reading comprehension, and applied those concepts in a new way to help our daughter use her stronger verbal skills to improve how she processes visual information.
Deb has so many talents that help people with NLD, so we were thrilled that our daughter’s Individualized Holistic Education Plan included two individual sessions and a small group session with her each week. Deb is also very skilled at helping students with executive function challenges, and our daughter benefited from these skills in daily academic advising sessions.
The Brehm faculty who teach traditional high school classes also infuse their teaching with best practices for students with NLD. In geometry, the teacher surrounded visuals with descriptive language, making it easier for our daughter to make sense of shapes and their relationships. Her language arts teacher understood that in spite of normal reading scores, our daughter still benefited from exercises to build skills around summarizing and identifying the main idea. In Healthy Living, which included a unit on sex and sexuality, her teacher understood the need to use specific language to help students be more aware and better prepared for life. In academic advisement classes, advisors spent a lot of time teaching and helping students learn to use best practice strategies to improve their organization and planning, which are often challenging areas for people with NLD. Her art teacher creatively provided projects that allowed our daughter to make beautiful art in spite of her visual processing and fine motor challenges. Art was a source of joy for her at Brehm, instead of a source of frustration as it had been at her prior school.
Brehm’s Head of School has a deep understanding of student profiles and what that means for the programming they need. Each year she modifies the programming offered and is creative in how she does so to ensure students’ needs are met - academically, emotionally, socially, and physically. For example, based on parent input, she implemented the full semester Healthy Living class mentioned above. She also started a current events class, because she observed that a number of students needed to learn to handle news that can be emotionally challenging.
Learning and skill building continued for our daughter outside of the academic day. Brehm is masterful at leveraging teachable moments across the program and making the most of them to help students build skills. I learned to love the friction that inevitably happened between students, because that’s when so much social learning happened. When there was a conflict between students that persisted, each student would ‘process’ with a staff member who would coach them on the emotional and social aspects of the conflict. These weren’t quick conversations and they took a lot of staff time, but they got to the root cause of the conflict. With coaching, the students would then come back together to have a conversation to work things through. Through this process staff also gained an increased understanding of the skills each student still needed to work on, and that was shared with the appropriate specialist who then would continue to work on the needed skill with the student. Brehm focuses on leveraging these teachable moments in this way every day across the program, with new learning and repeated practice happening again and again and again for each student.
Brehm recreation activities also offered so many opportunities for our daughter to build skills. She played paintball, which surprised many of us since she has sensory issues and anxiety. Through paintball she learned to do and tolerate things that were hard for her, such as reacting quickly and learning to hide, being chased, and being shot at and hit. She learned to work together as a team so that she didn’t disappoint her team members. For cheer team and student performances, she worked hard and did extra practice to learn the routines, which were challenging due to coordination issues. She acted in plays, where she once portrayed a two-faced character which reinforced for her that people aren’t always what they seem. She attended concerts, where she practiced strategies for tolerating loud noises and crowds. All of this was possible due to the dedication of the faculty and staff who understood her challenges and knew how to encourage her, how to break down tasks into steps she could learn, and then also helped her practice.
These recreation activities and dorm life provided so much opportunity for social growth. Unlike at her school at home, at Brehm she was able to participate in all school activities. At times conflicts arose, teachable moments occurred, Brehm leveraged them and ‘processing’ happened… just what someone with NLD needs. Some of the friendships she made at Brehm have persisted now years later.
The emotional support at Brehm was a crucial component of our daughter’s development. Brehm offers access to regular sessions with an LCSW or psychologist and access to a sensory room. Students participate in weekly small group sessions, with a range of content such as emotional regulation, friendship strategies, and conflict resolution. Faculty and staff are accessible when students need support. For example, her advisor spent a lot of time preparing our daughter for her first trip flying home alone because she was so anxious. When her grandmother died, her dorm parent not only comforted her but walked her through the specifics of what a funeral might look like before she flew to meet us for the funeral. Like many people with NLD, our daughter needed a lot of time to talk through her anxieties, and Brehm faculty and staff understood that need and met it.
One final point is that Brehm’s communication was essential for building parents’ confidence that their student was in the right place. The Individualized Holistic Education Plans are both broad and detailed, and are well thought out. The goals in the plan are meaningful and specific, as are progress notes. Academic advisors and dorm parents communicate regularly with parents, through regular emails and phone calls. Parents Weekends are super busy but are wonderful and allow for important dialog between parents and faculty/staff.
Brehm’s integrated services meant that our daughter was prepared for academic, social, and emotional challenges; had a multitude of ways to practice and generalize new skills; and had support and scaffolding when needed along the way. The integrated services provided an intensity of skill-building that couldn’t happen any other way. What a relief it was that we landed on the perfect program to help our daughter!
