Results from interview with Lindmood

Willow,

I think it is great your school has one of the Lindamood bell kits, although you did nto mention which one. However, I would suggest finding out if someone has been trained to use this program.

Janis

Hi Janis,
It is the LIPS program, I need to find a way to see if the therapist is trained in LM with out insulting the therapist.
Willow

doesn’t mean they know what they are doing…

I know so many teachers who have been “trained” by our district and have brand spanking new LiPS kits which go unused because they won’t spend the time remediating the kids they are just keeping them up with their homework..AARGH!

Willow: You might ask specific questions about the program to see if they know anything. Of course I might fool you and I haven’t been trained but I dare say that MOST people would not be able to explain the program so well if they don’t know about it and aren’t trained. Some schools have boxes of various programs and the teachers couldn’t tell you anything.

Here are some questions: Ask if they could sum up what the program does. If they can’t tell you about learning the tactile/kinesthetic (however they want to word it) position of each sound, then they don’t know the first thing. Ask them what steps your child would take in it— you should get something like first they learn to recognize and catagorize the various sounds, then the learn to “track” sounds (this is figuring out what sound is first,etc.); and then doing this using real words, etc. Hey I haven’t gotten any further. If they can’t tell you this, they don’t know the second thing.
Ask them if they can tell you what’s different about LiPS. If they can’t tell you it is the only program that uses the position of the tongue, lips, etc. in the mouth to learn the sound then the don’t know the third thing. You can play dumb like you know nothing, just that you have heard it would help your kid.

If they can answer these questions,
I don’t know how you would tell if the teacher has any background without really asking, you might ask “what is your background with this?” Then this leaves the person able to say that they went to a workshop or that they looked over the manual (that wouldn’t be enough, btw). If someone said that they worked on the manual several hours a week for a long time (like me) you would have to decide if you thought that was ok. (Yes I plan to get the training, just making a point here). Don’t look for certification, there is barely such a thing.

—des

My daughter is a SLP grad student at a top-rated grad school. She applied for a summer job at a LMB center. They were highering around 10 people for summer. When she went for final meeting, she was the only person there with SLP background and the only one who had heard of LMB and also had extensive background in working with LD children during undergrad work. She thought this job would be good for her resume and helpful in grad school. Other applicants were non-related undergrads, a couple of teachers, and people with no background at all. LMB spent most of time discussing wardrobe and appearance, how many earrings you could wear. She has held many jobs and had excellent references. She was the most qualifed candidate there and they did not hire her. I would be very careful before I ever gave any one that amount of money without checking qualifications very carefully. And what are you paying for—who exactly is working with your child. Are they qualifed or do they just look good. This left a very bad impression with me. I have 14 yo dd. When she was first diagnosed with dyslexia, Dr. said any good structured program would do the job. The specific one in not that important. We went with OG tutor and have had good results.

Well I don’t know that much about the centers. Though I have read some good things from parents here. But I am pretty sure the LMB programs have a lot of merit and are unique in certain ways. OG is very good for many kids with dyslexia. But there is a small number, and this according to Susan Barrett who definitely knows her stuff and even created her own OG based program, that really need LiPs. These are kids who are not able to track the number of sounds in words, can’t track sounds (ie could not repeat back say /b/, /l/, /s/), and can’t really hear the sounds suffficiently to benefit from OG. While OG methods teach phonemic awareness, they don’t go into it the way LiPs does. So I heard this right from Susan Barrett. And I have enough background in OG, I think, to see that this is correct. This is not to knock OG (or anything else), just to say that there are kids for whom the LMB programs are really needed.

I think the discussion here was to figure out how Willow might ascertain if the people knew what they were doign to teach her child. Having the LiPs kit alone will not cut it. I doubt someone who hasn’t worked seriously with it could make heads or tails out of it.

—des