Education

When Dr. Thomas Armstrong wrote the first edition of The Power of Neurodiversity fifteen years ago, neurodiversity was an obscure term in the eyes of the public.  Since that time, the concept has grown exponentially as more and more people have become aware that individuals with disabilities deserve to have greater attention focused on their strengths, talents, and abilities.  In this completely revised and updated book, Armstrong adds hundreds of practical strategies and tips not found in the first edition to help those with neurodiversities create personalized environmental ‘’niches’’ that adapt the world to their own uniqueness. It includes such vital information as:

• What current research says about the specific strengths and evolutionary advantages found in people with dyslexia, ADHD, autism, intellectual disabilities mood disorders, and other neurodiversities;
• How to take advantage of assistive technologies and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) tools that help neurodivergent individuals ‘’work around’’ obstacles at school and in one’s career.
• Which career paths are best suited to specific neurodiversities (and which are bad matches);
• Why inclusive classrooms offer the best learning experience for neurodivergent children, and how strength-based instruction can make learning better for all;
• How to modify the workplace so that every employee, neurodivergent and neurotypical alike, can thrive;
• What resources (books, organizations, apps, films) are out there to support the lives of neurodivergent children, teens, and adults.

The Power of Neurodiversity is a manifesto, a keen look at disability, and must-read for parents, teachers, neurodivergent individuals, and anyone interested in learning more about the millions of people who make up the neurominorities of our culture.

A new concept on human diversity has emerged over the past 10 years that promises to revolutionize the way educators provide service to students with special needs:  neurodiversity.  Just as we celebrate diversity in nature and culture, so too do we need to honor the diversity of brains among our students who learn, think, and behave differently.  In this book, Thomas Armstrong argues that we should embrace the strengths of such neurodiverse students to help them and their neurotypical peers thrive in school and beyond.

For college level students and adults in the workplace, read my book The Power of Neurodiversity:  Unleashing the Advantages of Your Differently Wired Brain.

Moody. Reckless. Impractical. Insecure. Distracted. These are all words commonly used to describe adolescents.  But what if we recast these traits in a positive light?  Teens possess insight, passion, idealism, sensitivity, and creativity in abundance -- all qualities that can make a significant positive contribution to society.

In this thought-provoking book, Thomas Armstrong looks at the power and promise of the teenage brain from an empathetic, strength-based perspective—and describes what middle and high school educators can do to make the most of their students potential.

A fully revised and updated edition of the groundbreaking book on tackling the root causes of children’s attention and behavior problems rather than masking the symptoms with medication.

More than twenty years after Dr. Thomas Armstrong's Myth of the ADD Child first published, he presents much needed updates and insights in this substantially revised edition. When The Myth of the ADD Child was first published in 1995, Dr. Thomas Armstrong made the controversial argument that many behaviors labeled as ADD or ADHD are simply a child's active response to complex social, emotional, and educational influences. In this fully revised and updated edition, Dr. Armstrong shows readers how to address the underlying causes of a child's attention and behavior problems in order to help their children implement positive changes in their lives.

The rate of ADHD diagnosis has increased sharply, along with the prescription of medications to treat it. Now needed more than ever, this book includes fifty-one new non-drug strategies to help children overcome attention and behavior problems, as well as updates to the original fifty proven strategies.

With nearly a half million copies of this book in print, Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom provides a nuts-and-bolts teacher's guide to the theory of multiple intelligences, including chapters on lesson planning, teaching strategies, assessment, classroom management, identifying students' intelligences, and more. This fourth edition provides new chapters on personalized learning, neurodiversity, and new learning technologies, as well an appendix of lesson plans aligned to Common Core State Standards.

In today's schools, students and teachers feel unprecedented--even alarming--levels of stress.  How can we create calmer classrooms in which students concentrate better and feel more positive about themselves and others?  Author Thomas Armstrong offers a compelling answer in the form of mindfulness, a secular practice he defines as the intentional focus of one's attention on the present moment in a nonjudgmental way.

Based on psychologist Howard Gardner's pioneering theory of "multiple intelligences," the original edition of 7 Kinds of Smart identified seven distinct ways of being smart, including "word smart," "music smart," "logic smart," and "people smart." Now, with the addition of two new kinds of smart--"naturalist" and "existential"--7 Kinds of Smart offers even more interesting information about how the human psyche functions. Complete with checklists for determining one's strongest and weakest intelligences, exercises, practical tips for developing each type of smart, a revised bibliography for further reading, and a guide to related Internet sites, this book continues to be an essential resource, offering cutting-edge research for general consumption.

Does your child have a favorite subject, activity, or hobby? Children learn in multiple ways, and educator Thomas Armstrong has shown hundreds of thousands of parents and teachers how to locate those unique areas in each of our children where learning and creativity seem to flow with special vigor.

In this fully updated classic on multiple intelligences, Armstrong sheds new light on the "eight ways to bloom," or the eight kinds of "multiple intelligences." While everyone possesses all eight intelligences, Armstrong delineates how to discover your child's particular areas of strength among them.

The book shatters the conventional wisdom that brands our students as "underachievers," "unmotivated," or as suffering from "learning disabilities," "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder," or other "learning diseases." Armstrong explains how these flawed labels often overlook students who are in possession of a distinctive combination of multiple intelligences, and demonstrates how to help them acquire knowledge and skills according to their sometimes extraordinary aptitudes.

Filled with resources for the home and classroom, this new edition of In Their Own Way offers inspiration for every learning situation.

"Every student is a genius," declares author Thomas Armstrong, and an educator's most important job is to discover and nurture the "genius qualities" that all students were born with but that may no longer be obvious. Urging readers to look beyond traditional understandings of what constitutes genius, Armstrong describes 12 such qualities: curiosity, playfulness, imagination, creativity, wonder, wisdom, inventiveness, vitality, sensitivity, flexibility, humor, and joy. He cites research in various fields that supports this broader understanding of genius and explains how influences in the home, the popular media, and the school itself "shut down" the genius in students.

Combining thoughtful insights and practical information, Armstrong offers guiding principles to help educators awaken genius in the classroom--beginning with awakening the genius in themselves. Readers will find dozens of suggested activities and helpful resources to provide "genius experiences" and create a "genial climate" in the classroom. In addition, suggestions for further study at the end of each section provide starting points for personal and professional reflection and growth.

As it celebrates the potential brainpower waiting to be unlocked in classrooms everywhere, Awakening Genius in the Classroom inspires educators to look at their students from a different perspective and to reinvigorate their teaching with a new sense of excitement and possibility. The result, Armstrong concludes, could extend far beyond the classroom and transform not only our schools, but the entire world.

During the last three decades, education reformers have pushed standardized testing and policies like No Child Left Behind and Common Core to improve test scores and proficiency in basic skills. However, during this period that author Thomas Armstrong calls the "miseducation of America," a number of troubling trends have surfaced, including a decrease in creative thinking scores among children in kindergarten through third grade.

Rather than focus on what's wrong with the education system that has produced these outcomes, Armstrong lays out what creative thinkers know about how children should be educated. In an extended thought experiment, he asks what would happen if we turned the reins of educational policy over, not to the politicians and educational bureaucrats, but to eminent thinkers and creators like Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Martin Luther King Jr., Rachel Carson, Doris Lessing, Jane Goodall, and other seminal culture-builders. What might they say about the best way to educate a child? If Einstein Ran the Schools suggests that the answers to this intriguing question should guide future efforts to reform our nation's schools.

Reading instruction (as well as remedial reading) typically uses words, word, and more words.  In this ground-breaking work, based upon Dr. Howard Gardner's famed theory of multiple intelligences, Dr. Thomas Armstrong reveals that some of the most effective learning strategies for teaching reading and writing are actually methods that reach beyond the linguistic (or word) brain and into other non-linguistic areas of the brain, such as the musical brain, the kinesthetic brain, the naturalist brain, the social brain, and the emotional brain.

Dr. Armstrong provides hundreds of examples to illustrate his method.  So, for the musical brain, students learn the music of words by chanting stories.  For the kinesthetic brain, kids create gestures to go with every one of the 45 phonetic sounds of the English language.  For the social brain, students de-construct the implicit social messages of a text (e.g. is this text an advertisement, a political speech, an instructional tool, or a literary effort?).  For the naturalist brain, students look for the ''roots'' of words by engaging in etymological excavation.  For the emotional brain, students learn to read words that express emotion and activity (like SPLAT! POP! BOOM! CLINK! etc.).

As Dr. Armstrong demonstrates, the most effective reading programs are those that combine phonemic awareness with actively reading real books.  But to learn those crucial phonics skills, students need to link phonetic sounds to music, physical experiences, social events, emotional states, logical analysis, and more!  That way, the otherwise ''boring'' teaching will transform into dynamic and exciting lessons that students will always remember.

Being smart is more than getting good grades or passing tests in school.  It's more than reading well, solving math problems, memorizing facts, and having a high IQ.  Psychologist Dr. Howard Gardner studied how kids and adults learn.  He discovered many different ways people can be smart.  You can be Music Smart, People Smart, Body Smart, Logic Smart, Word Smart, Self Smart, Picture Smart, Nature Smart, and Life Smart.  Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences has changed how teachers teach in schools around the world.  Now, kids can use the same approach to develop their own smarts!

Educators, politicians, parents, and even students are consumed with speaking the language of academic achievement. Yet something is missing in the current focus on accountability, standardized testing, and adequate yearly progress. If schools continue to focus the conversation on rigor and accountability and ignore more human elements of education, many students may miss out on opportunities to discover the richness of individual exploration that schools can foster.

In The Best Schools, Armstrong urges educators to leave narrow definitions of learning behind and return to the great thinkers of the past 100 years—Montessori, Piaget, Freud, Steiner, Erikson, Dewey, Elkind, Gardner—and to the language of human development and the whole child.

The Best Schools highlights examples of educational programs that are honoring students’ differences, using developmentally appropriate practices, and promoting a humane approach to education that includes the following elements:

• An emphasis on play for early childhood learning.
• Theme- and project-based learning for elementary school students
• Active learning that recognizes the social, emotional, and cognitive needs of adolescents in  middle schools.
• Mentoring, apprenticeships, and cooperative education for high school students

Educators in “the best schools” recognize the differences in the physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual worlds of students of different ages. This book will help educators reflect on how to help each student reach his or her true potential, how to inspire each child and adolescent to discover an inner passion to learn, and how to honor the unique journey of each individual through life.

What does it mean to a kid to be labeled attention-deficit disordered (ADD)? Or to have "hyperactive" added to the label (ADHD)? What can teachers do to boost the success of students with attention and behavioral difficulties? Are we relying too much on medication for these kids and not enough on new perspectives on learning, child development, the child's socioeconomic and cultural background, biological and psychological research, and the learner's emotional and social needs?

In ADD/ADHD Alternatives in the Classroom, Dr. Thomas Armstrong urges educators and parents to look for the positive characteristics in learners who may carry the ADD/ADHD label. Are they bursting with energy? Are they intensely creative? Do they enjoy hands-on learning? Are they natural leaders? Are they unusually introspective and reflective?

We need to look beyond a "deficit" approach and embrace a more holistic view of learners that includes teaching to their multiple intelligences, learning styles, and other brain-friendly approaches. For example, here are some classroom activities for kids who "can't sit still": Learning spelling words by having kids jump up out of their seats on the vowels and sit down on the consonants. Mastering the multiplication tables by forming a conga line, moving around the classroom counting from 1 to 30 out loud, and on every multiple of 3 shaking their hips and legs. Showing patterns of molecular bonding in chemistry class through a "swing your atom" square dance.

For information on ADD/ADHD for parents, see my book The Myth of the ADHD Child:  101 Ways to Improve Your Child's Behavior and Attention Span Without Drugs, Labels, or Coercion. 

A new term has emerged from the disability movement in the past decade to help change the way we think about neurological disorders: Neurodiversity. The number of categories of illnesses listed by the American Psychiatric Association has tripled in the past fifty years. With so many people affected by our  growing “culture of disabilities,” it no longer makes sense to hold on to the deficit-ridden idea of  neuropsychological illness. With the sensibility of Oliver Sacks and Kay Redfield Jamison, psychologist Thomas Armstrong offers a revolutionary perspective that reframes many neuropsychological disorders as part of the natural diversity of the human brain rather than as definitive illnesses. The Power of Neurodiversity emphasizes their positive dimensions, showing how people with ADHD, bipolar disorder, and other conditions have inherent evolutionary advantages that, matched with the appropriate environment or ecological niche, can help them achieve dignity and wholeness in their lives.