WHEN her son began hating school at grade one and started branding himself as stupid, his mother, Mandy Melville — a university graduate — felt hamstrung.

Her fight to help her child, which saw her crossing the ocean every summer, birthed the Creative Language-Based Learning (CLBL) Foundation in 2017 and is now a movement taking Jamaican classrooms by force and transforming the lives of countless children who had lost hope in their own abilities to learn.

Since then, the programme — which is heavy on the process-based instructional model of Lindamood-Bell® that has been proven to improve the lives of students with dyslexia and other language-based difficulties — is active in 126 schools across Jamaica. The aim of the foundation is to make it a feature of the educational landscape here.

But even with all of that, the diminutive Melville, asked to share her story, insists, “I’m just a mommy who used to take my son away to learn to read in Miami, Florida, at Lindamood-Bell.”

“He used to run away from school. He didn’t want to go to school, he thought he was stupid. We went through all of that, so I can relate to the struggles parents go through, especially when the kids are young. I am a university graduate and I didn’t know how to help my son,” she confided, her face lit with enthusiasm at the results now being experienced.

The fruits of those summer trips began emerging when her son, now a university student, began preparation for the then national exit exams for primary school students, Grade Six Achievement Tests (GSAT).

“During his mock exams he was doing so well, his teachers asked, ‘What programme did you get him on?’ ” Melville reminisced.

The recognition that not even those trained to educate her child were able to help him, and the knowledge that other parents were caught in the same maelstrom started Melville on the path from which she cannot retreat.

“My story is similar to so many others who couldn’t find a tool. When we first approached the Ministry of Education, I understood their predicament, because everybody has a tool to sell them and the teachers were testing something new very often,” she said.

That scepticism, however, is safely out the window.

“CLBL Foundation does the literacy and numeracy training using the Lindamood-Bell Methodology, so we train teachers in literacy and after that we do numeracy. We raise funds for the training, so there is no cost to the teachers. We then do a summer school as part of the practicum, where the teachers get this immersion into the programme. In summer, what we find is 20 hours of instruction per week over three to four weeks, students will close a one to two-year reading gap and all of that is provided at no cost to the children,” Melville told the Sunday Observer.

So far-reaching is its impact that the CLBL model is a component of the UK/Jamaica Violence Prevention Partnership Programme now being unveiled in schools under the Ministry of Education, in partnership with the Ministry of National Security and other stakeholders.

“The goal is to institutionalise this, to be able to develop the capacity of the teachers to be able to teach the students so that it is now part of the teachers tools to say how you deliver your curriculum using sensory cognitive skills; that even after the programme, they continue to see children who didn’t like school because they were frustrated, all of a sudden love school,” Melville said.

“Part of the methodology is positive reinforcement [by the educator of the student’s efforts]. They learn to self-correct so they will be able to self-correct in the future, so we are giving the children independence and that’s part of how the teachers are being exposed to how to teach and that goes on to physical education, science, social studies,
et cetera,” she shared.

Ongoing workshops, through which additional teachers are being trained, and a mentoring system are part of the magic of how sustainability is ensured.

“Every teacher doesn’t need to be formally trained, as we develop mentors where strong teachers mentor the new teachers. We are hoping to have master teachers,” Melville said while explaining that there are even teachers who coach adults in their communities to be able to help their own children.

She said customised “tips for home” sessions are also delivered to parents at different times during the days at school campuses across the island.

“Part of the teachers development is where they learn the instructor stage of the programme, then the diagnostician stage — where they can better understand what the struggles are [and] they learn how to assess and interpret the data — then we go to the pacer stage where the teacher learns how to pace the student, and the fourth stage is where the teacher learns how to positively mentor their colleagues in the same way they learnt how to work with the student. So you walk into a school and you can almost identify the teachers who have gone through our programme…they are so proud and confident,” a beaming Melville told the Sunday Observer.

She said the foundation then captures the data on the progress made by students through their learning records.

“It’s just amazing; I do it seven days a week and it doesn’t feel like work,” she said while paying homage to the strong support of friends and donors, such as Sandals Foundation, who back the programme.

With her son now at university and “doing well”, Melville has set her sights on infiltrating teacher training institutions.

“The other thing we are doing is teachers’ colleges, we have to burn the candle at both ends so that teachers are coming out equipped. We have no intention of stopping. The education officials will tell you, I am a little stalker…they are the experts, not me, so I consult with them for everything; maintaining the fidelity of the programme is key,” she said.

An undated survey conducted by Dr Barbara Matalon, in collaboration with the World Bank, found that an estimated 17 per cent of Jamaica’s population had a variation of a learning disability.

It said 15-20 per cent of the population, or one in every five students, has a language-based learning disability that may include problems with listening, reasoning, speaking, reading, writing, and maths calculations and problem-solving. Furthermore, the study said dyslexia is the most common of these language-based learning difficulties, accounting for 70-80 per cent of people with poor reading skills.

It noted that without early identification and effective intervention, the negative impact of language-based learning disabilities can be significant and long lasting on the individual and society at large.