Welcome to my new website.

Here you can read my blog, learn about my practice, review links to other websites of interest, learn about my presentations and study groups, and link to my music. It's a "work in progress," like most of what we do...and, indeed, as we ourselves are!

Songwriting and Psychology

Posted on May 16, 2012 by jayEinhorn

This Sunday, May 20th, I’ll be presenting a workshop at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Here’s the description:

Songs and the Subconscious: Songwriting Beneath the Surface

Sunday, May 20, 2012, from 2:00-3:50 PM, with Jay Einhorn, 4544 N. Lincoln Ave.-WEST 7737286000

Songs express and evoke feelings that the writer may be more or less aware of. Participants will bring their instruments and songs, sing for the class and discuss the feelings and images the songs evoke. Jay is a singer-songwriter and psychologist whose latest CD, “Elephant in the Dark,” features “storylike” songs of “self-examination, learning and rebirth” (Evanston Round Table). $25.00

Wisdom from Robert Downey, Jr.

Posted on May 8, 2012 by jayEinhorn

“…And so the real definition of success is essentially, How comfortable are you in your own skin, and are you heading in a direction that gives you a sense of hope for the future, or a sense of, at least, engagement with life?”

…”I’ve been a street kid, and I’ve had too much money to count, and I can’t tell which one is more of an impediment or a motivator. It depends on the day.”

(in the May, 2012, issue of Esquire)

Some Neurodevelopmental Benchmarks of Child Development Ages 3-5

Posted on May 4, 2012 by jayEinhorn

About two and a half years ago, when I was Director of the Healthy Families free weekly mental health clinic in Waukegan, Illinois (a joint program of Rosalind Franklin University and the Healthcare Foundation of North Lake County), I was asked to speak on early childhood development to a group of early childhood educators and representatives from community agencies, sponsored by the Community Action Partnership of Lake County. In addition to the handout, below, each person at the meeting received a bilingual (English-Spanish) Hoopoe book of teaching stories (www.Hoopoekids.com) donated by the Learning Resource Alliance (www.learningresourcealliance.com). As part of my presentation, I read the children’s book referenced at the end of the handout, The Lion Who Saw His Reflection in the Water (http://www.hoopoekids.com/orderEng.htm#lion/). Here’s the handout:

Some Neurodevelopmental Benchmarks of Child Development Ages 3-5

I. Developmental Benchmarks

A. Sensorimotor: The child consolidates what she has been learning through much practice and trial and error. Most actions of daily life become automatic, unconscious and fluid, operated primarily through the cerebellum rather than the neocortex. Gross motor (running, climbing, throwing) and fine motor (tool use, drawing/writing, computer dexterity) control is consolidated and extended.

B. Linguistic: The child consolidates basic structures of language–words and grammar–that have been acquired with much practice and effort. Receptive vocabulary is extended as the child learns to understand many more words than he will often use. Expressive vocabulary is extended as the child learns to actively use many more words.

C. Social-emotional: The child consolidates and automatizes his attachment relationships with primary attachment figures (usually parents), which will provide much of the foundation for her patterns in new relationships. The child learns to relate to teachers in pre-school. Through play and adult-structured activities, the child learns to relate to peers, maturing from parallel play to interactive and reciprocal play. The child begins to find and explore partnerships and an expanded network of relationships of various kinds, including creative relationships, exploratory relationships, status relationships (up vs. down), intimate relationships (close vs. far), power relationships (controlling/controlled), etc., and develops interpersonal problem solving strategies within and outside the family. The child learns to communicate feelings, resolve problems, and self-soothe (not always in the best ways, e.g., watching television for distraction). Language is increasingly used to mediate feelings and relationships. The child learns that behavioral choices have consequences and begins to think strategically.

D. Pre-academics: The child learns to: recognize letters and numbers, read letters and count numbers in sequence, read small words and do simple addition and subtraction with real objects (not necessarily abstract numbers), write letters, numbers, and simple words, and follow adult instructions sufficiently to manage her behavior to meet early classroom requirements.

II. Critical Connections

A. The child learns when and how to obey and when and how to make independent decisions, and how to learn from demonstration and correction, through supervision and instruction by adults, including parents and teachers.

B. The child learns to listen to stories being read or told to her, maturing language, memory, and imaginative functions, as well as supporting healthy social-emotional attachment. One of the best things parents and teachers can do for children is to READ TO THEM! Stories that contain metaphoric structures (teaching stories) are the most useful for combining linear thinking (the words are linear) with thinking in images and metaphors. Example: The Lion Who Saw His Reflection In The Water.

Note: That’s the handout. If I were doing it now, I’d want to add something about musical and visual-artistic perception, both of which are being trained during the early neuromaturational period.

Learning Disabilities Evaluation: Psychological and Educational Dimensions

Posted on April 30, 2012 by jayEinhorn

This Tuesday evening, May 1, Jordi Kleiner and I will be reprising the presentation we gave at the American Learning Disability Association annual conference, last February in Chicago, for the Chicago North Chapter of the Learning Disability Association. The program takes place from 6:00-7:30 PM, at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. All are welcome and there’s no fee.

At the Illinois Reading Council Conference: The Common Core Reading Standards

Posted on April 16, 2012 by jayEinhorn

The annual conference of the Illinois Reading Council (IRC) is perhaps the largest gathering of people interested in teaching reading in the state. This year the conference met in Springfield, and I participated to present on a project I had done for the Learning Resource Alliance (www.learningresourcealliance.com) called “Parents and Children Reading Together.”

Springfield is the capitol of Illinois, with two capitol buildings; the old one, now a museum, and the current one. Yet, although the government buildings are there, and despite it’s population of 118,000, Springfield feels more like a town than a city. There’s a curious kind of energy vacuum, as if the dynamic power of the state is really four hours northwest in Chicago. Lincoln’s presence is still to be felt: his home is there (now a museum), there’s an Abraham Lincoln library, a model replica of the train that brought his body back for burial after he was killed (in a restored train station, itself a museum), and several statues.

The IRC was like a town coming to town, with hundreds of people filling the Lincoln Hotel Conference Center and spilling over into many rooms in the Hilton across the street, where I gave my presentation. I’ll write about “Parents and Children Reading Together” later. Here I’ll review a presentation entitled:

Literacy Strategies to Implement the “Common Core” Reading Standards

This presentation was by Dr. Roberta Sejnost, a teacher of teachers at Loyola University in Chicago and literacy consultant to the Kane County Regional Office of Education, west of Chicago. Sejnost’s presentation focused on the “common core” reading standards. The common core standards result from a collaboration among state educational programs to try to establish common goals and comparability across reading programs within and between states. My impression is that the state educational leaders got together to try to improve, redirect, or compensate for some of the problems of the “No Child Left Behind” law. More information about the common core standards is at:

(http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards/english-language-arts-standards/).

The goal of the common core reading standards is to produce readers who, as Sejnost said, can “read like a detective and write like an investigative reporter.” “Lexile level” is a measure of reading complexity that is increasingly being used to select reading material by grade. Sejnost provided examples of a host of teaching methods with which teachers could support students achieving the common core standards. Graphic organizers, long used by educational therapists and tutors to help students with learning disabilities improve their writing, are included as methods to support both student reading comprehension and writing development within the common core framework. “Inquiry Circles” is a method that involves student-led small group projects to support understanding in depth; Sejnost recommended the text “Comprehension and Collaboration: Inquiry Circles in Action” (http://www.amazon.com/Comprehension-Collaboration-Inquiry-Circles-Action/dp/032501230X/).

The common core standards are optimistic and lofty. Students are expected to understand what they read and think critically about it. Teaching is seen to involve less lecturing and more active student learning, facilitated through lots of exercises of various kinds. One such exercise might be completing a “Critical Thinking Map,” basically a box on a page with sections for the student to complete, including:

•List the events, points, or steps that occurred in the section you read
•Summarize the main idea or message conveyed by the author in the section you read
•Present viewpoints or opinions you hold about the section you read
•What conclusions did you reach about the selection you read? Were the author’s conclusions valid or invalid? Explain.
•How is what you read in this section relevant to the world of today?

In the common core standards, good reading involves “not just telling about a character, but linking the telling to where in the story it says that.” And students should be able to answer questions not only directly from the text, but also questions whose answers are implied but not stated in the text. So both close reading and inference are goals of the common core standards.

The common core goal that appealed to me most was that children should learn to “read from different perspectives” within a text. For example, in a nonfiction piece about the creation of the intercontinental railroad, students would be able to see it from the point of view of the supporters of the railroad, as well as from the point of view of the buffalo. This is the kind of reading that is most like thinking into a teaching story, or a dream, in which all the characters and objects can have unexpected meaning.

Sejnost gave a great presentation. She knew her stuff up and down, presented it clearly and accessibly, and is obviously a seasoned veteran of many educational winds of change. I was impressed by some aspects of the common core standards, which certainly aim high in close reading and literal comprehension, but was also alarmed by some of the huge gaps in them. For example, if readers are supposed to “read like detectives and write like investigative reporters,” what about reading to absorb meaning and metaphor for later use in perceiving situations and relationships, and writing to create and discover meaning? As the states try to formulate a level playing field of expectations, while also aiming high, they seem to have ignored a great deal of the value in reading and writing .

The use of “lexiles”–language, or lexical, measuring of texts to determine appropriate grade level–seems to me to be both half-brained–because it focuses on literal language, the sort of processing characteristic of the left hemisphere, more or less ignoring the right hemisphere’s relational perception role–and an example of wishful thinking confused with reality; in this case, the wish to be able to precisely measure the reading level of a book through the application of quantitative methods. Lexiles quantify the reading level of a text according to categories like the average length of words and syntactic complexity of sentences, and you can miss a lot of meaning that way. Sejnost told us, for example, that according to lexical measurement, John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” would be a 2nd or 3rd grade reading level book! Such measurement is utterly blind to the meaning of the story, and to the level of experience needed by the reader to understand it. It’s something like evaluating text grade level by computer. This exemplifies the attitude that, “if it can’t be measured, especially by our current methods measurement, it either doesn’t exist, or doesn’t matter” which underlies so much of our thinking about human nature and education.

Another huge gap in the common core standards, it seems to me, is that they are entirely about active reading for details and meaning, but completely oblivious to the reading for passive absorption of narrative structure and meaning; which, it seems to me, is about half of the value of reading. In the common core standards, reading is very serious business, and reading for wonder, joy, and to be transported to another reality, has no place.

The common core standards seem to have another huge blind area, in that they don’t start with a working assessment of where the children are reading when they come into the class. Common core standards for each grade level assume that all children begin a class at more or less the same level; which is, of course, completely false. The common core standards belong to the tradition of “mastery learning” in education, which sees the goal of teaching as bringing students up to a level of mastery of the material. When it comes to teaching reading in the elementary, junior high or high school grades, which is what the common core standards aim for, most students will not achieve mastery learning, unless the bar is lowered so much as to make “mastery” meaningless. Along with the common core standards, or whatever measure we choose to reflect mastery of a subject, there needs to be an assessment of student progress from point A–say, when the school year begins–to point B–say, the end of the school year. Passing Dr. Sejnost on the sidewalk later on, as she was going into a restaurant for lunch, I thanked her for her presentation and remarked that it didn’t seem that the common core standards took note of where students were when they began the school year in their new grades. “Right,” she said.

Nine Criteria For Usefulness in Evaluations of Learning and Attention Issues

Posted on April 3, 2012 by jayEinhorn

(As consulting psychologist, I am asked to review private evaluations of learning and attention issues in students, and explain them to administrators, teachers, and even the parents whose children have been evaluated. Since the quality and usefulness of evaluations varies, I prepared this memo as a guide for parents, as consumers, and evaluators, as providers.)

This memo is prepared for parents who are considering seeking evaluation of learning and attention issues in their children, and also for potential providers of such evaluations.
Methods for evaluating learning and attention issues and disorders, and for reporting on evaluations, have evolved over the years, not necessarily in a consistent or integrated way. Professionals from several fields, with varied backgrounds, have entered the marketplace as evaluation providers. As a result, we have seen evaluations of varying quality and usefulness. Here are nine criteria that characterize a more useful evaluation:

1. A specific problem statement provides the focus for the evaluation. It tells the readers what this evaluation is about, and why it is important for this child to be evaluated for this problem at this time.

2. A detailed case history places the referring problem within the context of the child’s developmental and family history. Part of understanding a learning and/or attention disorder is understanding its history in this child’s life, and whether it might also be reflected in this child’s family history.

3. Information from the school, from teachers and other staff who may have useful information to report, tells readers how the school sees the child and the referring problem. Detailed descriptions by teachers and staff help to clarify the the referring problem. Observations by the evaluator of the student in school can also shed light on the referring problem, especially where classroom behavior is contributing to the referring problem.

4. Information from other sources, which may include therapists, tutors, former teachers, etc., who can contribute to the evaluator’s, and the readers’, understanding of the child.

5. Behavioral observations of the child during the evaluation process, with specific reference to the referring problem. The evaluator’s astute observations of the child’s behavior can contribute to the evaluator’s, and the readers’, understanding of the child.

6. Selection of tests that are specific enough and comprehensive enough to address the referring problem. Selecting tests that focus on the child’s cognitive functioning with reference to the referring problem will help the evaluator and readers understand the child’s cognitive functioning with regard to the referring problem. Where multiple explanations of a child’s problem are possible, it can be important to have testing across different areas in order to rule some out and establish others as associated with the problem.

7. Report of test results, including all scores. Reporting all scores supports the evaluator’s conclusions and provides professional readers with the information necessary to understand the basis of those conclusions.

8. Discussion of all the foregoing information leads to an impression about why the child is having the referring problem, in the context of his or her developmental history and cognitive processes, including a diagnosis, if appropriate. By discussing all the foregoing information, the report makes sense of the child’s referring problem, and helps readers make sense of it also.

9. Recommendations that are specific to the referring problem, the specific child, and the child’s situation, will help insights in the report find integration and application in the child’s educational program. When multiple recommendations are included in a report, prioritizing recommendations helps educators and parents determine the most appropriate next steps in supporting the child’s education.

Commentary on the Film, “A Dangerous Method”

Posted on March 12, 2012 by jayEinhorn

This Commentary is reprinted from the Winter-Spring, 2012, CAPPSTONE, the newsletter of the Chicago Association for Psychoanalytic Psychology. It appeared alongside a review of the film by my colleague Michael Losoff.

The story of Freud and Jung needs to be told, because of its importance for our time; especially, though not only, for those of us who practice psychotherapy. So I am grateful to “A Dangerous Method” for telling that story. I’m also grateful that the film takes a big step toward restoring Sabina Spielrein to her rightful place in that story. Yet I found the film more useful for prompting me to look into source material, than for conveying the characters of Freud, Jung, and Spielrein. One doesn’t blame the film for this, but rather acknowledges that there are certain qualities of extraordinary character that are difficult, if not impossible, to portray artistically.
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Sometimes the Teacher is the Lesson

Posted on January 17, 2012 by jayEinhorn

A lot of what I’ve learned in psychology has come from the research, study, and teaching of psychologists, but I’ve also learned a lot from watching how psychologists behave.

My first undergraduate college class in psychology was all about how rats are conditioned. That’s what learning was about, according to the psychology of that time. I had taken psychology to learn something about human nature, but the teacher droned on and on in the large lecture class about the methods and technical language conditioning rats. The teacher was very disappointed with how poorly the class performed on the first exam, and chastised us for not being better students. When I commented that perhaps the class performance on the exam had something to do with they way the subject was being taught, the teacher refused to consider it. The possibility that her selection of content and method of presenting it had any influence on what or how the class learned wasn’t part of her theory of learning.
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