[MUSIC] >>Welcome to A World of Difference Embracing Neurodiversity.

I'm Darryl Owens.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

Goes the old saying that sound advice meant to build resilience.

However, for neurodivergent children, those words can ring hollow, for those who struggle to try, try, try and try again.

And their efforts fail to yield a winning result.

For many kids with learning and attention issues, that lack of success can lead them to throw up their hands and stop trying.

It's a psychological phenomena called learned helplessness.

Because the child believes he has no control over negative outcomes, he no longer is motivated to try.

Given that youngsters with learning differences can face a daily gauntlet of challenges, helping diffuse their reduced motivation, low self-esteem, passivity, and procrastination that can feed this mindset is imperative.

The good news is Neurodivergence doesn't cause learned helplessness.

And with early intervention, parents and educators can help kids beef up their resiliency muscles and overcome learned helplessness.

On this episode, we visit a Georgia private school for Neurodivergence students where countering learned helplessness is enshrined in its mission statement.

Next, our panel of national experts explore strategies for empowering students to dodge learned helplessness.

Later they'll meet our latest difference maker, an inventor and adrenaline junkie who never allowed an undiagnosed learning difference to scuttle his dream of blasting into space.

We begin in at Atlanta at the Howard School where countering learned helplessness is at the core of what the school does by putting students in the driver's seat of student-led conferences, its honor council and more.

Chief correspondent, Cindy Peterson brings us the story.

[MUSIC] >>At the Howard School, located in Atlanta, Georgia, the mission goes beyond traditional education with a focus on serving children with language-based learning differences, from kindergarten through 12th grade, the Howard School emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and celebrating each student's unique abilities.

>>Our focus from day one from when Mary and Howard opened the school to today, its embedded in our mission, is to empower children to acknowledge and celebrate their strengths and then to name, identify and address things that are harder for them.

I think often children who learn differently have the experience in a typical school setting where they're made to feel embarrassed or they're made to feel disempowered in their learning journey and they can start to experience a learned helplessness.

This is hard.

I can't do it.

I can't find someone who can help me do it.

I'll give up.

And what matters to us is that we help students overcome that narrative.

You can combat learned helplessness by changing the story.

>>Combating learned helplessness is a core aspect of the school's philosophy.

Rather than giving into feelings of inadequacy or inability, students are taught to approach challenges with resilience and determination.

>>We work with students, I think, in a different way that really helps to build their understanding of the way their brain works and to build their own self-advocacy.

And I think that's so critical for our students because they really, before coming here, they don't typically understand the what the struggles are that they're having.

So they really benefit from having those conversations where we celebrate the way that everyone's brains work and that everyone's brains are different.

>>We see a lot of kids that their self-esteem is down.

They don't think very positively about their own skills.

And so we try to focus on identifying their strengths, their weaknesses and things like that.

>>Through techniques such as cognitive scaffolding, assistive technology, and cognitive behavioral strategies, students learn to advocate for themselves and navigate the learning process with confidence.

>>When you internalize learned helplessness, it's incredibly damaging to self-esteem, to productivity, to outcome, to sense of self.

And it becomes the internal narrative and the dialogue that self-talk that's so destructive, it can impact almost every facet of your life.

And at the Howard School, instead of having our students shy away from or feel embarrassment about things where they might need more difficulty, we really teach them to walk toward a problem or a challenge to understand it, to be able to explain it to others so that they can then self-advocate.

And more than that, we practice with our students what that self-advocacy looks like.

>>I was kind of a loner, I didn't really have any friends.

I was kind of just, I guess, angry at the world 'cause I didn't seem to fit in it.

And when I came here, I started to learn that there's plenty of people who have similar struggles to me.

And I started to learn how I could fit in.

And I started to learn conversation skills.

I started to meet people, I started to make friends.

>>They keep everything positive as well.

The way they teach and stuff.

It's real.

I like it.

And it's pretty interesting.

That's what keeps me positive.

Also, the students at the Howard School as well, they can be fun.

It feels better knowing than other kids around.

You're not like, you're not the odd one out as well.

Other kids have differences, you know that.

And the teachers teach us in ways of the differences we have.

So the way they teach us each student, they help.

They teach in different ways.

>>Parental involvement is also key to the success of the students.

Through clear partnerships with parents and guardians, the school reinforces techniques and behaviors used in the classroom.

>>My son is in fifth grade now, so he is in the last year of the lower school.

He has dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia.

And so we knew he had a ton of obstacles in front of him, but we also knew he could do it, but it was gonna take the right tools and the right support, and he had to start to believe in himself.

He often needed prompts, he often needed help, but slowly he began to take success.

And then he no longer was afraid of it.

>>Just thinking about how independent he became.

When we came here, the first thing the teacher said was, do not do anything for him.

Do not help him, do not just nothing.

And of course, as parents we were like, whoa.

Yeah, this is exciting.

He's gonna be able to do it by himself.

But it was so freeing for him too to know, and for us as parents, to know that they really wanted to see him for who he was, and they wanted to get him to a place where he could shine.

>>As students progress, they develop a strong sense of self-worth.

Every child is encouraged to set their own goals and take ownership of their learning journey by instilling a belief in their abilities and providing a supportive community.

The Howard School empowers students to overcome, learned helplessness and embrace their full potential.

>>It's in the DNA of the Howard School, and I think it's why I'm confident that we are a place where all of our students will leave having overcome a sense of learned helplessness, that they will leave empowered, and that they will leave knowing their worth and their value.

>>For A World of Difference, I'm Cindy Peterson.

[MUSIC] >>Thanks, Cindy.

Next, let's meet our panel of experts who will give us a battle plan to beat learned helplessness.

[MUSIC] Dr. Oksana Haggerty is an educational and developmental psychologist who serves as a learning specialist and the dean of the Center for Student Success at Beacon College in Leesburg, Florida, America's first accredited baccalaureate institution dedicated to educating neurodivergent students with learning and attention issues.

She specializes in academic support, cognitive abilities, learning disability interventions, and educational and developmental psychology.

She has been quoted by numerous media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, Self, US News and World Report, Reader's Digest, Cosmopolitan, and Red Book.

Dr. Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist, audiologist and clinical and research neuroscientist specializing in psycho, neurobiology and metacognitive neuropsychology.

Since the early 1980s, Leaf has researched the mind brain connection, the nature of mental health, and the formation of memory.

She's the host of the podcast, "Cleaning Up the Mental Mess," and the author of several bestselling books, including "Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess," "How to Help Your Child Clean Up Their Mental Mess" and "Think, Learn, Succeed."

Dr. Elizabeth Short is a professor of developmental psychology at Case Western Reserve University.

She's the director of the Developmental Master in Early Intervention Program.

She's the principal investigator of a grant received from the Office of Special Education Programs dedicated to the interprofessional training of young psychologists, speech language pathologists and social workers to improve the lives of children with disabilities.

Her primary focus has been on understanding the processes underlying the cognitive, social and emotional development of preschool and school age children.

We're gonna begin our conversation with Dr. Haggerty, Dr. Haggerty, from a child psychologist perspective, what are the most common ways neurodivergent children and teens develop learned helplessness?

>>I would say that neurodivergent students develop learned helplessness in two opposite ways.

When they get too much help and when they don't get help at all, or when they don't get the right interventions.

Because when we think about working with students who are neuro divergent, we have to keep a perfect balance between four approaches.

We have to provide accommodations, we have to sometimes provide modifications with the curriculum, certainly within K through 12 curriculum, we also have to provide explicit skill development or interventions, and we have to provide supports.

So learned helplessness to me happens when the balance of these four approaches is not perfect when, for example, instead of providing explicit skill development, we rely too much on accommodations or supports.

And instead of, so having the students engage in the classroom with the faculty member or with the teacher, we rely on the resource teachers too much.

And the students learn the fact that they don't have to participate and they hope not to be called in the classroom.

And they hope that at some point the door will open, the resource teacher will come in and will take the student out of the classroom.

So it's not about really not doing the right thing, it's just about doing the right thing the wrong way.

And that's where I think the learned helplessness is coming from.

>>All right, well thank you.

So Dr.

Leaf, how can parents and educators recognize some of the early indicators that a child is experiencing learned helplessness?

>>Well, the first thing is to recognize that the word neurodivergent is not a medical condition.

It's not a diagnosis, it's basically a description and it's based on the idea that we are unique and different, each of us and our brains, after 38 years of being in this field, after years of researching the brain with many, many scientists, we recognize that there's uniqueness.

So I want to stress the fact that when we talk about signals or signs that they are, these are still gonna be unique to each person and we must see them as descriptions of signals as opposed to symptoms of a diagnosis.

Because that learned helplessness will definitely come from when we talk about this as a sign of a disease or something's wrong with your brain.

So just the emphasis to stress there that we need to see neurodivergence as a, as what we all are.

We are all different.

Every brain is unique.

So some of the behavioral patterns that emerge are things like withdrawing, being new, withdrawing from different things, not only to play with their friends or being scared to try new things, being frightened of change.

These are all warning signals that something is going on in terms of emotions they can become, they can become frightful, hypervigilant, hyporvigilant.

So too vigilant or under vigilant.

They can be scared, edgy, nervous, anxious, all those kinds of things that we see that are telling us that something isn't right.

And we need to observe our children without pathologizing childhood.

That's really important to recognize that we will have ups and downs.

So it's very important to look for patterns that are, that their changes and that these are patterns that they're not just a one-off, and to also then look within the context of a child's life.

So what is going on in that child's life?

So it basically, in some, once you start seeing patterns of things like withdrawal and anxiety and that sort of thing, it's then to use this as a launchpad to describe the who, the what, the, when, the where, the why of what is going on in the child's life.

>>All right, well thank you.

So Dr. Short, in your professional experience, what are some of the obstacles or challenges that parents and educators face in trying to help children overcome learned helplessness?

>>I think some of the major challenges are that we need to recognize failure is a normal event for everyone, for these children, as well as every one of us.

And failure is an opportunity for us to learn something.

So instead of making someone feel badly about the lack of success we have to help them celebrate failure as an opportunity for change.

We have to change this learned helpless approach to one of learned optimism.

The reason that children feel helpless is they don't think they can do anything in the face of failure.

And both our other speakers just mentioned, and I think it's really important to emphasize, we need to help children figure out strategies for overcoming failure and for really challenging themselves in this situation and believing that this isn't a permanent state of affairs, but rather a temporary one that allows us to then gain new skills and be successful.

The danger is we do too much for these children.

Again, this is not a new comment, but a sustained comment, we do too much and then they feel helpless and they wait for us to do this, we have to empower them with the skills to be successful and to believe that they can overcome any obstacle, provided they acquire the skills and they put forth the effort to make, to complete the job.

Many kids read a book when they were little, "The Little Engine That Could," and that's a motto.

I think that all of us in the face of failure or struggle need to recognize that if we keep on trying and we bring the right tools to the table, that we will be successful in our own time.

We all respond at different rates and we need to recognize that and compare ourselves to ourselves and not everyone around us.

>>All right, well thank you.

So Dr. Haggerty, Dr. Short brings up a good point about how important it is for parents to be able to develop and craft some strategies to help their children overcome learn helplessness.

Help us with that.

What are some strategies that parents can deploy at home?

>>I would like to share two strategies that we certainly use here at the Center for Student Success a lot, and they are relatively simple, but surprisingly underemployed.

One of them is following the old adage of catch them being good.

I think that I'm seeing it all the time, and maybe it's the educational system.

We very often act like those proverbial bad managers when we notice people only when they do something wrong.

And I don't think we spent as much time talking about the successes as we spend talking about failures.

[MUSIC] >>Watch the full ask the expert segment on our website at awodtv.org.

If you want to learn more about this topic, you can also watch or listen on Facebook, YouTube, or on your favorite podcasting platform.

[MUSIC] Next, let's meet our latest difference maker.

Like many boys of his age, Kai Michaelson dreamed of exploring the final frontier of space like the astronauts he saw celebrated in the newspapers while his dreams were in the clouds.

He also showed he had the right stuff for tinkering.

Growing up in Minnesota, Michaelson jury rigged a makeshift diving bell, a bicycle with wings, and even a hotdog cooker, lovingly called Kai's Little cremator.

Though he excelled as an engineer, Michaelson couldn't engineer similar success in the classroom.

He struggled with the three Rs leading teachers to believe he was stupid, beat down and unaware, he was living with dyslexia.

He became a ninth grade dropout.

Rather than stay down, Michaelson worked on going higher, fueled by his love of racing.

He built rocket powered snowmobiles, motorcycles, hot rods, jet packs, and later rocket race cars that set records and earned him the nickname Rocket Man.

That success led him to Tinseltown, where he partnered with a top Hollywood stuntman and worked on more than 200 films and TV shows before returning to his first love, space.

In 1997, Michaelson finally truly earned his Rocket man moniker when one of his creations carried him into space, making him one of the first civilians to soar so high.

And that just goes to show you nothing can keep a good man down on earth that is.

Chief correspondent Cindy Peterson brings us his story.

[MUSIC] >>In Hollywood, he's known as Rocket Man between sending rockets into space, crafting rocket powered vehicles, and assisting stuntmen on movie sets, Minnesota native Kai Michaelson launched into the spotlight.

>>To the years I've, I've worked in over 200 movies, television shows.

I hold 72 state, national and international speed records.

I'm the first civilian in the world to get licensed by the federal government, and we put two rockets to the space.

I formed that team and put together a number of people that were able to do things that nobody else ever did.

We are the very first civilians to put a rocket in space, and I think that's pretty cool.

>>Growing up, Kai struggled in school facing difficulties with reading and math that were later attributed to dyslexia.

>>Well, I had really a tough time at school.

The teachers couldn't teach me, they'd say something to me five, six times I couldn't repeat it.

And consequently, because of that, I had major problems at school.

>>However, his father had introduced him to electronics, which sparked his interest and allowed him to excel in hands-on projects that he would often take to school to show off what he could do.

>>And she grabs this book and it was hooked to a wire.

She says, what is this?

What is this that open up?

And I says, please, Mrs. Becker, don't take that from me.

It's a radio.

She says, well, where'd you get this?

Where'd you get this from?

I says, I built it.

You built that radio.

I built that radio.

She could not believe it.

I said, yeah, I soldered in all the diodes.

You did that?

And she couldn't imagine that I was capable of doing that.

Well, that was the first real positive thing, I got off anybody when I went to school.

That was my start of building things.

And I've got, I found out by getting attention to something, you'll get credits for that and it just, it put a new deal.

But nevertheless, I still, I dropped out of school.

Ninth grade, just struggled through school.

I could not figure out what it was.

>>Despite not finding out until he was 30 that he had dyslexia.

Kai's determination and ingenuity propelled him to success.

>>Well, I started out racing when I was very young.

Consequently, I got to, I started racing early.

Well, that started from motorcycles and I wanted to dragsters five different dragsters and top gas and top fuel.

And then I ended up putting a, I found out that these racers were, that could do exhibition racing with jet powered cars.

At that time, I took the reciprocating motor out of my car and built a rocket motor and put a rocket motor in and came off to Twin City Speedway.

Went out to there in Minnesota, dragways, Union Grove.

And every track that we went, we set a record.

>>During a chance encounter while on tour in California, Kai's life took a pivotal turn while renting a space in a race car shop.

He crossed paths with destiny, setting the stage for a remarkable journey ahead.

>>And a stunt guy came in there to get a piece of equipment welded and it was a catapult for throwing you up in the air.

And he says, can you fix this for me?

And I says, who built this piece of junk for you?

He says, what do you mean piece of junk?

I says, you should all use all the aerospace hardware.

And he says, like, what?

And I started, he says, well, can you build me one?

Well, now all of a sudden I'm building stunt equipment.

From there, I ended up on movie sets.

I got an explosive license so I could do special effects.

Now I'm doing stunt work and now I'm doing stunt coordinating.

>>Kai's Minnesota home is filled with hundreds of his personal inventions, some that were used on movie sets with stuntman Dar Robinson and Kitty O'Neal, the famous deaf stunt woman who was an inspiration all on her own.

And then there's some that he built just to say that he could.

>>This is hydrogen peroxide rocket belt that you could actually fly with.

There's like two three of these in the country that are still operational.

This is a robot.

I built a robot many years ago.

This is Buddy's rocket power trike and my rocket powered wheelchair.

And one of my favorite things, the S.S. Flusher America's secret weapons, rocket power toilet, and it runs on nitrous oxide and plastic.

It's a pretty interesting piece of equipment, but it's one of the fun things that I built over the years.

This red and yellow car back in here is rocket powered.

Katie O'Neill went 412 miles an hour in 3.22 seconds is the world's fastest quarter mile car.

And this is the Evel Spirit.

This is the backup one for when Eddie Brown jumped over the Snake River.

This is a beer powered motorcycle, and this is a jet powered go-kart.

It's got three jet engines in it, and they fire 100 times per second.

So this thing fires 300 times per second.

A jet powered coffee maker.

I just like to build a lot of weird things.

[MUSIC] >>Today, Kai works with his son, Buddy manufacturing, parachutes building beer powered motorcycles, and any other bright idea they get in their head.

>>I look at this being dyslexia, it's a, a blessing of disguise because one side of my brain may not too be too sharp, but the other side, I'm a pretty smart guy, I think.

Mechanically at least I have, I would call a mechanically, a mechanically photographic memory.

Like where I can, I register hardware in my head.

And so when I'm building something I basically already seen where I've started building.

I mean, before I'm done, I know exactly.

And you'll never see any blueprints around here.

And you can, there's no drawings, no blueprints.

It's all right out of my head.

Everything in this place is right out of my head.

>>One thing's clear, the sky's not the limit for Kai Michaelson.

For "A World of Difference" I'm Cindy Peterson.

[MUSIC] >>Thanks Cindy.

And congratulations, Kai Rocket Man Michaelson for making a difference.

And that does it for this edition of "A World of Difference in Embracing Neurodiversity."

I'm Darryl Owens.

I'll see you back here next time.

You can watch episodes of "A World of Difference" on the Beacon College Facebook and YouTube channels, and on the show's website awodtv.org.

The website also provides tip sheets and other resources for your parenting journey.

You can watch the show from the PBS app available on your favorite streaming device, and you can listen on your favorite podcasting platform.

Thank you for watching and supporting "A World of Difference."

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