Synopsis

In the United States, a majority of students graduate below proficiency in all academic subjects. Parents of struggling students feel overwhelmed and confused about how to help their children simply survive school, let alone succeed. Various school reform efforts have been tried and all have failed. But all hope is not lost. A science exists that allows children to learn as individuals even though at school they are educated in groups. One that avoids senseless labels that sentence children to lifetimes of failure and mediocrity.

Dr. Kimberly Berens and a team of scientists have spent the last 20 years perfecting a powerful system of instruction based on the learning, behavioral, and cognitive sciences that they call Fit Learning. This method of teaching has been proven to markedly improve how students understand and achieve, even for children who have been told they have learning disabilities or other disorders that interfere with their ability to learn.

Blind Spots reveals the history of our broken education system and shows that by using this teaching system in the classroom, we can unlock the vast potential hidden within every child.

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Excerpt

Page 33

“Education is as ineffective and inefficient today as it was a century ago. Although developed countries around the world continue to value and invest in education, this investment is largely wasted on a profoundly ineffective and inefficient system guided by ideology rather than science”

Page 93

“Educational traditions arise from blind spots regarding how learning actually occurs. Let’s be clear from the start that these traditions don’t exist because they work. They exist because people believe in them and, more important, because it’s just how we’ve always done things.”

Page 184

“What I am asking you to consider is the possibility that sometimes our beliefs get in the way.  Sometimes our beliefs prevent us from making progress, from being effective, from solving problems that really need to be solved for the betterment, not only of our own lives, but of all humanity.   Is it possible to hold on to your beliefs but be willing to let go when doing so might make a difference?  I think it is possible and I think pragmatism is what makes it possible.”

About the Author

Kimberly Nix Berens, Ph.D., is a scientist-educator and Founder of Fit Learning. She co-created a powerful system of instruction based on behavioral science and the Technology of Teaching, which has transformed the learning abilities of thousands of children worldwide, including those who are struggling, average, gifted, or learning disabled. For more than 20 years, her system of instruction has produced one year’s worth of academic growth in only 40 hours of training. Her learning programs effectively target such essential areas as early learning skills, basic classroom readiness, phonemic awareness, reading fluency, comprehension, inferential language, basic and advanced mathematics, logical problem solving, grammar, and expressive writing. From her early beginnings in a broom closet at the University of Nevada – Reno, Dr. Berens has helped grow Fit Learning to an organization with more than 30 locations worldwide. She currently lives in Long Island with her husband and two children, where she oversees Fit Learning locations in Long Island, New York City, and Connecticut.

Blind Spots: Why students fail and the science that can save them is her first book.

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