Additional Learning Support
Providing an environment that minimizes distractions and excessive electronic stimulation, emphasizes self-care and routine, and promotes nutritional diet, exercise, and sleep all together create a platform enabling success and a sense of self-confidence through genuine accomplishment. Once this process can be set into motion much of the mental energy being expressed in frustration is seen to be redirected in positive efforts to confront and overcome challenges.
How Can Robert Land Academy's Program Support Development?
At our Academy, we are committed to offering comprehensive support to our students in various aspects of their well-being. This includes a robust focus on physical health and nutrition, ensuring that our students maintain a balanced and healthy lifestyle. Recognizing the importance of mental health, we provide dedicated support for emotional and psychological well-being. Our approach is inclusive and effective for students with a range of learning disabilities, including ADHD, ODD, and OCD, among others. We believe in nurturing every aspect of our students' development, helping them to overcome challenges and thrive in both their academic and personal lives
What We Do
Our Program Has Been Proven To Help With:
- Specialized Support for ADHD, OCD, ODD, and DCD: Tailored assistance and programs for students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), and Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD).
- Enhanced Assistance for Individual Education Plans (IEPs): Dedicated additional support to effectively implement and manage Individual Education Plans, ensuring personalized educational experiences.
- Fostering Physical Fitness and Healthy Lifestyles: Actively promoting and encouraging physical fitness, instilling habits for a healthy and balanced lifestyle among our students.
- Comprehensive Mental Health Support: Offering extensive guidance and support in mental health, ensuring the emotional and psychological well-being of our students.
- Academic Intervention and Remediation: Providing focused intervention and remediation for students who require additional help in their academic journey, ensuring they meet their educational goals.
Robert Land Academy’s Program
Diagnostic
Our experience shows that once boys can identify a purpose behind schoolwork, their desire to overcome problems greatly increases. By diagnostically identifying areas of weakness in Literacy and Numeracy and providing remediation programs, the majority of boys are capable of making remarkable progress. By providing them with meaningful but obtainable objectives combined with a coaching philosophy towards teaching, they are able to progress and gain confidence through the realization that effort yields results and that their abilities are not fixed.
Honesty
The effect of a no failure policy in junior grades has had a disproportionate effect on boys. Smart boys will ask what they get or do not get as a result of putting in effort in subjects that hold no interest for them or doing work for a teacher they do not like. The fact that grade advancement takes place irrespective of actual achievement is an open invitation for many boys to fall behind. This death of a thousand cuts can lead inexorably to real academic issues and poor performance even when the effort is forthcoming. Poor marks are not necessarily reflective of intelligence. However, they can certainly combine with insecurity to pose a genuine threat to learning.
Closing the Gap
Current generally accepted programs perpetuate and accommodate academic weaknesses and reviews of student files show that this invariably leads to a systemic increase in the gap of learning as students approach the end of secondary school.
Oppositional Defiant Disorder
Behaviours associated with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) are clustered in and around authority figures and compliance with behavioural expectations. Robert Land Academy’s program of clear, fair and consistent rules and expectations together with clearly defined consequences to reinforce and encourage positive behaviours has proven itself to be very effective and is in keeping with recognized methods of dealing with this disorder.
Enabling success through genuine accomplishments builds genuine self-confidence and does a lot to deal with the frustration and aggression that is often an underlying cause of ODD.
The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders otherwise known as DSM-5 defines Oppositional Defiant Disorder as a pattern of angry/irritable behaviour or vindictiveness lasting 6 months or longer and in evidence when interacting with one or more individuals who are not siblings.
A person correctly identified with this disorder must exhibit 4 symptoms from the following categories (1) angry/irritable mood (2) argumentative/defiant behaviour or (3) vindictiveness.
Despite common assumptions, ODD children are not aggressive towards people or animals and do not destroy property or show patterns of theft or deceit.
Introduction Learning Disabilities
Under current general usage, the terms Learning Delayed or Learning Disabled are used to explain significant gaps between tested cognitive ability and actual academic performance. Given policies of guaranteed passing in most primary and elementary schools throughout Canada and the U.S.A., and given modifications to curriculum expectations as part of many Individual Education Plans (IEP), many boys are behind in key areas of literacy and numeracy essential to secondary success measured in eligibility to post-secondary programs.
Rather than accommodating these problems where this is translated as perpetuating them, Robert Land Academy’s program corrects these issues by providing additional support, remediation and diagnostic identification of areas requiring attention.
This enables boys to repair weakness and go on with firm foundational strengths to subsequent levels.
Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) is a disorder associated with physical awkwardness and motor skills delay which is said to be present in 50% of students diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). The behavioural characteristics have been shown to have responded well to the active program in place at Robert Land Academy. Sports, activities, self-care and routine help to improve fine and gross motor skills and build self-confidence upon manageable building blocks of achievement. An active program with daily exercise and physical activity is conducive to addressing these needs in an effective and natural manner.
Learning Disabilities and Disabled Learning
They are able to reassure themselves of their intelligence by playing video games and working the system. As the vast majority of schools no longer accept competition as an acceptable component within academics, it comes as a shock to many students when they are forced to confront the reality of the stiff competition for postsecondary programs.
However learning disabilities are defined, it becomes clear in reviewing student files that core areas of Literacy and Numeracy can become systematically weakened as a result of lack of effort, understanding or poor focus. In such cases, the gap between where students are in terms of normal grade/age functioning and their actual functioning level can widen to the point where the student is effectively disabled.
Given that junior schools now have adopted a no failure philosophy, many students see no downside in not putting forward effort in school and are not doing homework. The majority of males now entering high schools are being placed into programs that preclude admission to university programs and many of the more competitive college programs. The result of this is that the majority of students entering universities are now female. Given that many boys feel that school is a waste of time and serves no purpose, the less work and effort that they can put into school the smarter they perceive themselves to be. As they perceive no connection with what they are doing in the present and what they can do in the future, there is no downside in programs that involve less or no homework and little if any effort.
Other Disorders
High Functioning Asperger / High Functioning Autism / Obsessive Compulsive Disorder/ Executive Functioning Disorder
All of these conditions and their respective clusters of behaviour have been shown to respond to a process of normalization, structure, and consistent consequences that reinforce or discourage inappropriate or self-limiting behaviours. The daily routine, predictability and lack of external distractions associated with Robert Land Academy’s program all tend towards reducing such behaviours while encouraging coping mechanisms that enable students to focus on their areas of strength. Boys are carefully assessed during the interview process to assess individual suitability to the program. When it is felt that students’ needs exceed the program in place they are not admitted and where possible other suggested alternatives are made available to them to pursue.
Intervention and Remediation
In the 2021-22 academic year the Academy had an average class size of just eight in grades 9-12. Small class sizes allow for greater teacher attention time.
The Academy implements a system to regularly check attainment and progress. Students who require additional support are identified, the Academy puts in place an intervention program enabling those students to make rapid and sustained progress.
Teachers at Robert Land Academy set a variety of classwork, coursework, and homework. Students are encouraged to complete a mixture of tasks that challenge all aspects of literacy. Some of the learning takes place on MacBooks and Chromebooks, however, students will often write their assignments by hand so their teachers can assess and provide written feedback.
Each night and over the weekend the students consolidate their learning in study halls. This is the students’ time to revisit their lessons from the day and to ask their teachers questions. It is not unusual for the teachers to be online at this time to support, teachers will offer tutorials or provide one-to-one support for those in need of extra assistance.
The Academy also provides the students with access to specialized tutors who hold degrees and Ontario teaching qualifications. The tutors are based on campus and available every day to support students. The teachers and tutors stay in close communication to identify those needing targeted intervention.
How We Promote Physical and Mental Health
However learning disabilities are defined, it becomes clear in reviewing student files that core areas of Literacy and Numeracy can become systematically weakened as a result of lack of effort, understanding or poor focus. In such cases, the gap between where students are in terms of normal grade/age functioning and their actual functioning level can widen to the point where the student is effectively disabled.
Given that junior schools now have adopted a no failure philosophy, many students see no downside in not putting forward effort in school and are not doing homework. The majority of males now entering high schools are being placed into programs that preclude admission to university programs and many of the more competitive college programs. The result of this is that the majority of students entering universities are now female. Given that many boys feel that school is a waste of time and serves no purpose, the less work and effort that they can put into school the smarter they perceive themselves to be. As they perceive no connection with what they are doing in the present and what they can do in the future, there is no downside in programs that involve less or no homework and little if any effort. They are able to reassure themselves of their intelligence by playing video games and working the system. As the vast majority of schools no longer accept competition as an acceptable component within academics, it comes as a shock to many students when they are forced to confront the reality of the stiff competition for postsecondary programs.
Physical Health
- Daily exercise
- Regular fitness testing
- Mandatory physical education lessons
- Structured physical training sessions
- Fitness programmes
- Daily hygiene checks
- Balanced healthy diet
- Minimum eight hours sleep
Several studies have indicated that an increase in physical activity and fitness may improve academic performance.
Robert Land Academy’s program is filled with opportunities to be physically active. Students are actively encouraged to improve their fitness, we often see an improved attention span, improved grades and a healthier attitude towards their education.
Mental Health
- Encouraging positive relationships with family and friends
- Regular video calls to family
- Structure and regular daily routines
- Psychological assessment on arrival
- Access to a registered psychotherapist
- Regular meetings with the on-campus nurses
- Counselling and coaching
- Meditation
If there is one thing that the last years of dealing with the covid pandemic and its attack upon our physical health has taught us, it is the importance of mental health. Nowhere has this been more apparently obvious than in the growing disengagement from school both socially, emotionally, and intellectually by significant numbers of boys. Remote learning has taken its toll and continues to do so not merely in terms of its immediate impact but also in terms of the downward spiral that it has initiated with longstanding implications.