Richard, Deb, and Dyslexia

When schools are made better for neurodivergent individuals, they become better for everyone. This series profiles current international school leaders who identify as neurodivergent — including those with autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, bipolar disorder, and hypersensitivity. We explore how their neurodivergence has influenced their leadership: the unique strengths it brings, the challenges they’ve navigated, and what schools can do differently to ensure these leaders are supported and empowered. For several of those featured, this marks the first time they’ve spoken publicly about their neurodivergence — a courageous step in a world where stigma still lingers, and a meaningful one in helping all school communities move toward greater inclusion and understanding.

Richard Jaberzadeh, a senior leader in an international school in the Middle East, has served at schools in Europe, South-East Asia, and the United Kingdom. He credits much of his success as a school leader to his particular brand of neurodiversity, leveraging the cognitive and emotional strengths of his dyslexia into tools for supporting international schools and their students.

Richard was in his late teens when he received an official diagnosis of dyslexia. It wasn’t necessarily a shock to him; he’d been a stammerer in his younger years, though had mostly outgrown that. Still, the root issue of the stammer – challenges in quickly retrieving the right words to express what was on his mind – remained in play for Richard. He developed adaptive strategies and workarounds, including humor and colorful prose, to keep his audience engaged while searching for the best means to express himself. In his school today, Richard puts his well-honed repartee to good use: breaking the ice, building relationships, and turning difficult moments around.

The catalyzing moment for his diagnosis was an advert that caught Richard’s eye: a promise of a free laptop for people with dyslexia. He pursued his hunch that his word retrieval challenges went deeper than a stammer and were somehow, counterintuitively, related to his ability to extract the meaning of complex reading passages without reading every word. Richard’s reward included two new resources: a computer, and a diagnosis. He now had the tools to pursue a better understanding of his brain. Thus began a lifelong quest: know thyself. He realized that he had a “race-car brain, with bicycle brakes,” and embraced the enduring challenge to fully form and articulate the ideas brewing inside his mind before his audience lost interest, patience, or time. As a school leader, this skill helps him in developing solutions, or the beginnings of solutions, in the just-in-time situations so common in international settings.

Deb Lane, a seasoned educational leader and leadership development consultant, also received her dyslexia diagnosis in her late teens. Growing up on the east coast of the United States, she’d performed well in school even while knowing it took her longer to process information than her classmates. In retrospect she chalks up her early academic success to a combination of adaptive strategies such as using diversions and compensations - e.g. putting extra time into illustrations on a written piece of work, using humor, being well-organized –  to highlight her intellectual and practical abilities, while downplaying her difficulty with making sense of words. In her alliances with international schools today, this mindset allows Deb to work with leadership teams as a down-to-earth and skillful problem-solver. 

When her family relocated to Texas during Deb’s tenth grade year, she began to struggle academically. A teacher suspected dyslexia and recommended that Deb visit a clinic in San Antonio, where she was formally diagnosed. She remembers the relief of having someone understand her and felt validated that someone recognized the effort and perseverance it took to make it as far as she had. With appropriate supports, Deb learned to better manage her dyslexia, through practices like “chunk reading” to extract the essence of a piece of writing. She graduated from high school and was accepted to Baylor University on probation. She credits growing self-awareness, the willingness to seek and accept help, and dogged perseverance for making it through Baylor, acquiring two masters degrees and a doctorate in education, and pursuing a fulfilling career involving school leadership, a leadership development consultancy, and book authorship. This resilience has been of great value ever since, as Deb has tackled countless complex and non-linear challenges in the service of international schools.

Like other forms of neurodivergence, dyslexia is a condition which shows up in different ways for those it affects; a “constellation,” in our parlance. Symptoms range from almost unnoticeable to extremely challenging.  It most famously shows up as difficulty with reading and/or interpreting what is read, especially in time-sensitive conditions. This is probably a contributing factor to an unfortunate misconception that dyslexics are low in intelligence. In reality, multiple studies have shown that most people with dyslexia have average or above average IQ. What might explain this? Dyslexic brains process things in unique ways, allowing their owners to view the world from unusual vantage points, and requiring them to adopt tools, strategies and attitudes to navigate through life in ways different from their peers. Those advantages are not only forms of intelligence; they also produce tangible benefits as dyslexics make sense of the world around them in ways that neurotypical brains literally cannot.

Richard has realized that the brain wiring that makes word retrieval challenging, also makes it oh-so-satisfying when he is finally able to find the perfect words to express his thoughts. Even more, this wiring allows him to conceptualize approaches to sticky challenges and come up with elegant solutions – if he’s given the space and time to do so. He recounts a situation at a previous school where the leadership team was confounded by a particularly tricky timetable puzzle. Solutions had eluded the team’s collective attempts at turning the various moving parts into a functioning Swiss watch; rather than meeting everyone’s needs and desires, their timetable was imploding under its own weight. Richard convinced the team to allow him 48 hours, on his own, to figure it out. With this time and space, he designed an elegant and fully functional schedule, to everyone’s satisfaction and amazement.

Deb, too, has seen the benefits of her neurodivergent brain. By viewing situations from multiple vantage points, and employing personalized adaptive strategies, she's not only fully compensated for information processing challenges, but also greatly heightened her EQ. She can “read a room” like no other, employing emotional and neural sensitivities that she’s honed over the years. This allows her to quickly build rapport and emotional connection with people in ways that have served her very well in her leadership roles, and in navigating complex intercultural scenarios.

How can international schools better support educators like Richard and Deb so that their neurodivergent superpowers can flourish, and the schools they serve can too? We can start with creating a psychologically safe environment so that they can be forthcoming about their neurodivergence and the ways in which it plays out for them. Then, depending on the nature of their dyslexia, accommodations might include providing modes of communication that suit their processing style, assistive technology such as screen readers and digital recorders, workspaces that minimize distractions, and allocations of time and space that allow them to complete tasks using their own processes. These minimal investments can lead to outsize rewards as the gifted dyslexics amongst us put their superpowers into play for the greater good of the school community.



Read more about neurodiversity in international school leadership in Better Together and Diana Rosberg Connects The Dots (Autism).