Stepping up to the Cellfield method

Kids with reading difficulties offered new option

By Anthony Bonaparte

Long-time educator Ingrid Poupart has a passion for teaching. In the mid 1980s she took a position at Edinburgh Elementary in Montreal West, and within five years became director of its after school programs and soon introduced tutoring sessions.

Then in 2001, to help students deal with the anxiety of writing high school entrance exams, she established the Stepping Up Resource Centre, which started offering workshops to kids all over the island of Montreal. Through Stepping Up, Poupart and her tutors try to demystify the process and designed ways to help the kids improve their scores. “We often saw Grade 6 students crying and parents who were anxious and nervous,” she says.

“The key is the more they know the process, the less stressed they are and they can perform to what they know.”

After renting space in various schools for 10 years, last January Stepping Up opened its own centre in Côte St. Luc.

Poupart, who’s devoted half her life to helping get past hurdles, knows what it’s like to overcome obstacles. As a dyslexic, she had her own problems when she was younger. “I’m 53 and I really could not read until I was in my early 20s,” she says.

“I could read the words but I couldn’t understand.”

She says she can still hear the old mantra that says children have to re-read it over and over again to get it. “Somebody who gets it reads it once and they move on, but somebody who doesn’t might have to read it 10 times, and maybe they’ll get some of it.”

Poupart, whose youngest son is also dyslexic, says she didn’t receive the proper support when she was younger and had to learn how to deal with her limitations. “I went through school praying that I wouldn’t be asked to read out loud,” she says.

By learning coping skills and finding lifelines, she always found work, eventually becoming an office manager for CBS Records. But at age 23, married and pregnant, Poupart decided that it was time to learn how to read and over the years went on to take, and get certified in, several learning programs — her latest being the Cellfield Program, founded in Australia by Dimitri Caplygin with the first clinic opening in 2002.

The program is designed to help children and young adults who have either poor reading or comprehension skills — many of whom are dyslexic.
When Poupart looked into it she says “it was love at first sight” and took the computer-based course before becoming Canada’s first and only certified licensee. “I really am a firm believer that I need to experience it to teach it,” she says.

Cellfield uses brain plasticity and computer science to synchronize information and deliver it directly where it is needed, quickly and efficiently. And it claims that students will start to see marked improvements in less than two weeks.

Stepping Up began providing the Cellfield Program in March, 2010 and Poupart says the result so far with 23 children has been phenomenal. “The reading rate — word identification and word attack — has gone up about two grade levels, and for reading comprehension it’s about the same.”

The 12-week program is not cheap, coming in at $1,800. But Poupart firmly stands behind it, saying the biggest improvement she saw with her own difficulties came after she took the program herself.

“I’ve been in the education field for 25 years and I’ve not seen a program like this.”

A free information session called Cellfield and Reading Disorders: How Brain Plasticity Can Help our Children and Adults, will be held on Monday, Nov. 29 from 6:30-9:30 p.m. at the KoSA Arts Centre, 5325 Crowley Ave. in NDG. For more information call 438-380-3635, e-mail: info@steppingup. net, or visit www.steppingup.net
anthony@thesuburban.com