ow do you properly introduce someone who's been called the next Dr. Spock?

Anyone who reads Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, Teacher Magazine, or Southern Living, for instance, has probably read about Mel Levine, professor of pediatrics, and All Kinds of Minds—the institute he founded to help children become more successful learners.

One way would be to start with Levine's eccentricities. He lives about an hour outside of Chapel Hill on a 30-acre farm he's named Sanctuary. There, he and his wife, Bambi, raise hundreds of geese, 10 donkeys, a horse and a mule, seven dogs, 40 pheasants, 19 peacocks, and 10 swans.

Or you could start with the origins of Levine's interest in learning problems: Levine says that he was an awkward child and not very good at sports. During baseball games at camp, he would play right field for both teams and pass the time searching for snakes in the grass and reading biographies. It was here, he says, he figured out that nobody's good at everything.

Then there's the moment when Levine found his calling. After earning his medical degree in 1969, Levine enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and was stationed in the Philippines, where he volunteered as the school doctor at Clark Air Force Base. This is where, he says, he realized kids learn in many different ways.

You could also begin with Levine's philosophy "label the problem, not the child." Levine believes that the students themselves should understand their differences. "Whether or not they have learning problems, students need to know how their minds work—learn about learning while they are learning," he says.

evine, director of the Clinical Center for the Study of Development and Learning, explains that every student is "wired" a little bit differently. Whether Levine's personally seeing a child or presenting a workshop to teachers, the first thing he does is create a profile of each student's strengths and weaknesses.

The profiles come from a model consisting of eight neurodevelopmental constructs ranging from memory to higher-order cognition. "The names [for the constructs] are pretty unimaginative," Levine says, "but we call them constructs to convince ourselves that we constructed them, so that we're prepared at any point to change them."

To help teachers identify where a child is having difficulties, Levine and his team of researchers have created observation tools that teachers learn during "Schools Attuned"—a 35-hour professional-development program for elementary and professional school educators. The Teacher's View is an online tool that has 12 different "windows" with checklists to examine tasks such as "call on the child in class and listen to the way he speaks" or "analyze a writing a sample." The window for calling on a child in class, for example, includes items such as "never uses a compound or complex sentence," "is hesitant in speech (you want to jump in and help)," "has trouble finding words," and "has poor transitions between sentences."

After the teacher observes the child, she enters the information into the program, which analyzes the information and figures out where the child may be having the most difficulty. The program then provides suggestions to the teacher. For example, "In the four windows you have completed, everything that you've checked off that is problematic concerns memory. Here are some recommendations that you may want to think about for that child."