Teaching the Learning Disabled. Thoughts, Strategies, Revelations.

[ddeubel]

As an educator, I've done a complete 180 when it comes to my teaching philosophy. I thought as a young teacher, that the teacher's role was to help those that can. Now I believe, firmly believe that we are here to help those who can't. Radical maybe but let's be honest -- those that can will succeed no matter what we do. They really will! However, if we can pull a few of those who just seemingly can't - up by the bootstraps, we will be doing our proper job. To improve the world from what might have been otherwise....

Enough of my preaching. I'd like to know what others think about learning disabilities (do you even agree that they exist? or maybe like I believe - that every kid should have an IEP , we are all learning disabled, it just depends who is doing the evaluating?). I've been doing a lot of thinking on this and research in the realm of ELLs (English languguage learners). I believe and will finish up a paper sooner or later - that all those who are over 9-10, have a learning disability when learning a second language.... What I'm really interested in are the strategies or surprises you all have had along your teaching road/path - when it comes to the "learning disabled".

I've also in a dedicated fashion, put online a film that I think EVERY teacher should see - F.A.T. - Frustration / Anxiety / Tension. A workshop that really gets teachers to feel how it might be like to be a learning disabled student in a regular classroom.

If you have any other films/resources to share that is also welcomed. I really need the perspective.

[Ian Carmichael]

As always you take us deeper, David. I think this is so true - so how can we be unblockers, unlockers? The two revelations I've had in this respect are
First: the 'learning disabled' need closer teaching distances (about the same as relational distances) because they need the closeness of a learning mediator - and the 'bus driver' will never be close enough. Maybe we could call it Individual Educational Presence.
Second: what's the culture I need to learn. How do I tune into the frequencies of relevance?
Strategies? I'm all set to eavesdrop (sorry, that's 'lurk' in this culture, isn't it?)

[Nathan Lowell]

big topic - Learning Disabilities. I'm pretty sure the conditions exist but I guess my question is really if it's a labeling problem rather than a condition.

Think of this. In my day-to-day practice, I talk about "people who are darkness impaired." If you take a group of people, lock them in a basement, and then shut off the lights, those who are blind won't even notice. The rest will have serious problems dealing with the loss of what is actually just a standard accommodation that they take for granted -- lights. The only reason we don't normally consider lighting to be an accommodation is because people with sight are the majority.

So learning disabilities .. what if it's just .. you know .. a labeling problem.

IF .. and this isn't really such a stretch because there appears to be plenty of support for it .. Gardner's Multiple Intelligences is a legitimate way to look at skill and talent -- as a continuum of ill-defined knowledge domains -- then it seems a small step to think that the relative few domains which get rewarded in school -- reading, writing, language, logic -- will turn up groups of people who lack those skills so severely that they fall out of the system's ability to deal with them. They're not *really* learning disabled so much as they're 'school disabled.' Perhaps they'd do better in an environment that wasn't based strictly on reading, writing, and staying in your seat.

Kinda like people who are blind in a well-lit room. They can't see anything, but they're the folks you wanna have around when there's a power failure and you need somebody to find the door.

ADD? ADHD? I'm not sure about these .. I understand they're diagnosed a lot but the so are "learning styles" and I'm not sure about them either.


Alternately:

I know in dealing with physical disabilities, it's pretty easy to figure out if somebody is blind or deaf. That physical manifestation carries a cognitive freight as well.

When it comes to the less easily diagnosed -- or less obvious -- perhaps what we're seeing is the cognitive freight from an unrecognized physical/emotional manifestation as well.

I'm spinning this off the top of my head and I'm blathering but you're asking the right questions, I think.

[Connie Weber]

David,

I'm in San Francisco at the Learning and the Brain Conference. Spent several hours listening to Sam Goldstein and think he's really got it in terms of understanding children with differences, disabilities, labels, challenges. I'm going to read all his stuff.

For right now, here's an article he wrote, relevant to your discussion. And there's more, much more. He has a lot to say about language... Let's dig up that stuff and talk about it, too.
http://www.samgoldstein.com/node/117

Nathan, thanks for getting onto this forum. We need your perspective as we focus in on this topic! Do you know Goldstein's work, by the way? He may have a somewhat different focus than you do--a lot of his studies are about ADHD. He's all about finding ways to build up self-discipline, resilience, executive functioning (through internal dialog, the use of language for self-monitoring).

Goldstein is a firm child-advocate. "We must be proactive rather than reactive." "We must advocate for planful ways to help..."

David, excellent question. I agree with what Ian said: "As always, you take us deeper."

[Mike]

Hey all..... There are many ways to explore who it is that is called "TEACHER".

I am of the belief that we must get to know ourselves very well to become better teachers.

Kinda flows off the idea of Parker Palmers- WE TEACH WHO WE ARE!

Some cool instruments to look at yourself:

1. Quick learning style inventory:
http://www.learning-styles-online.com/inventory/

2. A deeper look at oneself:

http://www.keirsey.com/sorter/register.aspx

3. Myers/Briggs:

http://www.russellrowe.com/myers-briggs_temperaments.htm

What do you use to look "with-in"?

If we "teach who we are".... how do you reflect on who it is that "teaches"?

[Laura Gibbs]

Nathan, I loved this idea of "people who are darkness impaired"... my own experience has been that all students find some things easy and some things hard, and sometimes students present you with situations that also challenge you as a teacher (regardless of what kind of labels people put on things).

Just to take a dramatic example with a blind student - a small group of linguistics majors at my school came to me with a request to do an independent study class in Polish, and one of the students was blind (and a genius linguistics student). Well, since she was blind, I had to throw my writing-on-the-blackboard approach to the classroom out the window, and instead went to Walmart and bought a whole big bagful of plastic animals and little people and toy soldiers and such, all of which could be distinguished by touch.

Then we spent a year doing the basics of Polish grammar and syntax (it is a morphologically complex language, which is why the linguistics students wanted to learn it) by using those little toy animals and people and objects, passing them from hand to hand, and acting out little plays involving the toys and ourselves, while sitting around a table, making up sentences with those little toys. IT WAS HILARIOUS. At the end of the year we divided up the little toys amongst ourselves as souvenirs (with the biggest fight over who would get the ballerina whose leg we had torn off so that we could practice the word for "leg" in the singular...)

If I ever get the chance to teach language to a small group of students like that again, you better believe I will head straight to Walmart and buy another sack of toys even if all the students in the class are sighted. The needs of that one student, thank goodness, challenged me in such a way that the class ended up being way better for everyone than it ever would have been "normally."

[ddeubel]

Connie,

Thanks for the Goldstein link and I especially like his "homework" page. I do though sometimes think we over analyze everything and I lean towards Nathan's notion that somehow we "create" the learning disabled. Not that a disability doesn't exist but just that we can't find the language to talk about it in a positive fashion -- somehow in our epistimology, we don't have the category which would build this into a plus/positive. Why?

There are so many different ways of being, learning. We need more teachers questioning the straight jackets that administrations/schools and society sets learning within. My own adventures, reading/watching videos about those with significant challenges in life have led me to see learning in a non- hierarchical fashion. (and that's where I disagree with Goldstein and others who place skills/thinking on that type of "one thing is better than the other" scale. It leads to a view of education that values intellectual thought but which confines the graceful badminton player or the girl so creative with color - on the sidelines of life. Brief oddities.

As I write this, I'm thinking of that amazing Hole in the Wall experiment of Sugata Mitra with the poor in India. The kids taught themselves, even another language! Every kid learned and there wasn't a sense of "you can't do this so we have to push you aside." All the kids formed a "ring" around the computer and like a wave - the learning flowed outward without lessening. See the TED talk or visit his site but it really provides a model showing that learning is a self organizing principle. It is many times the human/teacher/societal intervention that destroys that and creates "disability".

Mike, I agree with your notion completely. That we teachers come to know our strengths and weaknesses is a sign of "wisdom" and good teaching. I spent days putting together a great Myers Briggs ppt for a course I taught and if I can find it , I'll post. It allows anyone to easily find their indicators/profile....

Connie, don't leave your heart in San Francisco!

[Ellen Pham]

Two gems I've picked out from this discussion so far-

The 'learning disabled' need closer teaching distances (about the same as relational distances) because they need the closeness of a learning mediator...

My own adventures, reading/watching videos about those with significant challenges in life have led me to see learning in a non- hierarchical fashion. (and that's where I disagree with Goldstein and others who place skills/thinking on that type of "one thing is better than the other" scale. It leads to a view of education that values intellectual thought but which confines the graceful badminton player or the girl so creative with color - on the sidelines of life. Brief oddities.

Connie and Mike, I very much appreciate your contributions too. Why the above quotes are gems for me is that they speak to the personal reality I experience when I am teaching learning disabled children.

From a practical point of view, there definitely are discrete learning disabilities. Yes, sometimes it is murky and hard to figure out what difficulty is coming from where, but sometimes it is as plain as the nose on your face- there is cross wiring in the phonological and orthographic functioning in the brain -if I am labeling that correctly- but you don't even need to remember the correct labels to recognize the problem. For example, I had a bright GED student who was very capable of forming an essay in his mind, but he literally could not spell. His correlation between the sound of a letter (any letter) and the written symbol was random. The word 'was' could be represented with any three or four letters. And it would change each time he wrote the word- literally almost no consistency.

One interesting part was that he could read, slowly, at somewhere between a fourth and sixth grade level. Surprisingly, if you are bright, and an adept problem solver (which is was, impressively, probably from all the practice he got in figuring out ways around his learning disability), you can get through almost all the GED this way, given enough time. He had passed four of the tests, but was stuck on the writing/ essay portion. After a lot of haggling and paperwork, he was given a testing accommodation where he could dictate his essay to the test examiner, and he passed.

My point in relaying this story is that there are discrete learning disabilities that, when you are working with a student in that specific area, are as clear as if the student was blind. Whatever you want to call it, it exists, and if you are trying to achieve an academic goal, it is a hindrance. What impressed me about this student intellectually was his problem solving abilities. That's a strength I've seen in many learning disabled students I have worked with.

[Ellen Pham]

Hey David, I'm still having problems with the fat1 video cutting out at 16:16. If I play it in the browser, it simply stops and returns to the beginning of the video at this point; when I download the video onto my computer, it only downloads up to that point.

Right now I am downloading it one more time (this is probably my fourth attempt). You know how much I want other teachers to watch it; I am afraid this is presenting an insurmountable obstacle to many : ). Maybe you could try uploading it again?

[Ellen Pham]

Results of 4th attempt: It still downloads only to 16:19

[Ellen Pham]

Hey David, I watched this video and thought of this discussion:

Needle Sized Art Very incredible story! Not only is this mans art cool but he got a ton of cash for it!

"I have learning difficulties... I can't read or write, but I had to find a way of expressing myself. The teachers at school made me feel small, sort of made me feel like nothing. I'm trying to prove to the world that nothing doesn't exist."

[Connie Weber]

Hey David,
Thanks again for this discussion. I have a lot more to say but I've got to look up more notes from the conference. Tons of stuff on the topic--got lemon meringue pies in the oven, got to tend to them and get them delivered tonight. (Anyone want one?) just wanted to resurface this discussion because we'll have a large number of American Teacher Award teachers touring the place shortly. Let's keep it going... I'll do my part shortly. As always, great discussion, David--and everyone else!

[Connie Weber]

Seems like time to reopen this discussion. What do you think, everyone? Should everyone have an IEP--or maybe a highly specific individualized learning plan? Are labels constructive or restrictive? Enabling, or the opposite? If you were suddenly in charge of creating the labels, what categories come to mind? Do we all deal with able-isms?

I know I'm completely disabled in the realm of learning languages, although I hear nuances in bird song that most don't hear at all. I'm completely direction-disabled, although I never forget a physical space I've been to, remember it with acute detail. (Can even remember what I was thinking about when I was there before, even years before.)

I can snapshot a bird silhouette in a microsecond and probably identify the bird, but may not notice what my students are wearing that day. And probably couldn't tell you anything about the relative height of students in my class.

Are we all composed of these weird interblendings of abilities and disabilities? If so, what does this mean for the learners in our classes?

What are your weird combinations of abilities and disabilities?