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Students with Learning Disabilities. Ritah Kisakye - Coggle Diagram
Students with Learning Disabilities. Ritah Kisakye
Learning disabilities involves different learning challenges that affect student's learning abilities to receive and process information.
Signs and symptoms of learning disabilities.
. Most students avoid reading aloud and dislike reading and
writing activities.
. Struggle to understand open ended questions and word
problem.
. Difficulty in reading comprehension or math skills.
. Student faces challenges with writing
. Student struggles following classroom discussions and
expressing their thoughts loud
This is the process I would use to identify a student struggling in class.
Monitor all student's performance in terms of cognitive and behaviour during class time and out of class.
The teacher then shares his observations to the special needs teacher to present struggling evidence about that particular student including information collected from his homeroom teacher.
We realised involving a school counsellor is very important as there are so much she can identify about the student that others might ignore. So the teacher consults her after getting permission from the special needs teacher to have more information collected from different people before a final decision is made. Again collected previous data is shared with the school counsellor.
Going through the information collected, after a certain period of time probably a month, The teacher concerned consultS his home room teacher to collect more data before any decision is made.
From this step, the teacher contacts other subject teachers to investigate and collect more data. A document is again shared to other subject teachers to find out their observations too. The teacher provides differentiation strategies to observe observe and record the student's strengths and areas where we need to provide support him.
A teacher creates a google doc to note down all her/his observations during each class. This document includes how a student expresses his ideas with others, look at his behaviour, and look at his organisational skills to manage his assignments within the allocated time. We provide individualised time to that
particular student during an activity to get to know him more and we are sure this gives us an idea on what to focus on in the next period.
Once the teacher notices that other teachers are facing same challenges on how to support this student, then the special needs teacher is contacted again for the next step. The data collected in all subjects gives evidence of the student's level of achievement in all classes to determine whether he qualifies for special educational services.
After noticing that one of the students is struggling in some activities in class, We provide more time looking through their assignments presented. That shows us where to start from.
At this a stage, parents are contacted and provided with evidence of the student's performance collected in different subjects. The teacher is comfortable to share it with the parents or work collaborate with the special needs teacher to see how the matter needs to be addressed to the parents since sometimes it can be overwhelming for them.
Contacting parents is to show teacher's observations and for the first meeting the parent is requested to share what they have noticed at home about their child that might be an usual and if they don't have anything to share, they will be advised to take note on a few aspects that might have been suggested by the school counsellor together with the special needs teacher.
Finally after everyone is contacted, as a team, we would agree whether the student qualifies for special education services or use of 504 plan.
Why would we use the process I have presented.
Being a learning support assistant for some time, I have realised that some students have been referred to Learning support without enough data. That has happened because some people don't take time to understand each student's strength. .
Data has be collected and subject teachers need to show evidence of different strategies they have used to help a student show their understanding in different assignments.
When I was interviewing one of the teachers, I remember her saying not every student who struggles requires special educational services. So I think following my process to identify a student struggling would provide enough evidence before a decision is made.
I think involving everyone who teaches a particular student thought to be a struggler in class needs to provide evidence of why they think the student needs to be referred to special education.
Reference
Melinda. (2021, July 16). Learning disabilities and disorders. HelpGuide.org. Retrieved November 5, 2021, from
https://www.helpguide.org/articles/autism-learning-disabilities/learning-disabilities-and-disorders.htm
.