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Teaching disabled students problems
Case study of a student with learning disabilities
Case study of a student with learning disabilities
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F.A.T. City is a workshop held by Richard Lavoie, an expert on learning disabilities, that let’s an audience experience the frustration, anxiety, and tension children with learning disabilities deal with every day. In this video, Mr. Lavoie does several activities with the audience to let them experience what it’s like to be a child with a learning disability in the classroom. The setting of this video is a traditional classroom setting. It’s sunny outside and morning or afternoon. There are two big green chalkboards at the front of the room and posters hung all over the walls. The desks are arranged in a big u shape with the audience sitting around them and the teacher in the front sitting on a stool. Throughout this video the teacher is …show more content…
standing up and walking around, and there is a lot of talking and laughter from both the audience and the teacher. The participants of this workshop included a social worker, a psychologist, a recreational therapist, a regular education teacher, a special education teacher, and parents, teachers, friends of children with learning disabilities. The participants consisted of men and women of all ages. The first activity in this video was Experiencing Frustration, Anxiety, and Tension. In this activity, the host hands out booklets to the participants, and going from person to person starts quickly asking them questions and demanding answers. He is trying to frustrate them and show the anxiety and tension experienced by children with learning disabilities. The second activity was processing. Going along with the last activity, the audience thinks the host is going too fast and it is hard for them to process the questions he is asking which is what he is trying to prove it feels like for a child with a learning disability since they process two times slower than a child without a learning disability. He also gives tips on ways to help the child in the classroom and to not make them feel so intimidated so they can focus and actually answer questions. The third activity is risk taking. While still quickly asking the audience questions, he then asks I anyone wants to volunteer to answer a question on the next page and no one raises their hand because they had no positive reinforcement for their right answers and embarrassment for a wrong one. That’s why children with learning disabilities don’t want to volunteer answers because they get no positive reinforcement if they get an answer right and get embarrassed if they get it wrong. The fourth activity is visual perception. He tells the participants to turn to the next page and asks them if they know what the image is. No one does until he then tells them what their looking at and some still need a visual aid. This activity shows that everyone was seeing the image but not perceiving it. They needed him to teach them, which is what children with learning disabilities need. It’s not that their not motivated, but sometimes need a little extra help. The fifth activity is reading comprehension. In this activity, he shows them three columns of words that they all have seen before and know the meaning of. He then reads a paragraph containing all of the words, and then asks who understood what the paragraph meant. Only one person understood because of their background. Just because a child knows what some words are, when they are all put together they may not know the meaning of what they are reading. They just need some extra help and instruction. The sixth activity is effect of perception on behavior. He shows the audience a picture and tells them to write down a title for it. He then asks a woman if she likes her answer and if it’s good enough to read in front of the class. She says yes, so he takes her paper and then asks her if he thinks her answer is funny and rips it up. She wrote down what she saw but he thought it was wrong even though she saw the image differently from what it really is. He is showing how children with learning disabilities can perceive things differently than others and don’t always know when their doing something wrong and shouldn’t be punished for it. The seventh activity is visual motor coordination.
He quickly shows everyone a picture of an uppercase Hearn and tells them to try and reproduce it. He then has two women come to the front and sit down and look into a mirror and try to trace it. Neither of them are successful due to mixed messages between their hands and eyes. This activity shows how difficult it is for a child with a learning disability to write. The eighth activity is oral expression. He starts talking very fast, stuttering, and having trouble finding the right words to say to show how a child with a learning disability would respond when asked a question. Most children with learning disabilities have dysnomia, which is a word finding problem. They have problem with their storage and retrieval systems in the brain, which is what makes it difficult sometimes to retrieve or find the right words. For most people talking is associative, meaning they can do more than just talk at one time. But for children with learning disabilities, its cognitive meaning they can just do that at one time. He plays “popcorn” with the participants and asks them to say a sentence that tells a story and relates to the one in front of it. This was associative for everyone, so to make it cognitive and to show everyone what it’s like to be dysnomic, he tells them to do the same thing
but they can’t use any words that contain the letter n. This also shows the anxiety children with learning disabilities feel because they don’t have the time they need to think of an answer. The ninth activity is reading and decoding. He has the participants to read a passage that is broken up, uneven, and has mixed up letters in it to show what it is like to read as a child with learning disabilities. The tenth activity is auditory and visual capabilities. He has the participants to read a story that is jumbled up and asks them a question about it afterwards and no one can answer it. He then reads the story aloud and everyone understood and was able to answer the questions. This shows the difference between auditory and visual learners and why it’s important for children to have access to both. The eleventh and final activity is fairness. He explains that being fair isn’t making sure that everyone has equal of something but that they a person has what he/she needs. If a teacher is lecturing and a student needed a copy of it because they were unable to take notes, it would be fair because the student would need that and the others wouldn’t. Otherwise everyone but the child with the learning disability would have notes and that isn’t fair. The parts that impacted me the most were the first activity experiencing frustration, anxiety, and tension. I hate to think children feel these emotions every day in school when it could be the processing and risk taking activities. Children with learning disabilities want to learn just like everyone else but they feel so intimidated and scared in the classroom that they can’t focus on lectures, or answer questions when asked and then face embarrassment when so little could be done to change this. What was considered fair in this video is that a person get what they need. This definition changed my opinion of the meaning and I’m glad it did because this meaning makes so much more sense. Before watching this video I thought it meant that everyone had an equal amount of something or was receiving the same things. If you have a student in your class who needs to sit in the front row to see the board and then two other students want to sit in the front just to sit by their friends, that wouldn’t be fair because they don’t need to be sitting in the front like other students who can’t see. This video opened my eyes to so many things about working with children who have a learning disability. I hadn’t ever realized the way children with learning disabilities are treated in our school systems and how there are so many small things that can be done as a teacher to help them and better them. I learned so many tips and ways to help children with learning disabilities in my classroom one day.
In the video presentation of How Difficult Can This Be? The F.A.T. City Workshop, Richard Lavoie is able to simulate several of the difficulties that a student with a learning disability has to face at school. Some of the difficulties experienced by the students are intrinsic to the disability itself, but many other difficulties are directly related with the emotions that the student experiences when attending a class, and as a result of his or her interactions with teachers and classmates. Both the United States law and the education system, have the opportunity to make a huge difference in the learning experience of every student with disability. Students with disabilities need to be guided to a path to education that is both feasible and accessible for them; with achievable goals, and by being provided what they need in order to succeed, and to be able to overcome any obstacles.
In the video footage they are studying Science with a concentration on speaking, listening, and viewing. During this lesson they learned to maintain eye contact with their speaker, engage in active listening, and keep still.
“The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal” by Jonathan Mooney is the story of his journey around the U.S. in short bus nonetheless to meet with different children and their families who have faced challenges in school due to ADD, ADHD, Autism, and other learning disabilities. Jonathan Mooney himself faced the disability of Dyslexia and often had to deal with many challenges in school himself, but he appears to be one of the more fortunate ones, who was able to grow from his disability and ultimately get a degree in English. Needless to say, his book and journey lead the reader to question what really is “normal”, and how the views of this have caused the odds to be stacked against those who don’t fit the mold. Throughout, this story, for me personally however, this story gave several events that I found moving, and had the potential to influence my further work in education.
Perhaps if everyone realized the wisdom in the famous proverb, “before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes”, people would have more empathy for those who may seem to be atypical. The video How Difficult Can This Be? The F.A.T. City Workshop presented by Richard D. Lavoie effectively gets participants to experience the feelings and stress of children with learning disabilities. Lavoie draws his participants into the classroom experience with well developed exercises that elicit the frustration, anxiety, and tension of children with
As the video introduces the audience to facilitated communication, a treatment which at the time was considered a revolutionary and miraculous treatment, I began to experience a strong sense of happiness followed by a rush of hopeful and optimistic emotions which were attributed to the implications of such treatment. No longer, I thought, will children who are born with such a horrible disorder will have to continue to experience the horrors of the inability to
Alison spent 12 years of her life learning how to learn. She was comfortable with conversation, but could not understand directions. This caused her a lot of self-esteem issues as a young child trying to fit in with all the other kids. She felt an enormous amount of pressure at both school and home. At age seven, she finally came to the realization that she just did not understand. That is when she began to develop coping mechanisms like asking others to repeat and clarify directions, spoken or written. She used the cues of those around her, and observed her classmates and reactions...
There have always been implications in the way a teacher can teach a student. You have your perfect students who seem to know more than you, the bad student who doesn’t want to learn, and then you have your student with a disability. These students try hard to succeed, but without the proper equipment, are unable to do so. This comes into play especially with students who are unable to speak. There were many ways in the past to help people who couldn’t talk by either writing the words down all the way, to using sign language. Using these methods to convey a message to a person or group of people can take a long time. This could be, and is, very discouraging for someone who just wants to tell you the answer, or ask a question; however there isn’t an easy way to get it out. Luckily a company over in Europe developed a system that enables teaching and learning to come easier to a person with a disability. This system is called DynaVox.
Paramount to education in America is the concept of the classroom. Common definitions of the average classroom incl...
Auditory learners are students that learn by being read to, so that they can get the information in their ears. They understand it better that way, they can’t understand it through their eyes. This is the importance of books being put on tape. One perspective that I learned from watching this video about students with learning disabilities is that it is very important to get to know your students, so that you can learn the best way to teach them what they need to know.
It's 8 o'clock in the morning and the corridors of Mill Road Elementary are busier than Grand Central Station. The only difference is that Mill Road students are about a foot shorter and ten times more energetic than your average Grand Central Station commuter. In comparison with the dorm room I have just left, these walls are papered with hundreds of drawings and paintings. The hallways could compete with any modern gallery in terms of sheer bulk and some critics might argue for their content as well. However, I did not wake up at 7 o'clock to view the Mill Road Elementary prized art collection. Instead, I am there to present the 3-step Disabilities Awareness program to several classes of supercharged fifth graders.
Disability is like a bruise on an apple; sometimes it is evident, sometimes it is hidden. Consider Claire Hovey; she has arthritis – a hidden disability affecting one’s joints. Claire used to think of “pain as a hurdle” (Hovey, 2015); thus when diagnosed, she expected to tackle pain “with grace and poise” (Hovey, 2015) managing it silently (Hovey, 2015). However, self-doubt and fictional comparison brought negative psychological effects (Hovey, 2015) and she soon realized that neither were beneficial for her daily rehabilitation (Hovey, 2015). In contrast, Robert Ward lives with learning disabilities and a speech impediment – also hidden. For him, there was no diagnostic point; instead the learning curve came as he realized
Pauc, R. (2010). The Learning Disability Myth: Understanding and overcoming your child’s diagnosis of Dyspraxia, Dyslexia, Tourette’s syndrome of childhood, ADD, ADHD, or OCD. London: Virgin Books.
The third child looked at was Sarah who has a learning disability that wasn 't diagnosed until she was in fifth grade due to her ability to compensate for her disability in the previous grades. It is found that she has an expressive language problem. Sarah understands everything well, but has trouble expressing what she knows. I was surprised that the solution was to just practice speaking in school. I expected it to be a lot more complicated to help
Richard McGann, who was the Deaf-blind consumer, stood at the very front of the classroom facing the hearing consumers, who were sitting in the chairs that formed the semi-circle at the front of the classroom that had been arranged specifically for the interpreted event. The hearing consumers consisted of the students in the class, in addition to the professor’s mother, who attended the class that day as a guest. The interpreters for the event consisted of a team of two interpreters and a Support Service Provider (SSP). The classroom was well lit to ensure adequate visibility for the interpreters and the SSP, and Richard McGann was directed to stand in front of the chalkboard located at the front of the classroom in order to have a dark colored, solid background to achieve even better visibility. While ideally there might have been a larger, even darker background in this type of setting, it was the best arrangement that was possible given the specific ramifications of the classroom. Below is a diagram of the classroom setting and placement of interpreters and d/Deaf/hearing
Training future teachers is an important part in a good school system because it gives future teachers superior and inferior examples of how to teach. In college, teachers in training will only use textbooks to study. One problem with only learning how to teach through textbooks is teachers can’t see the process of teaching, they only read it. Cameras also benefit teachers because it shows them how they teach. Thomas Roberts an administrator at Hafen Elementary School in Nevada quotes what some teachers’ feedback is, “‘I didn’t know I leaned to the right when I speak. I didn’t know I focused more on the girls than the guys’” (Gray). By seeing and knowing what each teachers’ learning styles are, they can try to fix anything they don’t like. For instance, if a teacher realizes they lecture too long th...