Supporting All Students: Learning Disabilities, Writing and Universal Design

Tonight's class was jam packed. We began with a group assignment on Misunderstood Minds, a series of videos which presented information on the impact of learning disabilities and the failure of schools to accommodate for learning disabilities, on the both the students and their families. My group was introduced to Nathan a first grader and Adam, a high school student. Their stories were heartbreaking. Adams and Nathan's stories underscored the need for schools to identify early, students who experience difficulty learning, find the areas that cause difficulty and to create a consistent plan that is enforced grade to grade and which supports students through both remediation and compensation. We as teachers need to improve our ability to differentiate learning and to convey our lessons using multiple modalities and to transfer this multi-modality focus to our assessment practices as well. Students with learning disabilities need to be supported or we as a society will pay the price in the future with increased dropout rates, increased crime rates and increased mental health issues. My daughter is currently working on a PHD in forensic psychology in Australia. The focus of her thesis is resilience among teenagers in the criminal justice system. She reported that of the clientele in her study only 20% of the teensagers tested scored as having average or higher intelligence, as being free of any identified learning disability and as not suffering from a mental health issue. 80% of the youth in her study were diagnosed as being globally delayed or with a learning disability and or with a mental health issue. We need to begin supporting the students with learning issues now. Here's the link to see the PowerPoint my group created for the Misunderstood Minds videos. The class then looked the cognitive processes involved with a writing task. I knew that writing involved a lot of brain power and I had heard from past presentations that writing is one of the most challenging task for students, but I had no idea how difficult it actually was until I saw the visual web of the steps a person follows in order to write: many of these steps happen simultaneously! Here's a tumbprint of the visual or click on the word visual to see an online pdf of it.

There are so many places where neurons can misfire or information can be sent to the wrong part of the brain. Looking at this, how can we not provide support to make this task doable for students with learning disabilities? For the last part of the evening, we learned about Universal Design for Learning. Universal means the methods and learning needs to be used and understood by everyone. Design looks at creating plans that need to be flexible and accommodates for all. For the learner the focus needs to be on what (the knowledge to be recognized) the how (the skills to be learned) and the why (the rationale for the learning the what and the why). Universal design for learning has teachers considering their goals - what will their students know and be able to do, the barriers to the learning and the multiple means of representation to be used to convey and assess what students will learn to know and do. UDL reminds us that helping students will learning disabilities results in improving achievement for all students. The way people learn is as unique as their fingerprints. Classroom strategies cannot have one size fits all. Here’s a outline that contains more info on UDL:

A video which explains UDL:

A picture says a thousand words.