My child is struggling 
Now that my child has 
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Karen Golembeski: Thank you. And for our final question today, we had several questions about strategies for how to build confidence and promote success in school and at home. So aside from staying positive and motivated, how do you recommend people build their confidence and promote success in school?
Sheldon Horowitz: One of the things that I would suggest that parents, educators, and individuals with learning disabilities think about in terms of promoting success is to look at assistive technologies. These can be enormously helpful. And today we have many more options to choose from than ever before. We have calculators, we have screen-reading software, we have cameras that take digital images of prints and convert them into audio files for people who struggle with reading. We have portable scanning devices that are as small as the size of a pen that read text aloud and then save it for download to a computer later on. We have software that captures natural speech and imports it into a word-processing program. These are just a few of the kinds of technologies that are leveling the playing field for students with LD. But not everything we do and not all of these kinds of activities and opportunities that promote success need to be high tech. Students with LD tell us that the most important strategies for success are often high touch as opposed to high tech, meaning that honest face-to-face problem-solving with teachers and parents and students is critical to success.
That said, here are a few things not to do:
- Don’t call upon the child with dyslexia, a specific LD in reading, to read aloud in front of the class unless of course you know that they will be successful.
- Don’t assume that a child with learning disabilities doesn’t want to visit the library and take out books just because they’re struggling with reading.
- And don’t assume that the child with LD hasn’t mastered an understanding of course content because they do poorly on pencil-and-paper exams.
Instead find ways to include students with LD in activities that demonstrate what they do know and help them and others to see that learning disabilities while very real are not in any way a prescription for failure.
Karen Golembeski: Dr. Horowitz, thank you so much for your time today. And thank you to all of you for participating in this podcast. Please do visit the other podcasts in this series, Learning Disabilities Basics, as well as Things you’ve Always Wanted to know about Learning Disabilities (coming soon!). Thank you.
The podcasts for this series and the Student Success Collaborative are generously funded by the Cisco Systems Foundation. The Student Success Collaborative consists of partners City Year, Silicon Valley Education Foundation, Teachers without Borders, One Global Economy, and the National Center for Learning Disabilities.
