The following is a transcription of the podcast, "Learning Disabilities: Sorting Fact from Fiction (audio)."In this podcast, Dr. Sheldon Horowitz answers questions about some of the myths and facts connected to learning disabilities (LD). He also talks about key qualities shared by successful individuals. And, learn how parents and educators can help students with LD to stay motivated and positive.
This is the second in a three-part series developed with the Student Success Collaborative.
Karen Golembeski: Welcome. This podcast series is brought to you by the Student Success Collaborative. The Student Success Collaborative is made up of City Year, One Global Economy, Silicon Valley Education Foundation, Teachers without Borders, and the National Center for Learning Disabilities. The Student Success Collaborative and this podcast series are funded by the Cisco Systems Foundation.
My name is Karen Golembeski and I’m the assistant director of education programs at the National Center for Learning Disabilities. This podcast is part of a three-part series on the basics of learning disabilities with questions provided by the Silicon Valley Education Foundation and Teachers without Borders’ networks of educators across the country.
Our guest today is my colleague, Dr. Sheldon Horowitz. Dr. Horowitz is the director of LD Resources and Essential Information at the National Center for Learning Disabilities and he’s essentially our in-house expert on LD.
Today’s podcast is on the topic of learning disabilities, sorting fact from fiction.
Welcome, Dr. Horowitz.
Even though [students identified with] learning disabilities make up 50% of the students receiving special education services in the United States, many myths about learning disabilities still exist. Will you sort some of the facts from fiction for us?
Sheldon Horowitz: Sure. I’d be happy to speak about some of the mythology, some of the misunderstandings about learning disabilities. It’s true that almost half of all children who receive any kind of special education services in the United States are classified as having specific learning disabilities. And it is pretty remarkable that there’s still so much confusion about what LD is and is not. As recently as 2010, there was a Roper poll survey done where we learned that individuals, parents, educators and others, still confuse learning disabilities with other disorders including mental retardation, below-average intellectual functioning. They even confuse LD with sensory impairment such as blindness and deafness. And [they] attribute learning disabilities to laziness and lack of motivation. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Learning disabilities are, in the words of a renowned researcher, islands of weakness in a sea of strength. One of the graduating high school seniors with learning disabilities who is this year’s Anne and Allegra Ford Scholarship winner whose essay you can read on our LD.org website describes her brain as a computer with a glitch — still able to process information, still able to get the job done, but in ways that are different and often unexpected. Average students liken their learning disabilities, their struggles with learning, to driving a car with a missing gear in the transmission. Or figuring out how to get somewhere when street signs are confusing or the rules of the road change depending upon where they are and things change from one block to the next. And listen to what one young student told me about his learning disabilities. He said that learning disabilities are what I have, and not what I am. So the take-away message here is that [having] learning disabilities is not a prescription for failure but rather a hurdle or a set of challenges that once understood by the person, by his parents, by individuals, teachers in school, can be worked around with targeted instruction, meaningful accommodations, high expectations, and a network of support.
Karen Golembeski: I’ve often heard you advise those with learning disabilities to become successful and comfortable with talking about their learning disabilities and what they need from others to be successful. Why is it so important to let people know about your learning disability?
Sheldon Horowitz: It’s a very good question. If you were to look around the room and just try to pick out someone who you thought had learning disabilities, what would you be looking for? Would it be someone who was left-handed, someone wearing glasses, someone who you knew avoided doing math or someone who wasn’t a particularly avid reader? The truth is that there isn’t a sure-fire list of characteristics that typify everybody with learning disabilities, and LD manifests itself differently in different people. It’s not necessarily something that you notice unless the person with the learning disability is doing something like reading or spelling or math or those kinds of tasks that would demonstrate the kinds of trouble that they have that model their particular areas of weakness. People wouldn’t know about the presence of a learning disability necessarily unless it was made mention of and it could easily be mistaken for a reluctance to read, or a poor math learning ability, or spelling errors, or note-taking problems that were reflective not of the LD, but that were translated improperly as laziness or even a lack of effort.
During school years, the school is responsible for seeking out students with LD and making sure that they have the instruction and the support they need to succeed. However once a student has graduated from high school and moved on to college or to the workplace, the responsibility to disclose the presence of a learning disability and ask for help lies completely with the individual. This is a very important distinction, and for more information about when to share the presence of a learning disability, to whom you might share, how it’s best done, visit the LD.org website.
Karen Golembeski: Over the years I’m sure you’ve gathered some tips for keeping students with learning disabilities as well as their parents and teachers motivated and positive as they progress through school. Will you share some of these top tips with us?
Sheldon Horowitz: Motivation and perseverance is really, really important. Some of the very most interesting research that we have about learning disabilities — helping us understand what seems to make the most difference over time — comes from some work that was done in the area called success attributes. More than income level, more than parenting style, even more than overall intelligence, researchers have identified certain characteristics and behaviors. And, do you know what the Number One item is? The Number One item in that success attribute literature is self-awareness: a person’s understanding of the nature of their specific challenges and what he or she needs to be successful.
Successful individuals with LD don’t give up. They anticipate the help that they need and they find ways to get it in school, on the job, at home, and in the community. And they learn to be confident and outspoken self-advocates, first when they’re in school attending those decision-making meetings, those IEP meetings, even as early as middle school. As they get older, they love the mantra “no decisions made about me without me.” They’re part of the process. They develop a vocabulary. They know how to contribute to meaningful discussions about what they need to be successful. And clearly it takes a strong and well-informed group of adults, specifically parents and educators, working in close partnership with each other, to make all of this happen, but research tells us that it’s well worth the effort.
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.
