The following is a transcription of the podcast, "Things You’ve Always Wanted to Know about Learning Disabilities (audio)."In this podcast, Dr. Sheldon Horowitz answers three common questions about learning disabilities (LD):
- How can you get a child’s learning disability to go away?
- How do you deal with someone – a child, parent, or teacher -- who denies that anything is wrong, that the learning disability doesn’t exist?
- How does brain structure and function relate to learning disabilities?
This is the third in a three-part series developed with the Student Success Collaborative.
Karen Golembeski: Welcome to this podcast series on the basics of learning disabilities. 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 generously funded by the Cisco Systems Foundation.
My name is Karen Golembeski. I am 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. Questions for this podcast and others have been submitted by the Silicon Valley Education Foundation and Teachers without Borders’ network 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. He’s our in-house learning disabilities expert.
Today’s podcast is on the topic of the things I’ve always wanted to know about learning disabilities. So let’s begin. Welcome, Dr. Horowitz.
Sheldon Horowitz: Thank you very much.
Karen Golembeski: Today’s podcast will be broken up into three questions that we’ve received from the field, so we’ll start in from a question that a parent asked, and it is, “How can I get my child’s learning disability to go away? Is it something that people outgrow? Is there a medicine or some other treatment that can be used, an example being diet or exercise, special glasses or bio-feedback?”
Sheldon Horowitz: Well, thank you very much for this question. Let me begin by saying that learning disabilities are life-long. They do not go away and they’re not something that you outgrow. There is no brain scan. There are no blood tests. They are no other medical procedure that can rule in or rule out the presence of a learning disability. It’s also important to know that learning disabilities very often run in families, so it’s not unusual to see a sibling, a cousin, an aunt, an uncle or even a parent who also has a learning disability. And there is no medicine that can effectively treat learning disabilities. LD is not that kind of a disorder.
That said, learning disabilities and disorders of attention like ADD or AD/HD often co-occur and these disorders can be treated effectively with medication. The process of discovering what signs and symptoms are related to the LD and which are characteristics of ADD or AD/HD is rarely easy and the best outcomes are achieved when parents and educators and physicians work closely to understand the child’s needs and to plan a course of treatment. Educational interventions, behavioral therapies and, yes, medicine are all important pieces of that LD, ADD, AD/HD puzzle.
As far as diet, exercise, special glasses, bio-feedback therapies and such, I only have one recommendation -- consumer beware. Just because something seems to make sense doesn’t mean that it’s rooted in sound theory or can be backed by sound scientific practice. Sure, some of these approaches might seem to work for some children, but we just don’t know why. We don’t know for which children and whether the benefit will last over time. Many of these approaches are expensive and are not covered by medical insurance or are not provided at no cost by schools, and many of these therapies raise false hopes and expectations resulting in even lowered self-esteem and a deep distrust when things don’t go well and things don’t get better.
I wish I knew enough about the neurobiology of different types or dimensions of LD to propose a sound theory of plausible cause and then prescribed particular treatments. We’re just not there yet and the best we have is carefully designed instructional strategies and a system for trying things out and making adjustments over time based on good performance data. In other words, carefully targeted, well-delivered, high-quality, research-based, individualized and differentiated instruction.
Karen Golembeski: Thank you. Our next question comes from one of our teachers. What should I do when children, parents or other teachers are in denial that anything is wrong? How can I get people to talk, share, and plan together?
Sheldon Horowitz: This is such an important question. If you remember I mentioned a Roper survey that was done in 2010 in an earlier podcast. What this survey revealed was that parents are prone, not all parents, but some parents are prone to waiting as long as an entire year even when they suspect that their child is struggling in school before initiating a request for help. And some educators and parents, too, even physicians are prone to say things like, “Well, let’s just wait and see how he or she develops over the next few months,” suggesting that the problems of paying attention, learning the foundational skills in reading and math, and even fitting in socially with peers might be something that the child will outgrow. My best advice is “do not wait.” And take a look at NCLD’s LD checklist, which is free to view and download from the LD.org website. Become familiar with the signs that might place a child at risk for LD beginning as early as the pre-school years and extending right up through adolescence and adulthood. And if one of the players -- either a parent or an educator or the child him or herself -- is pushing back and denying that there’s any reason for concern, my advice is not to allow everyone to step back but rather to invite discussions, meet informally to share information, define some expectations that each person might have, collect some information both screening, diagnostic information, even informal work samples, and come up with a plan for how to ensure that the child continues to make progress.
Karen Golembeski: Thank you. Our final question is an interesting one to me. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this topic. A teacher asked about the biology of learning disabilities. Please help us all gain a better understanding of the brain structure and function as it relates to learning disabilities.
Sheldon Horowitz: The brain is an incredibly complex and very vulnerable organ and there’s no question that any medical insult to the brain, any changes in the brain, can cause problems that result in compromised learning. Many decades ago scientists discovered that in some instances the brain had an almost remarkable capacity to recover from what was thought to be irreversible and even traumatic injury. So, for example, a young child who had by virtue of her having a fast-growing tumor in her brain had to have the left side of her brain removed. This child was still able to develop language. Not perfect but certainly well-developed enough to allow her to enjoy learning in school and social interactions with her peers. The brain’s ability to re-distribute functions once thought to be controlled only by one part, one hemisphere, and then have them be assumed by other parts of the brain convinced researchers that the brain was not a hard-wired control center for learning and emotion but rather a sort of living machine that was changeable, that was flexible, that was malleable, meaning that it could change and adapt to meet the demands of the day. The term that we use for this is plasticity, or recovery of function.
We also know that there are certain points in the course of development when learning seems to be easier for the brain. So, for example, during very early infancy it seems that the brain is much more likely to take in the fine distinctions needed to learn speech sounds of a particular language. And we also know that windows of opportunity for brain development open and close repeatedly throughout the course of development, sometimes as a result of just normal physical growth and maturity, sometimes because of some illness that results in changes in brain chemistry, sometimes due to disease, and sometimes just for reasons that are unexplained.
Parents and educators need the best information they can get about different types of brain-based disorders that children may have acquired for any number of causes and the kinds of teaching approaches that have been proven effective to help them grow into successful, independent learners.
The bottom line, the presumption should be that these children -- in fact, all children -- can learn. This especially true for children with complicated medical histories who have co-occurring learning disabilities.
Karen Golembeski: Dr. Horowitz, thank you so much for giving us your time today. If you’d like to learn more about learning disabilities, please access the other two podcasts in this series with the focus on Learning Disabilities Basics, and Sorting Facts from Fiction. We appreciate you joining us today. 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.
