Learning Disorder

Learning Disorder
Order Description
You are to respond to your peers by evaluating their proposals and highlight their proposal’s biggest strength and biggest weakness. Offer one suggestion on how to improve the weakness you noted. You are to respond to each discussion your thoughts on what you understand from each discussion. Please respond with two paragraphs for each discussion but keep each response separate.

RYAN DISCUSSION
A teacher encountering a child with a specific learning disability (SLD) is more common than many may realize. Per the Learning Disabilities Association of American (2016), about five percent of all public-school students have some form of specific learning disability (LDA, 2016). The reason these statistics may be so high is due to the number of different types of disabilities that a child can be afflicted with. Some SLD include: auditory procession disorder (impeded sound to brain interpretation), dysgraphia (handwriting deficits), dyscalculia (number deficits), dyslexia (reading deficits) and language processing disorder, in which the child has difficulty attaching meaning to sound (LDA, 2016).
Given the number of areas of cognition that can be affected the educational system is tasked with developing curriculum to meet the needs of varying degrees of difficulty. There have long been inconsistencies in the development of educational standards. It is difficult to implement standards when there are conflicting opinions on the best possible practices for children with SLD. The common debate is should children with SLD be in regular classes or special education classes. Chalfant (1989) examined the Regular Education Initiative, which incorporated the idea of mainstreaming children with SLD in regular classrooms. However, it is suggested that mainstreaming places enormous responsibility on a teacher who may not be trained in the needs of all SLD. This initiative is also criticized for placing the ultimate blame of continued struggles on the educator.
Fore (2008) and his team examined the idea of either inclusive or non-inclusive. This approach also yielded inconclusive results. The authors noted “the results of their study revealed no statistically significant evidence to suggest that students’ academic achievement varied based on inclusive versus non-inclusive placement” (Fore et al., 2008, p. 55).
Instead of having children attend different classes or overwhelming one teacher, a standard that could be considered is co-teaching.A co-teaching team typically includes a general and a special educator who teaches the general education curriculum to all students, as well as develop IEP’s for the kids with SLD. Lawton (1999) suggest that in co-teaching classrooms the teachers obtain personal and professional support, while the students gain the attention of a second teacher. It is also suggested that having a special education teacher in a regular classroom might help identify children who have yet to be diagnosed with an SLD. One of the difficulties in implementing this approach is monetary availibility. An option to this obstacle would be to seek Block Grants for additional funding.

SHAKIRA DISCUSSION
Learning disabilities can take on many different forms early in childhood development. One of the more common disabilities is dyslexia. While there are many people who live day to day with dyslexia as an adult. When children are first diagnosed with it, it can be overwhelming to come to terms with. Dyslexia is considered a learning disability that involves difficulty identifying speech sounds. (Singer, 2016). This is one of those disorders were the earlier you identify the disability the better chance the child has at overcoming it. Dyslexia is much more common than must people think, about 1 in 5 students have a difficult time with reading. (Singer, 2016) Some of the difficulties that are associated with dyslexia go well beyond reading. Spelling difficulties and visualizing letters in reverse are very common symptoms with this disorder. If not identified early enough this disability can manifest itself in different ways. Children may become uninterested in school work. And even take on another disorder such as oppositional defiant disorder. This is where children become purposely disruptive simply because they don’t understand the work. When it comes to treatment early diagnosis is very important to correcting the issue. Once a child is diagnosis with dyslexia an Individual Education Plan (IEP) are given to special education teachers that allow them to tailor supplemental instruction to the child. (Ryan, 2015) While the school currently has resources such as therapy sessions that can be given on school grounds private tutoring sessions with a reading specialist can also help a child their reading skills.
Another method of treatment that can be used in school is kinesthetic imprinting, this is when a child learns to read by telling the teacher a story, then the teacher writes it down. Next, each word that the child can’t recognize is written down by the teacher. The child then traces the letters until they can say the word without using this process. (Ryan, 2015) For the most part the resources to help students with dyslexia depends on the special education program within each school district. Being able to help children with this type of problem shouldn’t be stretch of the dollars.