News, commentary, and resources about Learning Disabilities
At lunch the other day, my friend Dan and I agreed that there really had to be something to brain-based learning…as in, try learning without a brain. But, the readers of Teach Effectively! surely seem to consider brain-based learning as the most bogus of the four reform movements that are compared in the current Bogus Bowl at that site.
Dan also noted that there really has to be something to inclusion, too.
Sphere: Related ContentMississippi (US) Governor Haley Barbour and the state legislature for Mississippi appear to be at political loggerheads about education funding, according to an article entitled “Gov. Haley Barbour: Version 2.0 — Katrina still in his sights: Ongoing hurricane recovery, funding Medicaid and education gains top Barbour’s agenda” by Sid Salter of the Clarion Ledger. Mr. Salter’s article has a broader focus than education, but there are several paragraphs which caught my attention. In them, Mr. Salter reports about Gov. Barbour and Representative Cecil Brown disagree about the targets for education funding. Funding of programs for reading instruction, including programs addressing dyslexia, appear to be among the casualties in this disagreement.
Continue reading ‘MS tiff about funding’
In an article entitled “NZ ‘failing kids who struggle to learn,’” Lane Nichols of the Dominion Post reported about a critical evaluation of New Zealand schooling. It seems that NZ schools have been failing to address the problems of students with Learning Disabilities and some parents of those students have complained. Shades of Eli Tash in Milwaukee (WI, US) in the 1960s!
Continue reading ‘NZ gets started’
The Council for Learning Disabilities (CLD) has launched its revised Web site. CLD, which has been an active and affirmative force in support of Learning Disabilities for many years, sent this message to its members last week.
We are proud to announce the launch of our new website! This website was designed to provide you more information about CLD, the field of learning disabilities, and our upcoming conferences, as well as membership information. We welcome your comments and feedback on what you like about our new website, as well as letting us know of any problems you might find. Please contact us at mailto:CLDInfo||@||ie-events.com [remove the pipes surrounding the at sign] to tell us what you think!
There’s been a link in the LD Blog blog roll pretty much since the beginning of this blog. It’ll stay there, but for folks’ convenience, here’s another link that will allow you to explore the new CLD Web site.
Sphere: Related ContentThis is the lead from an editorial praising a movie the movie, “Taare Zameen Par.” The movie is generating multiple entries in my Google news searches.
Eagle’s Eye: Every child is special
Bollywood actor Aamir Khan’s directorial debut, Taare Zameen Par (TZP) focusing on the saga of a dyslexic child, possibly is one of the outstanding Hindi films produced in 2007.
Released 21 December worldwide, TZP vividly portrays the manner in which an eight-year-old boy, disinterested in studies, is humiliated and punished by all his teachers at school.At his home, too, with utter disregard to the boy’s special talent for painting, his parents pack him off to a boarding school as a disciplinary measure. The boy faces virtually living hell and yet again fares badly in studies until an exceptional art teacher (played by Aamir) ‘discovers’ the hidden talents of the child.
Later in the editorial, the author trots out the usual list of famous individuals said to have had dyslexia and raises the currently pop ideas of Professor Julie Logan from the Cass Business School in London, which we’ve discussed before on LD Blog. Sigh.
Although I have serious problems with those lapses and the intellectually challenged idea expressed in the film and the editorial title (”every child is special”), I wonder what the movie’s like. Anyone seen it? I’d like to see it.
Links:
The original editorial ;
The earlier post about Professor Logan’s research;
The official Web site for the film.
|
 |
Reading fluency
Among the fab five components of reading—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—different aspects have seemed to be in the spotlight at different times. Of course, this is just my subjective view, but it seems to me that there was disproportionate focus on comprehension in the ’80s and early ’90s, then on decoding in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Recently, it seems that everyone’s talking about fluency.
Although I think that a disproportional focus on fluency is a mistake (more on that in a later paragraph), I thought it would be beneficial to have some resources here on LD Blog about reading fluency. So, I’ve assembled a few recommended links here:
One of the reasons that we have to be careful about a disproportional emphasis on fluency is that we don’t want to communicate to learners that reading speed and accuracy, even including prosody, are all there is to reading. That is, fluency is just a means to the end of finding the ideas that the text conveys. This should be the idea of “balanced reading,” in my view. To be sure, fluent decoding is critical, but teacher have to shift the emphasis from the early stages when they are showing students how to unlock the coded material to the should-come-soon stages of comprehending the coded content.
Although it may sound like I’m playing with words, I am not. As strongly as I advocate for teaching early decoding skills efficiently and effectively, I don’t want readers to think that I consider decoding the end in itself. More on this another time… it probably deserves a page and perhaps it belongs on Teach Effectively rather than here on LD Blog.
Sphere: Related Content