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Teachers assume the responsibility for teaching each student in their classrooms. This has become extremely challenging in recent years because of the increasing number of students with special needs. This increase in special needs students can be attributed to many factors: increased awareness of a wider range of special needs, improvement in identification procedures, and development of medical technology that allows children to survive traumatic prenatal and postnatal experiences. However while the medical community and students of social trends can be concerned about why this increase has occurred, educators do not have the luxury of time for research — nor do we feel that finding this answer will make our task any easier. Each day we enter the classroom and find these students ready to learn. Our immediate task is to determine which strategies will help them succeed, not only in our classrooms but also in the environment in which they will live. Although this can seem like a daunting task, regular classroom teachers can easily acquire the tools to help students with special needs. It requires an open mind, an understanding of what learning disabilities really are, and a willingness to accept the challenge of teaching students who have them

Special education is regular education

Our educational training programs make an unfortunate distinction between regular educators and special educators. This distinction not only leads to the belief that there is some magical formula or skill that only the special educator possesses, but it also contributes to classroom teachers’ feelings of being inadequately skilled to teach special-needs students. While educators who have trained to work with students with special needs have studied extensively and possess many skills for special-needs instruction, the lessons they have learned actually originated with regular education teachers. Until the mid-1970s, there were few special programs in public schools for students with special learning needs and, therefore, few special education teachers. Students with special learning needs had limited choices. They might be placed in institutional settings outside the public school setting; they might drop out of school; parents might provide private tutoring to support the student through school. A lucky student might find a dedicated teacher who was determined to teach him or her. It is from these dedicated regular education teachers that the roots of special education training began. Yet it is not unusual for a regular education teacher to state that he or she feels inadequately trained to work with students with special needs.

Initially, special education programs were oriented towards meeting the needs of students with more obvious learning difficulties — the mentally disabled, emotionally disabled, visually impaired, hearing impaired, and physically impaired. Eventually we began to recognize that there were students with more invisible handicaps, later called learning disabilities. Much of the increase in numbers of students with special needs is due to the recognition of learning disabilities. Although we identify learning-disabled students with one label, this is an eclectic group of students and there is no one solution to meeting their needs. Successful teachers of students with learning disabilities find that they must have an extensive repertoire of strategies.

There are two primary characteristics of teachers who are successful in teaching learning disabled students, regardless of whether they are regular education teachers or special education teachers. First, teachers must have an accurate understanding of learning disabilities and be open-minded in accepting and understanding a diagnosis of learning disabilities. Too frequently there is a misunderstanding that if a student is delayed in an area of skill development, he or she must be learning disabled. Learning disabilities are defined by the presence of both a discrepancy between ability and achievement and a processing disorder. The skill deficit is a manifestation of the processing disorder. Understanding and accepting a diagnosis of learning disabilities is complicated by inconsistencies in learning and performance. A student might master a difficult task while struggling with a simple task, or master a task one day and not be able to perform the same task at a later time. This may lead a teacher to label the student as lazy or feel that the student is being manipulative rather than consider the possibility of a processing disorder that interferes with his or her mastery of the task.

Second, teachers must readily accept the challenge to help learning disabled students succeed. To accomplish this, teachers must be willing to question their own teaching styles and techniques, be willing to attempt different strategies, and be creative in developing new strategies. By systematic trial and error, teachers will generally find a strategy that will help each student to gain some amount of success in the classroom. When students see a teacher putting forth this extra effort, they will generally also increase their own effort.

Understanding learning disabilities

Learning is a complex task that we will never fully understand. When a student is having difficulty learning a particular task, it is important for you to clearly identify the expected outcome for the task. If you expect the student to know how to calculate interest, it does not matter if he knows the multiplication facts or how to multiply decimals, since those are not the tasks you are trying to teach. The student should not be hindered from learning this process or demonstrating that knowledge just because he struggles with simple calculations. Similarly, if a student can demonstrate the desired learning outcome verbally or through active demonstration, he should not be limited to expressing this knowledge in written form. Once you have identified your goal, you can analyze the skills required for the task and determine what is contributing to the student’s difficulty. You may find that it is not the task itself that is causing the difficulty but the method of input or output of information. It is always relatively easy to modify your requirements for acquisition or expression of information, since those are more observable learning activities.

The "internal step" of integration of information is much more difficult to assess and modify. In order to determine what the deficit skills are as well as which strategies might be successful, you must understand what processing skills are and how they contribute to the outcome of learning. The skills that are required for the acquisition, integration, and expression of learning are referred to as processing skills. These include organization, memory, sequencing, discrimination, perception, attention, and speed. Each of these skills is also affected by the student’s strengths and weaknesses within the modalities — auditory, visual, tactile, and kinesthetic. Ideally, it would be convenient if all of our modalities functioned equally well in all processing skills, but, realistically, this does not happen. You might find that a student has a very strong visual memory but that his or her auditory memory is deficient, or you may find that all skills in the visual area are strong while all skills in the auditory area are weak. Your knowledge of the student’s strengths and weaknesses will guide you in choosing appropriate strategies.

The manifestation of a deficit — for example, poor spelling — is not a clear indicator of the processing deficit. A student who exhibits spelling difficulties could have one of several types of deficits:

• a deficit in auditory discrimination, an inability to hear the differentiation of the sounds
• a deficit in auditory memory, an inability to remember the sound-symbol relationships
• a deficit in auditory sequencing, an inability to blend sounds together
• a deficit in visual memory, an inability to remember letter formation or which letters are in a word
• a deficit in visual motor skills, an inability to correctly form letters

To find out what the deficit is, you should ask if the student can recognize the correct spelling among several choices, whether she can verbally spell the words even though she cannot write the letters, and whether she can learn the words for a spelling test but cannot remember them over a longer term.

A student who has poor handwriting, similarly, may be impulsive and is therefore not taking the time to complete the task; he may have fine motor difficulties such that it is difficult for him to control the small muscle movements and produce legible handwriting, motor sequencing difficulties such that he does not automatically remember the sequence of the small motor movements for handwriting, or visual spatial difficulties such that spacing and letter size are incorrect or reversals and/or inversions are problematic; or he may simply use poor handwriting to camouflage another deficit, such as weak spelling or poor memory for letter formation. A student who consistently completes multi-step calculations inaccurately may have a poor working memory, which means that though she can memorize isolated facts or procedures, she has difficulty holding one bit of information in reserve while working with another bit of information. A student who cannot follow directions accurately may have difficulties with speed in processing auditory information such that she cannot process at the speed at which information is presented, auditory sequencing difficulties such that she confuses the order or the directions, auditory memory difficulties such that she cannot remember the directions, or auditory processing deficits such that she has difficulty with the interpretation of verbally presented material

Rely on the student’s strengths

Once you identify the processing deficit, you will still need to determine a strategy to use to help the student overcome it. The student’s developmental level, background of learning experience, intellectual abilities, and pattern of strengths and weaknesses in processing skills and modalities will all affect the success of any strategies you try. Always try to use strategies that rely on a student’s strengths. For example, if the task required is to memorize multiplication facts for four, and the student has poor visual memory skills but has strong auditory sequencing skills, you would not ask him to use flash cards to memorize the facts. Instead, you might teach him to count by fours using an auditory drill technique. Because sequencing skills are a strength, backward chaining as an auditory drill technique would be a good choice. If a student had strong musical or rhythmic skills, you might incorporate these into the auditory drill technique.

Many teachers wish for a list of prescriptions for working with learning-disabled students. Because of the diversity of this group of students, it is impossible to provide such an extensive list that would address all situations. But by approaching the challenge of a learning-disabled student with an accurate understanding of the learning process and an enthusiastic attitude, you will find yourself developing new strategies, sharing your ideas with colleagues, and borrowing ideas from others. Eventually, you will see your "bag of tricks" growing.