by Mary Grundy

Created on: May 13, 2007   Last Updated: May 16, 2007

As a former adult educator and current special education teacher, I have a general understanding of adult learning disabilities from a teacher's perspective. What I have mostly seen are two types of adult student with learning difficulties.

The first is someone who is very familiar with his or her condition and knows what accommodations work best. This person will have been tested regularly as a child and given a specific diagnosis. He will have had a lot of extra support in school and will be familiar with the ways his brain works. Listen to this student, and you will learn a lot about what it's like to learn with this disability and how to potentially help others. Be open to his suggestions, but also be confident to offer strategies that you have seen work for others. Sometimes, this sort of learner may need some help seeing himself beyond his label. Don't let this define him in your eyes or his.

The other type of student is someone who struggles with formal learning and doesn't know why. He may have spent his school years being told he was stupid, thick, slow, or worse, retarded, and by now he'll believe these things about himself. Particularly if the student is older, he will not be familiar with learning disabilities or what a diagnosis means. Getting that diagnosis can be the key to future success. Knowing that it "wasn't his fault" can be the biggest factor in letting go of past school failure. In fact the failure was the school's, not the student's.

Learning disabilities are greatly discussed in modern education, yet still remain greatly misunderstood. A person with a learning disability processes information differently than someone who does not. This is not a lack of intelligence. Learning disabilities can co-exist with developmental delays, but are not in themselves limits of cognitive ability. A brain with a learning disability is not damaged; it just works differently, so it must be taught differently.

Educators must consider how they are teaching and assessing all students. Each student can learn and demonstrate his learning, but he may need to do so in a different way than the rest of the class. Educators must be open to trying different methods of information inputting, using visual, auditory, and kinesthetic methods. This will accommodate any processing problems in these areas without setting particular students up as "different." A variety of assessment methods, such as presentations, role plays, oral exams, videos, or whatever creativity suggests, must be allowed. Many people fall into the thinking that alternative assessments are forms of cheating. It is cheating students not to give them the opportunity to perform their best. Adults in particular with a history of poor school performance deserve this chance. Given this, amazing things happen.

One could take years of university courses and still not fully understand learning disabilities. Much is still being discovered, disproved, and discredited. The best an educator can do is to keep an open mind and constantly adapt methods to suit whoever is on the other side of the desk regardless of labels.

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