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An eye-opener for teachers
SHANNON ALMQUIST got back to teaching children after working as a consultant for more than 20 years, training teachers in the United States and other countries because she says it is the most exciting and rewarding profession for her. Though it may not be what she calls a flashy job, it is an amazing experience to be able to assure parents who are in despair over children with cognitive or learning problems that they can be changed to cope with life as independent thinkers.
Shannon is in Chennai for a workshop to train teachers, organised by Alpha to Omega Learning Centre, which offers educational services for individuals with learning disabilities. More often, parents of children with Learning Disability (LD), Shannon says, try to convince themselves that things would somehow change eventually and put them in a normal school. Unable to cope, the child gets resentful and angry. At some point, when the school says that the child can't
continue there, it is too late to correct things. So it is important to recognise first that a child has problems and secondly to put him/her in an appropriate school.
So what exactly is LD? Most children, Shannon says, after two or three explanations know how to do a particular process. Children with LD are not necessarily less intelligent but have problems coping with information. It could be at the input level where for example if they look at a paragraph, they are not able to differentiate the significant words like the title or the words in bold or italics. Or, once they take in information, she says, they may have problems in not knowing what to do with it, in the way they process or make meaning out of information. And there could also be problems at the output level, when they know what they want to say but don't have the means or the vocabulary to say it. In a school system, which is based on standards, there are often lists of things, which the children are required to know. And when they don't know those on the date or at the age they are supposed to know it, teachers and parents get scared and try to correct things. But these corrective measures are often content-oriented.
As Shannon says, "What we traditionally do, is we put him or her in a smaller group and we go more slowly and speak in simpler words. We don't ask why he didn't learn it adequately. What was there about the way she processes the
learning/teaching that it doesn't stick with her. The processes we are working on now are to ask these somewhat revolutionary questions, to train the teachers in the processes necessary to make children changeable, to make them more vulnerable to learning so that as she has further educational experiences, she is changed by them.''
This involves a change in what Shannon calls teaching behaviours. Teachers will have to be much clearer about the child and about his or her needs and to impart to them appropriate thinking skills. It is easier for teachers to just tell the children what to do rather than instil in them habits, which would make them ask questions and learn by themselves. As she says, "The only way to change somebody so that the change stays permanent is to change their habits. And in the world we live in today and for children who think differently, if we are going to create in them habits they need in order to survive as thinkers, we've got to be more interactive with them.''
SUBASH JEYAN
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