National day for students with learning difficulties

In the sake for enhancing teacher’s knowledge about students with learning difficulties, ”world vision” conducted a training course at “Al-Makassed” school to increase teacher’s awareness of such issue. 

It’s almost impossible to go through your teaching journey without encountering a student with learning difficulty. It may be your student, your children, your relative or someone you don’t know. It’s obvious that every student is unique, the fact that each student has his own strengths and weaknesses. For that, a teacher can’t compare students to the ideal student in the class; rather she must focus on students’ progress according to their own capabilities. 

Teachers are responsible to guide each student and help in developing the strengths and remedying the weaknesses. 

Many teachers refer to some students as being foolish and lazy, the fact that it’s not their fault sometimes being the way they are. It’s just the way that their brain works.

The teacher’s academic and humantary role is to enrich the teaching process with special techniques to help these  students cope with their learning difficulties through concentrating on the strengths of such individuals (vision, listening, feeling…), and asking about the ultimate way to attract such student and involve him.

Teacher’s main role is to create humans. It only requires some faith that we can deliver our message and we can make out good people out of ordinary ones. 

It’s not about the percentage of students who get the point. It’s about comprehensiveness. If only one student was out of track, then a problem exist. The teacher should think of other ways to involve this student.  You must not be proud only of the good student, be proud of the week one that get your point and get on the way. 

Feedback must be given according to the student situation, not in comparison with the “benchmark”.

Teachers must be aware of some properties to discover if there is any learning difficulty behind.

• Going to the bathroom repeatedly
• Talking out of turn
• getting into trouble around exams activities, or heavy periods of study
• Forgetting stuff related to school
• Cheating frequently and copying others work
• Being the class clown
•  Always having  reason why he have not completed the work
• Always being out of time
• Can’t distinguish between words
• Week analysis
• Memorization difficulty
• Difficulty in the automatic memory(he knows but forget to do..)
• Psycho-motor difficulty
• Lack of participation
• Reading problems
• Miss reading the question
• Do not understand what he read (information processing)
• Bad handwriting
• Undesired learning outcomes
• Writing phobia (hate to write)

All of these signs may indicate a learning difficulty triggered by the way the brains of such individuals work. These signs may be tricky sometimes, where a student having one or couple of these characteristics may be just a normal person affected by some psychological or sociological factors.

The role of teacher here is to diagnose the situation and try to find out a good therapy!