Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Getting an IEP for dyslexia for a "good reader"?

Oops - and a few (blush) more thoughts on some of your other questions:


I would imagine the more time you can give them to discuss and prepare, the better, especially if you hope to re-write an IEP and set up remediation, not just get some accommodations in the classroom. They may need some time to think about your arguments and come to appreciate your concerns. This probably won't be solved in one meeting....


For us, teacher knowledge has been crucial, even if (especially if?) remediation is coming from elsewhere (we've had to do all ours at home). For us, the individual teacher has been everything, and both kids have changed schools as well as programs in order to match with specific teachers who "got" them. We've found two major issues: First, we've had wonderful, kind, well-meaning teachers who very much want to do the right thing - but just don't have a clue. With no real understanding of the effects of a specific LD, they constantly set expectations the child can't possibly meet - but dang it, is that child trying! But that's not what the teacher sees - they see this bright kid, and are convinced that they are so capable, surely they could do this thing if they just. tried. harder. And in consequence, the teacher does daily damage to the child, who actually. just. can't. Inadvertent, yes - but the damage is real.

For instance, DD's grade 3 teacher (when DD was first diagnosed dyslexic/ ADHD) seemed to be able to grasp that she had writing issues in language arts classes - and yet continually docked points on math for not explaining the problem in full sentences. She just couldn't make the connection. Same with docking points for spelling. The teacher was always pushing DD to do more reading and writing - but DD didn't have the needed skills and her teacher didn't know what was missing and wasn't teaching those skills, so DD just couldn't do it. The teacher just kept assuming that more practice would solve the problem - but more of the same work, without remediation, is deadly. Similarly, she kept focusing on getting DD to work on sight words, even while we were trying to explain that sight words were the problem, not the solution: i.e. DD needed to shift from her work-around to actual decoding if she was ever going to automate. Every day was lots of stuff like that - little disconnects in teacher expectations that added up to DD's continual feeling of failure and a huge amount of anxiety. When DD moved in grade 4 to a school where the teacher had a lot of experience with kids with LD, the teacher was able to do things like directly, explicitly and systematically teach the needed comprehension, analysis and writing skills; work on spelling but ignore it in all other work; and encourage writing while not letting output limitations be a barrier to learning in all other topics, whether math or history. Setting expectations at the right level for each task, and understanding and addressing the key skills gaps, were both huge for DD.

The second big challenge we find is the sheer unbelievable unevenness of our kids. Teachers really can't cope with the strange mixture of strengths and weaknesses, and especially the way both are in play at the same time, in the same task. Classes and teachers are really built to deal with kids who are fairly consistent in their abilities. This problem has escalated dramatically in recent years for my two (now in grades 6 and 8). When you add in attention issues, argh. It is so hard for the child to stick with an unmotivating task - and then you add in the LDs, which are unbelievably demotivating. It takes a really engaging teacher with appropriately exciting and challenging material to keep a child like this working through the pain of the mechanics. Few teachers can grasp that a child who is struggling needs actually more complex material in order to do well.

This matters even more for my DS, who is a much greater outlier in all directions than his sister. For mathaholic DS, the easier the math, the more basic errors he makes. The harder the math, the less impact fluency, retrieval and especially attention and handwriting issues have. (Note: This is why you want your HG child to stay skipped/ in harder classes.) Teachers have fought it like crazy, but when it's been put to the test, all have admitted - reluctantly - that for all DS's problems, he does better work and gets better grades when the work is much harder, and taking him out of his gifted program would make things worse, not better. School staff who have not directly taught him find this a crazy idea.

So for us, it's been critical to have teachers who get LD and understand the need to support and have appropriate expectations around weak mechanics and output. It's also critical to have teachers who can deal with the extremes at both ends, simultaneously. (This is the really hard part, and we haven't yet achieved it for DD.) In your case, do you go for the teacher with spec ed experience? That depends. Does their experience include LDs? Because in our district, spec ed usually doesn't. Interestingly, the two most fabulous teachers DS has had were both men, and both dyslexic. Even though it's my DD who is actually dyslexic/ dysgraphic (DS has myriad other issues but not dyslexia), what these two teachers brought was a fundamental understanding that reading and writing aren't "natural" and automatic. They are hard, and writing needs to be explicitly and systematically taught. As a gross generalization, I have found surprisingly frequently that women go into teaching because reading and reading are super easy - and the men I have met go into teaching because reading and writing are hard. So my best recommendation - if you possibly can, find someone for whom these things came hard.

Final thought on teachers: DS had many lovely teachers in primary, who he liked and vice-versa, and who worked hard on his behalf. To all of them, however, he was a problem to be fixed, and a challenge to get him to function and do things the way everybody else did - the way THEY did. A frustrating and ultimately fruitless endeavour with this highly divergent thinker whose pattern of strengths and weaknesses is diametrically opposite to most teachers. The first of those two dyslexic male teachers (grade 5) was life-changing: he saw DS not as a problem to be fixed, but as a phenomenon to be enjoyed. His goal was how to harness those strengths and passions and enable DS to deal with his weaknesses, rather than squash his strengths and his unusual approaches and fit DS into the same box as all the others. I don't know how to identify such a teacher in advance, but I have seen that DS can really like a lot of teachers that still were not at all what he needed. Major efforts to address his weaknesses did not help him until they were driven by a focus on his strengths. And for DS, that took teachers who unlike the vast majority, could both enjoy his math strengths, and empathize with his writing and executive function weaknesses.