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Top 10 Things Teachers wish Parents would do:
- Be
Involved! Parent involvement helps students learn!
- Provide
resources at home for learning, Read with your child everyday!
- Set a good
example. Show your children by your own actions that you believe
reading is enjoyable and useful.
- Encourage
students to do their best in school.
- Value
education and seek a balance between school and activities.
- Recognize
factors that take a toll on students' classroom performance. Such as
over-involvement in after-school activities.
- Support
school rules and goals.
- Use
pressure positively.
- Call
teachers early if you think there's a problem.
- Accept your
responsibility as parents.
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Greetings to everyone this Fall season. The
Oregon Chapter of the LDA wishes to welcome you to our Fall 2006
Newsletter. We hope you will find these articles informative and useful.
Please feel free to contact us for further information and assistance.
Remember to visit our website @ www.ldaor.org for links to other
resources.
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· The Turned Off
Child by Myrna Gordon
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THE TURNED OFF CHILD By Myrna Gordon Why
are so many of our children failing to work up to their abilities in
school? What turns students off to learning at school and at home? What
is the difference between a motivated learner and a turned-off child? Are
you looking for answers as to why your child id depressed, has low
self-esteem, and fights doing his work both at home and at school? Is
your child afraid to try new things for fear of failing? Does he
disappear into a world of video/computer games or other activities where
there is success? Has your child developed self-defeating strategies and
thinks he is too stupid to learn? After many years of working with these
turned-off children, both as teachers and educational therapists, and
after looking into thirty years of research on the subject, the consensus
of opinion is that these children have what is called &ldquolearned
helplessness&rdquo. Learned helplessness is a learned behavior
&ndash a conditioned response. It is not a conscious decision not to
learn. These children have cognitive, motivational and emotional deficits
because they have experienced so much failure, or what they think of as
failure, in their young lives that they don&rsquot try. It hurts too
much to try. They have turned off because, in their minds, that is the
safest way to avoid failing. Their explanation for failure is,
&ldquoI&rsquom dumb&rdquo or &ldquoI can&rsquot do
anything right&rdquo. They feel they have no control over the
learning situation so they either run away from learning or they become
rebellious and fight with everyone who tries to help them. What causes
children to become learned-helpless and to develop this negative way of
explaining failures and setbacks? Why do they become helpless, depressed,
stressed and anxious? To find answers to these questions, we must
understand how children view their successes and failures in life. It is
not possible to cure learned helplessness by just saying positive thing
to children. We need to get them to think about their thinking and to
tell us what their negative thoughts are. Once we know that negative
things children are saying to themselves, we can try to refute them and
change their thinking, their self-talk. There are three probable ways
children develop a positive or negative way of explaining life&rsquos
events. Home and school have the greatest influence on the child. All
adults involved with children can either help or hurt their development,
whether intended and desired or not. The primary source for a
child&rsquos explanatory style is the mother (or the significant
other (in the child&rsquos life. The child forms impressions form
what she sees and hears that are the solid foundations for future
pessimism and optimism. The secondary source is other adults,
particularly those in school. When a child brings home reports and
assessments of her schoolwork, she gets a combined reaction of both home
and school: in other words, a double whammy. This applies both to
positive and negative criticism. A child believes what he hears, and
everything has either a positive or negative effect on them. This should
make us realize how potent our explanatory comments are. There is not
neutral reaction. The third influence on a child&rsquos explanatory
style is life crises. Some negative life events include moving, death,
divorce and unresolved fighting. The time to look at a child&rsquos
explanatory style is in grade school and junior high, before lifelong
habits and defenses become cast in cement. Remediation of learned
helplessness is like a three-legged stool. The first leg id developing an
adequate understanding of what learned helplessness is and what causes
it. This cannot be stressed enough, for without a thorough understanding
of the problem and its depth, not only can the problem not be remediated,
but the child may be insulated against future help. The second leg is
helping children discover the root beliefs that cause their
self-defeating strategies and the distorted perceptions these beliefs
create. If you don&rsquot eliminate the negative thinking first, it
will be like trying to put a Band-aid on the measles. To do this we teach
children to be &ldquothought detectives&rdquo, to think about
their thinking. It has to be the child&rsquos thoughts, not ours. We
like to have the child tell us about an event, her beliefs about what
occurred, and what resulted because of these beliefs. Sometimes we start
with events in our own lives and model these for the child. It is also
sometimes good to start with happy events before getting into negative
events. We have children do this over and over again until they become
very good &ldquothought detectives&rdquo. The third leg of the
stool is giving children the tools to change and refute the distorted
beliefs and thereby reduce the emotional, motivational, and learning
deficits they create. Once children have become good at looking at their
thinking, they are ready to start disputing this thinking. We want them
to argue with themselves like an attorney and to change the things they
are saying from negative to positive. We model by doing this ourselves
with negative things that happen in our own lives. We try to help the
child by suggesting alternate ways of looking at a situation. However, in
the end the child must internalize and believe that suggestions for them
to become a part of his own self-talk and be effective. Throughout
everything, we do with the learned-helpless child, we must establish and
maintain a warm trusting relationship. If the child is feeling fear it is
impossible for him to relate and think about his thinking. It is
necessary that the adult working with the child have a positive attitude.
There should be not emphasis on errors, only what is right about the
work. Children need to know how to handle mistakes in a positive manner,
and as adults we can model this behavior for them. The work need not be
perfect by our standards, but it needs to be acceptable by theirs. Every
child has something that he does well; use this as a means to work
through. Have the child teach you how to do something, letting him
role-play being the teacher. There should be no time pressures. We like
to reward positive behaviors along the way. This is not a bribe but a way
of conditioning their responses to something pleasurable rather than
punishing. One method of remediation we have found to be very effective
is giving children a different rationale for their failures. We relate
their brain to a light switch. When the light switch is off we cannot see
well. The same is true of our brain, for we cannot think well if it is
turned off. To get light we must turn on the switch, and to start the
child thinking we must turn on the switch in them. Sometimes we ask the
child to put on our adult shoes and to try to run. When the child finds it
difficult or impossible, we ask, &ldquoDoes that mean you can never
run again?&rdquo The child will answer, &ldquoIf just means the
shoes are too big.&rdquo Children sometimes have physical problems,
such as visual or hearing, which make learning difficult. They learn that
these are not excuses but differences and they learn to accept them and
then to compensate for them. The same is true of emotional and family
problems. Children need to understand and to get help in coping with
these problems. We know we have just briefly touched on some of the
aspects of remediating learned helplessness in children and eliminating
school failure. We have written a book titled The Turned-Off Child:
Learned Helplessness and School Failure, published by American Book Publishing.
This is available through Publisher Direct Bookstore at
www.pdbookstore.com. We can change the child&rsquos whole life by
turning the child on to learning. Myrna Gordon is from Beaumont CA and is
a member ODA of California. If you would like to contact her, you can
email her at gordonrm@adelphia.net, or go to the website:
www.turned-offchild.com. Source: National PTA (www.pta.org)
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Read on...www.turned-offchild.com
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·
LDA National- Pittsburgh 4 Day - Busy Conference
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Here&rsquos a peek at four of the
sessions during the 2007 LDA Conference, February 14-17 in Pittsburgh On
Wednesday afternoon the Keynote Address will be made by Dr. Naomi Zigmond
of the University of Pittsburgh, who is widely known for her practical
research on the effectiveness of services for students with learning
disabilities. The title of her speech, &ldquoThe Special Education
Teacher in the Twenty-First Century: A Call for Unconventional
Thinking,&rdquo reflects her view that the pressures of high-stakes
accountability assessments not only puts pressure on students, families,
and teachers, but calls for a re-examination of the qualifications,
roles, and responsibilities of the special education teacher who words
with students with learning disabilities. What changes in special
education will Dr. Zigmond suggest and why? Dr. Herbert Needleman, who
will address a General Session of the Conference on Thursday morning, is
an internationally known researcher and expert on the effects of exposure
to lead in common products such as paints and gasoline. His studies and
his persistent advocacy to reduce lead hazards have drawn national and
international attention to the dangers of lead in the environment and
that resulted in a five-fold reduction of lead poisoning in American
children. In research with children and adults at the University of
Pittsburgh Medical Center, he has shown that lead exposure can have
developmental implications. It increases the risk of reading
disabilities, high school drop-out rates, juvenile delinquency, and adult
criminal behavior, even when there are no outward signs of lead
poisoning. How can Dr. Needleman&rsquos research findings and
successful advocacy help LDA move forward as advocates for those with
learning disabilities? In the Friday morning General Session, Dr. Perry
Zirkel, will bring his legal expertise to the LDA Conference. A Professor
at Lehigh University, Dr. Zirkel has published more than 1,000 papers and
writes a regular column in Phi Delta Kappa on special education law. His
most recent book is the The Legal Meaning of Specific Learning Disability
for Special Education Eligibility. With the passage of IDEA 04, policy
letters and the expected upcoming release of the regulations, states and
districts will be deciding what role discrepancy and a process that
determines response to scientific, research-based intervention will play
in Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) identification. There will also
be changes in teacher training, instructional materials, and
general/special education collaboration. What does existing case law
suggest about SLD identification and classification and how might they
relate to Section 504 and American Disabilities Act? The Friday evening
Awards Banquet will feature Mr. Kevin McClatchy, Chief Executive Officer
and part owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team. Mr. McClatchy,
who struggled with reading and learning disabilities, has become a highly
successful newspaper publisher with more than 30 daily newspapers that
reach more than 3 million readers. He will not only share his experiences
with dyslexia, but also give us an informal perspective about his road to
success in spite of barriers that, at times, seemed overwhelming. How can
sharing in Kevin McClatchy&rsquos success story help LDA foster
greater success in individuals of all ages with learning disabilities?
Please look for you conference brochure in the mail or call the national
office at 412-341-1515 for more information.
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Read on...www.ldaamerica.org
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