Post#15 Learning Disabilities How a neurodivergent student’s support for learning difference is provided
Psychology may have moved on from many of Skinner’s behaviorist principles over the past many decades, but… when it comes to the running of a classroom and school, some remnants remain for discipline, routines, and skill-building in structured settings. As recently as 2021 the U.K. Education Secretary said, We know much more now about what works best: evidence-backed, traditional teacher-led lessons with children seated facing the expert at the front of the class are powerful tools for enabling a structured learning environment where everyone flourishes.[i]
Being free to self-direct from morning to night between the ages of 5 and 15 is not even encouraged in Authoritative Parenting. Yet Naomi Fischer believes children who struggle to read should not be made to learn to read until they show interest in reading. [ii] What is a teacher to make of that when she sets up her lesson plan for the day? I am not being facetious.
There is an undeniable rationale behind the choice to retain the behavioural principles: many of us have a deeply embedded respect for the need of “compulsory structured learning” in a school setting. Children are expected to manage themselves in a large group of peers, control their impulses, sit down when told, pay attention on demand, listen to what the teacher is saying, make transitions all day from subject to subject, room to room, and keep track of all that is expected.[iii] Check out “The Five Golden Rules for the Classroom” online.[iv]
As Yasik saw it when we would ask what he did that day at school: “work, work, work, play, play, work, play, work, work”.
A classroom filled with compliant students is an uncomplicated way to deliver education as the U.K. Education minister proudly affirmed: teachers teach and children learn in an efficient model relied on across the globe.[v]
I texted the high school girl two doors up to ask if any of her classrooms are traditionally arranged with rows of desks facing the teacher. She texted back to say that some are and some are not. The trope of the traditional and unyielding teacher standing before straight rows of desks and less than thrilled students in endless movies may make parents wince. Fortunately or otherwise, a quick google shows that arguments for the desks in rows facing the teacher, for some situations of classroom management, have validity.
A blogger who came into teaching determined to shake up traditional classroom management eventually bowed to some old timey ‘tried and true’ wisdom for some methods.
It turns out it’s very hard to lead direct instruction or deliver complex instructions when half of your students are sitting in groups facing the other direction…. Or have you ever tried to help a neurodivergent student focus when they are surrounded by posters and artwork covered in text and images? … Me neither, and my abundant artwork led to a neurological overload for a number of my students…Of course there are aspects of the industrial model of classroom design that need to be updated, … but some are tried-and-true… For instance, when giving a lecture, which still belongs in the modern class, the best orientation is one that is focused on the lecturer…. The audience benefits from having a direct view of the speaker, allowing them to observe body language and hear clearly.[vi]
And it is a wide spread concern. Cozy crime novelist, Ann Cleeves, even got into the debate in her 2025 novel with an argument from a character who was a principal: When you’re new to a school, or even to a class, I’ve always thought it important to go in tough. It’s possible to relax later, but it’s almost impossible to start off as if the rules don’t matter and then try to tighten up… It would be much harder trying to treat nine hundred pupils and nearly a hundred staff members as individuals. [vii]
Consequently, schools continue to apply some behaviourist principles. When a child on the class list presents with learning differences, how often is noticeable lack of focus first interpreted as … not concentrating on what a teacher wants you to concentrate on…? What is a teacher to make of that when she sets up her lesson plan for the day? I am not being facetious.
Teachers make lesson plans guided by curriculum as is the expectation of parents and the education system. An interruption in delivery has to be dealt with. When one or more children in the classroom struggle with the delivery, it is not surprising that initial reaction is to question the child. It is not a leap to the next question. How often does the question then become how can we change this child so that they fit the environment better? [viii]
As early as 1911, a psychologist, Erwin Lazar, working with students challenged by the education system, questioned the system. Instead of seeing the children in his care as flawed, broken, or sick, he believed they were suffering from neglect by a culture that had failed to provide them with teaching methods suited to their individual styles of learning… The system needs to enable through whatever means, not demand one way or the highway.[ix]
If one factor is significantly useful, it is a sympathetic and tolerant reception by the school, … Those of our children who have improved have been extended extraordinary consideration by their teachers.”[x]
Despite such early awareness, it took more decades to move from change the child to change the system. O. Ivar Lovass, a psychologist of the 1960-80s, however much he personally appreciated the learning differences of autistic children, thought at that time it was likely hopeless for advocators of the autistic to rail against the education system. Lovass suggested those (in particular for him autistic children) who did not communicate with their world in the “normal” way, would none the less have the best hope of success if they [aspired] to become “normal” – purged of all visible traces of autistic behavior (with intensive training).[xi]
And most of these efforts to help were, if not altruistic, pragmatic: to present as normal is a normal human aspiration. The question then became how do we get this child to be normal?
Today I noticed an article that said a percentage of young parents continue to spank their young children[xii]. That may make some eyes pop, but it does make it easier to accept that some continue to be determined to change or blame the child with a learning difference.
I walk a trail that offers a short cut to town. It starts just across the street from our home, wide and easily traversed. All along the trail are narrower, less accessible trails often made by deer or rabbits. Curious, I tried one that as the crow flies was parallel to the main trail. Maybe I could change up my dog walks. The trail went here and there, breaking off, ending in bogs, and generally led me in frustrated circles. Abandoning my bright idea for an exciting new trail, I had to call my husband to come along and give me an orientation point to clomp back to sanity.
Attempts to find different approaches to supporting the different has also led to exploring some equally messed up trails, some even horrifying. Check out the therapies applied in California in the 70s/80s in attempts to rescue autistic people from a life sentence in an institute because they were not coming off as normal. One behaviourist technique was strategically called ‘aversive stimuli’ in hopes of disguising its inappropriateness, verging on, if not actual, cruelty. Sometimes attempts to normalize or even to being given ‘extraordinary consideration by their teachers’ has led to some erratic ‘best practices’ pendulum swings,[xiii] even opening the door to abuse.[xiv]
This was Phil Hanley’s experience in grade one.
I sat at the back of the room and was flooded with a memory from the beginning of first grade. Mrs. Skeen collected the spelling test and saw that I got zero and I’d marked Danny Birch’s test incorrectly. She turned red, slammed her hand down on her desk, and shouted, “Phillip, you can’t do anything right.” Then she stomped across the classroom, grabbed my desk with my little body still in it, and dragged it across the room. Only the back legs of the desk and the tippy toes of my sneakers touched the linoleum floor. She slammed it down facing the back wall.
“If you turn around you’ll wish we never met,” she screamed, so close to my face that I could smell the cigarette-and-coffee combination that polluted her breath.
She then composed herself and announced to everyone: “In all my years of teaching there’s always only been two reading groups. The A word group and the B word group. But now because Phillip can’t keep up we’re going to have a third reading group just for him called the C word group.”[xv] Dave remembers similar experiences with cigarette-and-coffee breaths in his face.
I met a fellow in one of my third year Education classes at Simon Fraser University who found sufficient courage to climb over the shame heaped on him to go to university. In his grade school, he experienced a response to his difficulties similar to Phil Hanley’s.
Brian (incidentally, a first nations child in a time when that carried absolutely no cool in this Fraser Valley community) was a student of the same teacher my youngest sister sat under in grade one and two. My grade one teacher [who came with cred as the daughter of the school’s founder], saw me as a …below-average child…who … requires frequent discipline. The discipline was a whack on the head with a pointer meant to remind me that I had misspelled some word and that I was, as she said, “…not paying attention”. Soon she started using me as an example to the other children, a person whom they should not emulate. I remember my classmates avoiding me and making me feel very alone…From being an active child, I became quiet and withdrawn.[xvi] I too remember the pointer as a handy dandy extension of a teacher’s hand; I ducked faster than his hand could swing.
It took many years for Brian to climb over his experience of education in his elementary and high school years. Of those years he said, My grades remained low and the lectures at home gradually decreased as both my parents and new teachers concluded that I was simply another dull boy… I received no special attention and remember classes as being long and boring.[xvii]
Even if there seemed to be a brain difference, if a child did not speak, at least in the conventional understanding of speaking, it didn’t readily occur to researchers and therapists that there was more than one way to communicate. Temple Grandin screamed. Others spin or even destroy things. That was not seen as effective or appropriate communication and had to be changed. Teachers understood that the child must be made to speak as others did. How to make that happen? My grade one teacher, in 1955, whose smirk told me she thought she was clever, put me in a closet for roll call. I spoke too softly, being new to the class. I guess she was either a trendsetter though or a follower of the therapies of the day. In one particular example, a student who sought to communicate, but in a manner not understood as a way of communicating, was hit by teachers with rulers, and like me, was locked in a closet.[xviii]
Phil Hanley was a student in the 90s. He saw the response to his learning difference as stuck with a choice between blaming the child’s behaviour or putting it down to the child having a brain deficiency, the ‘blame or brain’ theory. Either way it’s on the child.
My teachers felt they had pinpointed the issues. They were convinced I took so long to read and write because I was lazy, which is as logical as suspecting an alcoholic drinks so much because they’re thirsty. Looking at the zero-out-of-ten spelling test results and thinking, “The boy is idle,” is as ignorant as observing a flaming car wreck and concluding, “The driver must have been parched.”[xix]
As Phil Hanley sees it even today (2025) , …the school system is not designed for us… It’s not our fault. Schools need to change. So do society’s views on people with dyslexia. I know firsthand that students’ learning problems are often overlooked or dealt with incorrectly. … until my final year of high school, the only reassurance I ever got from teachers when they found out I was dyslexic was, “Hey, Tom Cruise is dyslexic,” to which I responded, “Oh cool, well then I’ll just star in Top Gun.”
…Like drug addicts, dyslexics face a lifetime of people who will never walk a mile in their shoes but are quick to give flippant directions. To laymen, spell-check and books on tape seem to be cure-alls. These solutions are about as helpful as telling a drug addict to “Just say no.’”[xx]
Some with learning differences would agree with Hanley. Some would say, no, with time and advocacy, educators continue, as much as understanding, and available resources allow, seeking to extend acceptance and support. Barely 10 years after Lovass’ time, in the 90s and also a student of the Canadian system of the 90s, following an assessment and diagnosis, Yasik was offered a much more supportive response than Hanley. The write up of his psycho-ed assessment offered explanations, recommendations, adaptations, accommodations, though with a dash of accusation on his quarterly progress charts.
It could be argued that with the demands of the classroom and limits on resources, it was hard to entirely sift out behaviorist principles. In hopes of maintaining a normal classroom, Yasik’s early progress charts would suggest rather innocuously that Yasik merely needed to ‘try harder’ or ‘be more focused’. One of Yasik’s first progress reports added a note saying Yasik needs to stay focused (explanation) and get work done on time (recommendation) and he needs to do his own work (accusation) – not get others to do it for him (his adaptation). To help with that the teacher would no longer let him sit with his best buddy (accusation) who was helping Yasik find answers (his adaptation). Translation: Yasik needs to try harder. Still some grains of blame the child needing sifting?
As educators have sought to move beyond blaming a child, they haven’t entirely sifted through the intricacies of the support offered to the neurodivergent. Yasik was supported with ESL help, the attention of a speech pathologist, resource teacher, and classroom assistant, along with the classroom teacher. He was not always thrilled. As helpful as the intention was, it was a double-edged sword. First of all, he was taken out of the classroom for he was relieved not to be seen stumbling in class and in need of focused, individual help, more help than his buddies needed. But being taken out of the classroom tooted out that there was at the very least something different about him or any of the many with a learning difference anyway.[xxi].
Rebecca Wilcox recalls being called out of the main crowd [at Oxford] to go to my assigned seating and my supposed friends around me reeling off the litany of insults. ‘Dyslexic’, ‘thicko’, ‘Becca’s off to her special needs room’. … I tried to smile, but inside I felt like crying with embarrassment … [xxii]
Yasik and the support staff sat together on a little, worn couch in the hallway, within view of anyone on a bathroom break. He would be helped to read with lots of repetition. Structured literacy programs like Orton-Gillingham also use repetition as well as offering more time for thought processes.
Repetition is about the value of practice to strengthen reading skills. Should repetition begin to rot into mindless memorization it becomes a hollow gain.[xxiii]
One day Yasik was sitting on the little couch in the hallway reading with the school secretary – a rather imposing looking woman who seemed to be the de facto principal – certainly parents give her due, and were somewhat in awe of her. She had already tangled with Dave because she thought reading should be fun and didn’t want to over push Yasik when Dave wanted tougher stuff for him. That day, (Yasik’s version) she sent home a note saying “Yasik has been uncooperative today”. At first he didn’t want to tell Dave so Dave said “I’ll only punish you if you don’t tell me. I won’t punish you for telling me what happened”. Yasik said, “Even if it’s nasty?” Getting Dave’s assurance, Yasik continued, “She was making me read something over and over and I just didn’t want to read the same thing over and over. I didn’t say anything bad. I just didn’t read.” She thought that was fun?!?
The journal says Yasik still fought reading, saying it was boring. Maybe it was. Perhaps neither we nor the school offered enough of the kind of reading that would have drawn him in.[xxiv]
It should be noted, however that Tiffany Haddish used memorization to do quite well in high school. She laughingly boasts, …I was in AP classes (where you can get college credit in high school), while not being able to read![xxv]
But was that laughter also hollow? A documentary on dyslexia focuses on some of the difficulties a learning disabled or different child must face… some may feel that if they just memorize what others around them are saying or doing, they will be able to hide, a sure-fire way to feel an imposter. Imposter syndrome takes firmer hold when being given extra time on an exam is seen by other students as unfair. For the learning disabled student it too often becomes simply easier to suck up failure, and above all, become ashamed of their struggle.[xxvi]
Yes the pendulum has been erratic, but not only in a bad way. Yes we continue to read of ineffective, poorly administered systems and practices, but that pendulum just keeps on swinging as time moves on. Changes continue. About five years ago in our town, a math teacher became frustrated that one of his students was taking too long on her math test. He shouted at her in front of the class. Later, when he was reminded that she had an IEP allowance to take longer, he apologized for forgetting her accommodations.
Parents, therapists and educators employ IEPs, extra support systems, and increasingly seek to acknowledge and accept difference, bringing into mainstream discourse the idea of neurodivergence.
Footnotes
[i] Fisher, Naomi A Different Way to Learn: neurodiversity and self-directed education Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023, 51
[ii]Fischer, Naomi. Changing Our Minds; how children can take control of their own learning Robinson, 2021, 79
[iii] Fisher, Naomi A Different Way to Learn: neurodiversity and self-directed education Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023, 50, 187, 196, 209
[iv] https://roomtodiscover.com/desks-in-rows/
[v] Perry, Bruce, M.D., Ph.D. and Oprah Winfrey What happened to you: conversations on trauma, resilience, and healing Flatiron Books: An Oprah Book, 2021, 221-222
Silberman, Steve Neurotribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity Avery, 2016, 431
[vi] Muir, Trevor. https://www.trevormuir.com/blog/rows
[vii] Cleeves, Ann The Killing Stones Thorndike Press: Gale, a Cengage Company, 2025, 254, 255
[viii]Fisher, Naomi A Different Way to Learn: neurodiversity and self-directed education Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023, 289, 31, 32,33, 62, 63, 197
Grinker, Roy Richard Nobody’s Normal: how culture created the stigma of mental illness WW Norton, 2021, 330
[ix] Silberman, Steve Neurotribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity Avery, 2016, 84, 298
[x] Silberman, Steve Neurotribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity Avery, 2016, 218
[xi] Silberman, Steve Neurotribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity Avery, 2016, 324
[xii] Kirkey, Sharon “About 20 percent of gen Z and millennial Canadians still spank their kids. Is that even legal?”
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/spanking-laws-in-canada April 08.2026
[xiii] Saltz, Gail The Power of Different: the link between disorder and genius Flatiron Books, 2017, 22
[xiv] Silberman, Steve Neurotribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity Avery, 2016, 306-309
[xv] Hanley, Phil. Spellbound: my life as a dyslexic wordsmith Henry Holt and Company, 2025, 223, 230-231
[xvi] Goodin, Brian “Socialization via Schooling: how schooling helped me believe I was a failure” Education 240-3 Simon Fraser University, 1989
[xvii] Goodin, Brian “Socialization via Schooling: how schooling helped me believe I was a failure” Education 240-3 Simon Fraser University, 1989
[xviii] Silberman, Steve Neurotribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity Avery, 2016, 302-303, 425, 298
[xix] Hanley, Phil. Spellbound: my life as a dyslexic wordsmith Henry Holt and Company, 2025, 223
[xx] Hanley, Phil. Spellbound: my life as a dyslexic wordsmith Henry Holt and Company, 2025, 239
[xxi] Fisher, Naomi A Different Way to Learn: neurodiversity and self-directed education Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023, 40-41
[xxii] Wilcox, Rebecca Bea’s wrong: we shouldn’t wish dyslexia on anyone: As Princess Beatrice claims dyslexia is a ‘gift’, TV presenter REBECCA WILCOX says… Daily Mail; London (UK) [London (UK)]. 19 Aug 2021: 42.
[xxiii] Grok
[xxiv] Fisher, Naomi A Different Way to Learn: neurodiversity and self-directed education Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023, 54, 56
[xxv] Haddish, Tiffany The Last Black Unicorn Gallery Books, 2017, 5
[xxvi] Redford, James The Big Picture: rethinking dyslexia: the myths, the stigmas, the truths revealed docuramafilms, Cinedigma Canadian Entertainment Corp, Inc., 2013
