Free Essay: Education Issues for Children with Learning Disabilities

Parents look forward to the growth and success of their children. However, it is unfortunate when children are born with disabilities, or they develop disabilities after birth. As a result, it is a challenging experience when educating these children and taking them to school. Most education systems around the world were made for normal individual and very few teachers, and parent knew how to deal with children with disabilities. The education system did not cater for individual differences and needs. Teachers had to develop different classwork organisation to cater for such children. Children who are especially vulnerable to encountering trouble include children of poverty, non-native speakers and those with attention deficits (Garnett).

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Children with disabilities are susceptible to the chronic risk of encountering trouble under various disadvantageous conditions, for long-term social problems, academic and side-effects during their classroom experiences. The classroom can have a negative influence on students with learning disabilities if they are crowded, busy, among other factors. For instance, if a class is crowded, it will be difficult for the teacher to give undivided attention to such a child. Children with disabilities have a short attention span as compared to normal children. Moreover, if the class is busy in terms of fast interaction and communication, a child with a disability may get confused; refrain from asking questions and get distracted.

In addition to that, children with disability barely operate with the normal flow of time. In spite of the time pressure, much of the childs time is spent waiting or being interrupted. This type of schedule requires a transition from one period to another. Such circumstances interfere with a students orientation in time and space. Once a child loses their coordination in time and space, he/she is unable to maintain a consistent stream of thoughts. Another issue could be the fact that classrooms are public arenas. This public spotlight can cause the childs failure and make them feel less worthy as compared to other children. A child with a disability may view the experiences in the spotlight of public attention as shame, even though those around them have no intent of making them feel discouraged. This perception determines a childs behaviour while anything he senses intended to help him learn. As a result, the child may avoid exposure habitually; hence losing the confidence to try.

Children with disability require privacy with teachers to avoid the feeling of intimidation. For teachers, classrooms are private domains, and they do not allow time for observation by another adult in order to monitor the childs progress. The privacy of a classroom limits observation of what can be seen on what's going on. An adult, seeing from various angles, might notice that a child could have extraordinary powers of concentration, except during reading and spelling. Therefore, more involvement is required in order to notice when the child has attention deficits and behaviour problems (Garnett).

In a class setting, the teacher is usually talking for most of the time. Teachers talk predominates in classrooms, especially during times of intentional teaching. To comprehend and retain information, children with attention disorders need to, rehearsing, talk a lot, verbalizing and formulating the steps of study tasks. They need to express themselves and learn practically. Moreover, they require tuition to achieve this. Instructions in a classroom are given to the whole class in a normal setting. This may appear to be overwhelming for a child with a disability. For a special child, a conversation should be maintained lest they are left in the dark of group-focused lessons and semi-supervised seatwork.

In addition, the normal class setting is sometimes focussed on a lot of activities. The main focus of instructions is largely at the activity level. The teacher has to express satisfaction when the child is correct and award them with marks. This makes the children happy. When the teacher focuses on the activity flow, it is not evident that a child with ADHD is mentally present hence they do not learn much of anything. He is terrific at engaging in an aspect of an activity that doesn't push his edges. Notably, Jose loves copying (Garnett).

More to that, progress is constantly monitored be the teacher. Checking in on students' performance is frequent, but uneven; probing individual students' understanding, providing instructive feedback or monitoring individual progress is rare. It is crucial that the teacher should give a special child correction as he/she practices reading words. Moreover, the teacher should keep weekly track of his/her word reading progress. Because advancement is slow and in smaller than common steps, both the child and the teacher need to see the progress that they are making together. These keeps both of them motivated and encouraged to keep on pushing forward.

In conclusion, these special students need to get the adequate attention that is not available in most general education classrooms as they are currently constituted. Common features of classes are at odds with the kinds of interchanges, activities, and consistency that the learning demands. Even though it is possible to reshape classrooms to respond more efficiently to children with attention disabilities, there are many barriers to change.

Works Cited

Garnett, Kate. 'What Are Classrooms Like For Students With Learning Disabilities? | LD Topics | LD Online'. Ldonline.org. N.P., 2015. Web. 17 Oct. 2015.