A student’s success leads to further success.
I meet the student where they are and work to engage them. I give them as much support as they need and recognize that there is an emotional component for both parents and students. I am a parent of a child with learning differences and I clearly recall the arduous search for new information as I attempted to identify long-term solutions to help my child.
I also understand how difficult it is for a child to see their classmates’ seemingly effortlessly accelerate past them no matter how hard they try. It is understandable that many of them interpret this to mean they are not as smart, or as capable, and that success is beyond their reach. Not only is this untrue, but often this kind of thinking and self-doubt will undermine a child’s self-confidence across the board. This kind of thinking is one of the first things I work to change in my students.
I set my students up to insure their success, dropping the support gradually as it is no longer need. When they see their improvement and their confidence grows, their progress becomes more rapid, each success leading to further success.
Multi-Sensory Teaching of basic language skills.
When someone is referring to multi-sensory instruction they are talking about using at least two of the different pathways for learning (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic/tactile). We use all of them, but for each individual some are stronger than others. By using all of them, the stronger ones support and strengthen the weaker ones. For example, when introducing a speech sound there is the sound itself, the visual symbol for that sound, and the physical production of the sound. The production of some sounds use vocal cords, while some come out your nose. We examine the position of the tongue, lips, and teeth to create each sound. For many of these students their strongest pathway is kinesthetic and that is often left out of reading instruction.
Using all the pathways, especially the kinesthetic, leaves more of a residue on memory. Memory is complex. And though a child might have great recall for events or a much-loved story, the memory for written language can often be very different. Short term and working memory have limited capacity for holding information and that will not change. However, we can organize the information more efficiently. To have information move to long-term memory there needs to be enough practice, and how much practice varies with each individual student. In addition to the physical aspects of language production, there is the physical structural patterns in English which are broken down and explored. We look at individual sounds, syllables, affixes, and Latin and Greek roots.
All the while vocabulary development, exploration of multiple meanings, contextual clues, dictionary definitions and synonyms are part of every lesson.