Kyoto ETJ Presentation May 25th, 2008

“Classroom Trouble-Shooting: Going Beyond Simple Behavioral Issues”

by Cynthia Akazawa

Classroom Trouble-Shooting:

Going Beyond Simple Behavioral Issues

Report of Cynthia Akazawa`s speech, 05/25/08.

Gifted children and those with learning disabilities make up a small percentage within the average elementary school. However, within the eikaiwa business these children are more commonly found. This is because parents with special-needs children are motivated to seek out after-school enrichment experiences. Roughly 10% of the students at eikaiwa schools are either in the gifted spectrum or coping with a learning weakness.

Identifying gifted students and those with learning disabilities is difficult but crucial both to respond effectively to their unique needs and to reduce related behavioral and academic issues in the mainstream classroom.

Some tips for coping with these children include the following:

. Try to tailor lessons to adapt to a specific student's needs. That could mean adding layers of difficulty to a task to challenge gifted kids, or making in-class prints with larger type and fewer lines per page for a student with visual processing issues.

 

. Group gifted students according to ability and not by age, where possible (i.e. scheduling), but try to mainstream LD students in classes with specifically tailored curricular modifications. Be on the lookout for twice-exceptional students: gifted students with a learning disability that mislead teachers into underestimating their true potential.

 

. Don't diagnose students, but use knowledge of learning disabilities and gifted issues to develop a working profile for understanding each student.

Don't shy away from a student's weak area just because it is difficult. Remember that repeated exposure in critical areas can stimulate brain development so that a student actually can improve. By all means, teach reading to students with visual processing weaknesses and sound discrimination to students with auditory processing weaknesses.

.Cynthia provided a handout of important study skills that she recommended be used to educate parents so that they could be more conscious of how to instill good study patterns in their children regardless of innate ability.

Regarding Giftedness:

. A child with an IQ of 100 is considered normal, with his actual age corresponding to his

developmental age. The Japanese curriculum is designed for these children.

. Roughly 10-15 students in any given public school classroom of 40 students have an IQ of 120.

. Students with an IQ of 130 or above are classified as gifted. They make up roughly two percent of the population.

Students with an IQ of 150 are seen less frequently. Probably one of these students can be found in one grade level of three classes of 40 students in public schools. Their needs aren't met in the mainstream classroom.

Roughly three percent of students have learning disabilities. They are defined as scoring ten points below their normal IQ score in one subset of an IQ test. Children who score nine points lower on a subtest are arbitrarily classified as "normal", but their weaknesses are still apparent.

. The majority of eikaiwa students have IQs that fall between 110 & 130. Children with normal (100IQ) intelligence do not usually attend universities.

. IQ is genetic. Siblings normally score within 5-10 points of each other on IQ tests. Scores of identical twins raised separately tend to be within five points of each other.  

Observing students' younger siblings is a good way to gain insight into their abilities, as developmental milestones in babies and toddlers are the easiest to identify.

 

Cynthia distributed a handout showing the typical development of normal children and offered Internet links to more in-depth information. She also distributed a handout showing developmental guidelines for identifying gifted babies and preschoolers and a handout showing the characteristics and problems associated with gifted older students. She offered a detailed list of IQ subtests to show how these tasks are used to identify specific areas of brain function and to help teachers consider how many tasks in the ESL classroom require the use of these same skills. She warned teachers, however, to leave diagnosing disabilities to the professionals.

  Cynthia also discussed the specific needs of ADD/HD students even though the diagnosis is not classified as a learning disability. She warned that many gifted students have attention problems and that their behavior is similar to ADD/HD. But, gifted students often need to go more in-depth for longer time periods, whereas ADD/HD students need fast-paced lessons with a lot of different tasks in a short period of time. There are, of course, gifted students who also genuinely suffer from ADD/HD, so identification is complicated.

Cynthia singled out two specific areas of learning disorders as most important for English teachers to be aware of: auditory processing disorders and visual processing disorders. These were described in a detailed handout.