The Elementary School Counselor’s Guide to Supporting Students with Learning Disabilities

A Comprehensive Program

Mati Sicherer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000163339
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

This unique book informs elementary school counselor practice in a positive way that changes the lives of students with learning disabilities by helping to engage them in their learning in an effective and concrete manner.

Through a comprehensive lens, this book gives elementary school counselors the tools they need to work with students with learning disabilities in a school setting, starting with an overview of learning disabilities as they apply to the role of the elementary school counselor. The second part of the book then explores these topics in depth with a step-by-step program for creating counselor-led groups for elementary school students with learning disabilities. The 6-to-8-week plan outlines how elementary school counselors can create and implement the program in their own schools and is accompanied by worksheets and handouts to help engage students.

Exceptionally beneficial for elementary school counselors and graduate students in school counseling programs, it is a guide book for counselors working with elementary school students with learning disabilities.

1 Introduction

Why This Book?

In 2004, I was hired to work as a school counselor in a small kindergarten-to-fifth-grade elementary school in a suburb near New York City. The suburb was eclectic and bordered on one side by a narrow river. On one end, million-dollar homes sat on hilltops overlooking the New York City skyline. On the other end, closer to the river, bad drainage, lowlands and the swollen river after too much rain caused regular flooding in the trailer park and small houses that made up that side of town. The children who attended my school all came from the side of town near the river.

More than once did the people who lived near that river have to be evacuated, sometimes even by boat, and more than once did we have to send out flyers reminding parents that floodwaters were not safe to play in. The waters, which would have been contaminated by septic waste garbage, had the potential to cause serious illness, but since so many of my students’ families were recent immigrants with minimal ability to read, speak or understand English, many times, the flyers went unheeded. My students came from places such as India, Syria, Turkey, Albania, Russia, China, Korea, Thailand, Mexico, El Salvador and spoke languages such as Arabic, Polish, Spanish, Albanian, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Circassian, Turkish and more. Others had roots in the United States that went as far back as the Mayflower. As the only counselor in the school, I was quickly thrown into the cultural mixed bag that was my school and I loved every minute. I loved the kids and I loved their families and I loved the staff and I thought that I was actually doing a pretty good job. I ran groups, I consulted with teachers, I met with parents, I ran workshops – I felt like I had a great handle on this very challenging and stimulating job and I loved every minute.

At the same time that I was beginning my journey in elementary school, my youngest children were beginning their own as well. Cass and Sydnee, my five-year-old twins, were just starting first grade. They had been in preschool since they were three and had attended kindergarten in the same building that they were to be attending first grade so they were already very familiar with school. They were bright and bubbly little girls who filled up with excitement about almost anything. They blazed with enthusiasm when we went to museums or zoos or even just to the park. For them, the world was filled with things to find and see and learn about. They asked so many questions about so many things that I found that I had no choice but to learn about them myself. After all, how could I could give them the knowledge about the world around them that they seemed to crave so much unless I knew the answers to the questions they were asking. And, oh boy, did they ever ask questions! “Mommy, why do the ants march in a straight line?” “Mommy, why does this bug curl up when I touch it?” “Mommy, why does the sun have to disappear at night?” “Mommy, why do we speak one language but other people speak a different one?” Their need for knowledge knew no bounds and I did my best to learn as much as I could to answer whatever answerable questions they had. They drank all of it in and remembered all of it. Strangers would often comment on my inquisitive and bright little girls and it would make me happy to see that their bright lights of knowledge were not just because I was looking at them through “mom colored glasses.” At the same time though, I was also extremely concerned about them. Despite how bright I knew they both were, neither of them had shown any signs of the prereading skills that my other children had shown at this age. They did not recognize letters or numbers with consistency, and they grew easily frustrated when confronted with new learning demands. I had already approached both their preschool and kindergarten teachers and been told by all of them that they just needed some extra time. I argued with them all incessantly. How could they need extra time when they were so able to learn so much in so many other ways? How could they need extra time when I could see that there was something wrong? I was not convinced. I was an educator and a seasoned parent. My three older children had learned to read early and were already excelling academically. My babies, however, could not even spell their own names as they were entering kindergarten. Platitudes such as “everyone gets there at their own pace” or “it’s not a race” made me crazy. I was well aware of the vast range that is considered normal for literacy skills, but I was also well aware of the fact that there was no reason why my daughters did not even have preliteracy skills at this point. They were inquisitive and bright and could synthesize verbal information better than many, much older children. We were also a family that read together all the time, which I knew was a great precursor to those early literacy skills.

Books were as much a part of our lives as breathing was. At the very least, my daughters should have been able to identify even just a few letters. They should have been able to point at an apple and say, even if they didn’t understand what they were saying, “A is for apple.” But they couldn’t. They not only couldn’t identify letters but they had also started running away from anything that had to do with learning to read or count. They were starting to become “discipline problems” at story time. They would cause a commotion or refuse to come sit with the group and I knew, despite the “experts” around me telling me not to worry, that there was, indeed, something to worry about.

By the middle of my daughters’ first-grade year, I had expressed enough concern to finally have them evaluated by the child study team. At first, the team was resistant to doing an evaluation. At that time, the school district where we lived was using a discrepancy model as their primary tool for classification. This meant that there had to be a “significant” discrepancy between their ability and their output. A student, in the early grades, would have to have a significant deficit in order to be eligible for special education, and they suggested that we table the evaluation for a year. If my daughters did have a learning disability, they said, the discrepancy would get wider in second grade and this would show in the testing, whereas if we did it now, there would most likely not be enough of a discrepancy to allow for services. I nodded vigorously and agreed with the study team. Yes, another year would widen the gap. They were right about that. But who would want that? A wider gap might mean that my daughters would be eligible for special education but to what end? How much farther behind would they be after another year? How much harder would it be to help them catch up then? I pointed out research that indicated that the earlier children are identified and served through special education, the more likely it is that they would be able to read at a normal grade level later down the road (Abreu-Ellis, Ellis, & Hayes, 2009). I also pointed out that based on a response-to-intervention model (which was supposed to have been the primary model for eligibility, even at that time), it would have clearly earmarked them for services since they had not had any significant academic growth since kindergarten. I must have argued my case well enough because the team decided to go ahead with the testing. Even without a response-to-intervention model, the testing proved that my daughters were clearly eligible for special education services. It may have been a surprise to the team but it was no surprise to me when the evaluation revealed that my daughters had significant reading, writing and mathematics deficits. My daughters were classified under the “specific learning disability” category and were placed into an out-of-class replacement program (which our district called “resource room”) for much of their day. They were there for math and for reading, but they returned to their general education placement for everything else. What this meant in practice was that for reading and math time, teachers were able to teach my daughters at the pace they required in order to fill in those missing pieces. For everything else however, they were back in the general education classroom where, even with modifications and accommodations, they were still taught at the same pace and in the same manner as their peers.

This mix of special and general education was supposed to make my daughters feel included while still giving them the education they required in order to learn. Yes, my daughters got taught at a different pace and with different modalities in the resource room, and yes, they had multiple modifications and accommodations for all of their general education subject areas, but something was still very wrong. Before they were classified, they were angry and frustrated because they wanted so much to learn just like all the other children and could not seem to do it. They would sit in class and try to hide how much they did not know and wonder why it was that they were so different from their peers. Once they started receiving special education services, I thought everything would get better, but I was so very wrong. That anger and frustration did not go away. In fact, it seemed to increase in intensity. Although they were very, very slowly starting to make some progress, they hated being taken out of their general education classroom each day during reading and math time. To them, this daily intrusion into their classroom was a blatant sign that they were struggling. Whereas before, they were upset because they were struggling, now they were upset because they were struggling but everyone else knew it too. Everyone knew that the students who were being pulled out of the class for this extra help were “special” so suddenly their deficits had become much more public. The daily routine of leaving their classroom for the resource room was an exercise in humiliation for them. Being pulled out of their general education class and into the “special” class may have helped them start to learn but it also seemed to solidify their differences in a very negative way. They were not like most of their peers. To make matters worse, their resource room serviced students with all ranges of cognitive challenges. They would look at their classmates in their general education class and then at their classmates in their resource room class and ask me constantly why, if they were as smart as I kept telling them they were, they kept getting pulled out of the class where the “smart” kids were. Why, they wondered, if they were so smart, could they not learn just like the other “smart” children?

To make matters even more difficult, when they did stay in their general education class for subjects other than math or reading, they could still not follow along. Each day that passed when a teacher told them to open their social studies book and read a passage or gave them a homework assignment based on work that they had already not understood during their school day was another reason to think that they were something less than their peers and all of this seemed to solidify the negative self-concept that they already had about their ability to learn.

They continued to progress slowly in the resource room but they also continued to feel terrible about themselves as learners and feel disenfranchised as members of their class. They didn’t feel like they belonged anywhere and no one addressed any of it. No one talked about their learning disabilities. It was as if once they were placed in the resource room, all conversation about what got them there and what it meant, or what it might mean later on, just suddenly stopped. Aside from two gifted and beautiful teachers who were able to see each and every child as the gift that they were (thank you Mrs. Recca and Mrs. Clark!), no one addressed my daughters’ challenges in the context of their strengths and I was starting to see some worrisome signs. I found a tuft of hair on the bathroom counter and realized that one of them had been pulling out her hair. They were both biting their nails so far down that their fingers just looked like bloody little stumps. Most worrisome was that fact that they just seemed to be losing interest in the things they used to love.

Sydnee had always loved learning about science and Cass had always loved to draw, but neither one of them seemed to want any of that any longer. They cried a lot. At homework time, they banged their heads against the wall and called themselves stupid. They did not seek out friends, nor were they sought out by other children. I knew they were getting the academic support they needed, but something still continued to be very, very wrong. They hated reading. They hated homework. They hated the resource room and they hated the general education classroom.

Even though they were starting to read, they knew they were still far behind their peers and to them this still translated as failure. How could they be getting what they needed but still be feeling so terrible? I started having nightmares every night. I dreamt about them growing up angry and unable to read or add or subtract. I was growing more and more scared every day. I could see that my beautiful, brilliant and happy little girls might be heading down a path of educational disengagement and depression, and there was just no world in which I would allow these two special little girls to b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Why This Book?
• 2. History
• 3. The Role of the Elementary Counselor
• 4. What Are Learning Disabilities?
• 5. Most Common Learning Disabilities and Related Disorders
• 6. Working with Students
• 7. Working with the Child Study Team
• 8. Working with Teachers
• 9. Working with Parents
• 10. The Program
• Index