In any book or thesis there is a set of assumptions and values. Sometimes these are called biases. Although this book will try to make clear which statements are research- and evidence-based, which are from clinical practice, experiences of teachers, and have yet to be evaluated; and which are value judgments; there will always be some form of bias. It is best to make these assumptions transparent so that they can be evaluated. The first, and most important assumption, is that all school children can learn. This seems simple and obvious. However, I conducted a workshop in which a teacher spent 15 minutes arguing with me about a child she worked with who was incapable of learning. The story continued that every effort the teacher made to teach basic concepts resulted in zero gain in skills or knowledge. As the teacher said to me, “I was teaching the best that I could, but this child was not learning.” I did not state my first thought, which was, “If they are not learning, then, by definition, you are not teaching.” That seemed unnecessarily snide. However, I did tell the story about my undergraduate days of working with planaria, which are flatworms with no brain and a simple nervous system. You can teach planaria how to move from a black to a white surface. I have always thought that if you can teach planaria, then you can teach human beings. Of course, planaria are different in that you can bisect the flatworm with a scalpel, and it will regenerate into two flatworms. The interesting thing is that both flatworms will now remember what you have taught them. This book will not recommend that we increase the quality of our education system based on any form of surgery and regeneration. But we will go back to the simple statement that all children can learn.

School psychologists often have the rule of providing individual assessment data from which eligibility to receive special education services is, in part, determined (Fernell & Ek, 2010). Nearly every school psychologist who has in this role has faced the following scenario: a child, who has struggled in school and has not demonstrated much improvement despite a series of individualized academic interventions, is referred to the school psychologist for assessment. The scores on standardized tests of intelligence, adaptive behaviour, academic achievement, and emotional well-being and functioning are collected and interpreted. The results do not meet eligibility criteria for the specialized education services. When the written report is presented to a multidisciplinary team consisting of teachers, administrators, and parents the team is uniformly disappointed. In many cases the child’s intelligence test or adaptive behaviour scores are too high for them to be considered as a student with intellectual disabilities and also do not meet the formal criteria for learning disabilities. Behavioural and emotional issues also do not meet criteria for a child with severe emotional disabilities. The inevitable comments are well-meaning, but certainly concerning. “But if this child is not made eligible for specialized services, he will simply continue to fail and fail and fail.” “We filled out a lot of paperwork and put in a lot of hours to make this child eligible for special education, this assessment is a technicality.” “Are you telling me that there is nothing we can do to improve this child skills?” “Can we just fudge the scores a little bit to make him eligible?” “I have been teaching for 20 years and I know a child with learning disabilities when I see it. I do not care what the assessment says.” “You must have made a mistake. Can you simply continue to test this child until they become eligible?”

Categorization of humans along different dimensions always seems to be a bizarre and fraught activity. From medicine, there is the concept of diagnosis (Linehan, 2019). The assumption of the medical model is that once a diagnosis is made, then correct, appropriate, and evidence-informed interventions can be applied to either improve or cure the disorder. There is no question that diagnosticians provide an important service to improving health. The field of medicine has a large guidebook known as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) (World Health Organization, 2021), which describes the criteria for diagnosing every known medical condition. There are diagnostic codes ranging from hangnail to brain tumor to being sucked into an aircraft engine (i.e., diagnostic code V97.33XD). Observations, interviews, blood and urine tests, medical imaging, and other diagnostic tools are used (WHO, 2021). Based on diagnostic criteria from the ICD, a diagnosis is made and appropriate medical interventions applied. This medical model has been an important part of improving health care for the world’s population.

This is not a book about intelligence as measured by intelligence tests. The primary goal of this book is to report effective frameworks, research, mindsets, techniques, and tips and tricks for teaching students with a history of chronic and stubborn low achievement. Most students who are low achieving have below-average general intelligence (Root et al., 2017). And much of the baggage of intelligence testing has affected the way that we approach and teach students who are low achieving. This is not to say that the common argument ma...