Let's begin by looking at individual deficits...
Imagine a student you had who wasn’t able to succeed in your math class, no matter what you tried. Think about what areas they struggled in – what their deficits were. Think about the ways in which they failed to conform to the expectations you had – of the average mathematics student. Think about the responses of the other staff – other teachers, administrators, specialists such as psychologists or special ed teachers. Think about the responses of other students. If they had an IEP, imagine what the IEP might have said. How did this student do in large class discussions? How did they do in groupwork? When asked to work individually on assignments?
What was this experience with this student like for you? What were your feelings? Emotions? Is there a particular incident that comes to mind?
Writing assignment: Take a moment to fix these details in your mind, and post below about your student and their deficits, keeping in mind the student's privacy.
Jitendra and Star say that students with learning disabilities “typically have deficits in attention, memory, background knowledge, vocabulary, language processes, strategy knowledge, visual-spatial processing, and self-regulation” (2011, p.13) Special educators argue that this leads to difficulties with “generalization, applying metacognitive strategies, discriminating key points from irrelevant information, and solving multistep problems” (Cole and Wasburn-Moses, 2010, p. 15). There area variety of specialized interventions that hav been developed, most of which involve pulling a student out of the classroom or somehow isolating them from the rest of the class.
These interventions tend to work reasonably well at addressing specific, discrete difficulties. There's more to aspire to here, though, than simply rote memorization and procedural skills. In the next section, we'll look at various definitions of mathematics and why the intervention paradigm fails to get at the core of what we need to do as mathematics teachers.