Teaching our teachers about NLD

More often than not, parents find themselves playing the role of "expert" on their children's learning needs, and can be called on to educate the teachers their children come in contact with.  Here's a terrific  article from the Smart Kids with LD website on helping your school understand non-verbal learning disabilities.

Rhonda & the Bridgeway team


Educating the School About NLD « Smart Kids With LD

By Marcia Eckerd, Ph.D.

The job of helping teachers and other school personnel understand Nonverbal Learning Disabilities (NLD) often falls to parents. Unfortunately, they’re not always fully aware of how NLD impacts their child at school. It’s therefore important for parents to educate themselves on how NLD manifests itself, so that they can better educate those their child relies on for help and support throughout the school day.

How does NLD show up in school?

The kind of processing typical of NLD presents the following academic and behavioral challenges unexpected in bright, verbal children.

Academic Challenges

• Black-and-white thinking and poor inferential thinking create problems with reading comprehension and following directions
• Weak visual-spatial skills lead to difficulty with math
• Problems with writing impact almost all subjects
• Intense focus on details makes it hard to get the main idea and know what to study
• Executive function weakness often results in poor organization and inflexibility
• Difficulty knowing how to break down large tasks contributes to frustration with classwork and homework

Social and Behavioral Challenges

• Poor social skills coupled with poor pragmatic language skills can lead to social isolation, teasing, and bullying
• Concrete thinking combined with inflexibility contributes to oppositional behavior
• Poor social judgment can result in inappropriate, sometimes provocative behavior, often misinterpreted as attention-seeking or rudeness
• Executive function weakness can result in impulsivity, poor emotional control, and the inability to self-monitor
• Reactions to provocations, real or perceived, can lead to disruptive behavior
• Poor coordination and spatial organization as well as poor social skills make team sports and PE frustrating

Managing these challenges in addition to the usual demands for academic performance is exhausting, which is why many children with NLD, understandably, come home from school “fried.”
By proactively working with the school, parents can help the staff anticipate problems and develop strategies to handle them, which in turn will lead to a better educational experience and a happier child at the end of the day.

Working with the School

If teachers are unfamiliar with NLD, it’s worthwhile to provide them with a short article that explains basic information about NLD.

When meeting with teachers, I recommend that parents bring a list of specific issues rather than a list of “you need to” solutions. This approach is less likely to produce defensiveness, and is more likely to engage teachers and counselors in problem solving.

The author is an evaluator, consultant, and therapist who specializes in working with children with NLD.

Tomorrow, we'll share the second half of this article, whic focuses on smart solutions for working with NLD kids.