Below are some comments from another colleague regarding Dr. Carol’s presentation on Evaluations for the Coalition of Advocates and Attorneys in Western Pennsylvania:
Thanks for your comments Joe. You are so right — the evaluation is just the beginning of the helping process, or should be! We need to help students in not only the academic skill areas that are deficit but also in those areas that make acquisition of skills a challenge which of course include the processing, processing speed, memory, attention and the rest of the Executive Functioning areas. Hope to see you at the next COA meeting.
Subject: Re: FW: questions from COA presentation on 2-5-10
Thank you for forwarding Carol’s response.
We frequently hear about the three “R’s” and related problems, but seldom about the components that make up the three R’s-most significantly, how to identify any deficit that may exist, their impact on day-to-day- educational process, and most significantly, their role in the children’s (and adults who don’t get the necessary remedial help) life. It is difficult, but we need to keep in mind the usual suspects that show up in all these problem-areas, processing speed and working memory.
I saw a good example yesterday. During a concert of high school musicians, a Penn State professor, who had been doing a brilliant job conducting the students he had trained in just two days, had to stumble around to think of the word, “iceberg”. He recovered quickly, making a joke — the somewhat nervous audience was eager to laugh. Carol has often talked about the accommodations made by those with deficits and the energy it takes to do that and how it affects their performance. If I recall correctly, Carol characterizes the activity as “exhausting”. Neuro-scientists call it “building explicit connections when implicit ones are missing” ( I imagine Carol would have used that term if she were talking to Neuro-scientists rather than us mere mortals!).
My point is, the problems Carol touched on have real-life implications-they don’t go away- ADA, IDEA etc require that the schools address them-they give the option of IEP or 504, we as advocates need to figure out ways to help the parents to get the schools to do it.
Hopefully, Carol and/or Joe would do a session on what to do about those problems identified by these thorough evaluations!
Keep up the good work, Shari… and Carol and Joe and Bob and Ted and Alice!!!!( This should identify us by our age!)
Joe James