What Exactly is a Learning Disability?
(From the Archives, August 2016)
by Chris McGinnis, PhD, BCBA-D
As I write this, 19-year-old US Olympic gymnast Simone Biles has now won her tenth gold medal. She has mastered the balance beam, vault, bars, and floor exercise. She seemingly defies gravity and other known laws of physics as she effortlessly performs the double layout with a half turn among others. I watch in awe. I can’t do that. Wow.
I’ve never tried though. Which means I haven’t put in the 10,000 hours Anders Ericcson and Malcolm Gladwell say it might take to master it. Come to think of it, I haven’t even started to put in the 10,000 hours it takes to master each gymnastic move Biles has mastered. And I highly suspect she has put in many more hours than that to win the gold.
If we were to forget the idea that practice in the form of successful repetition of each skill I wish to master is critical to my attaining mastery of each skill, then it would be easier for a group of Olympic gymnasts to look upon me pitifully and assume I had a learning disability in gymnastics. They can do it, and I can’t. Not very well anyway. It must be me. And by me they might mean my brain.
The idea that learning disability reflects faulty brain wiring dates back to Samuel Orton’s writings of a century ago in a relatively prescientific era. Without benefit of what we now know about human learning, Orton did his best to make sense of why some children had relative trouble learning and began classifying learning problems using labels like alexia, agraphia, and developmental motor aphasia. Earlier in 1887, dyslexia (dys = faulty, lexia = reading) had been coined by Rudolf Berlin, an eye doctor. In the 1940’s, Alfred Strauss among others put forth the idea of “minimal brain injury” as a cause of learning problems despite normal medical and neurological examinations (this evolved into what we now label ADHD). No data, no medical or neurological evidence – just an idea. But it caught on. Given that Paul Broca in 1861 had already discovered that a tiny part of the brain is critical for speech and that Carl Wernicke in 1874 had already guessed that another tiny part is needed for understanding speech, there was already some evidence that the brain is involved in the use and understanding of language.
Yet everything we do involves the brain. Just because you don’t understand why something happens doesn’t mean it’s by default wholly owned by the person suffering. Of seven billion people there are bound to be differences among us, and this lazy idea that individual differences that happen to be deficits are due to some problem within the individual dates back centuries. But just because it’s an ancient idea or practice doesn’t mean it’s true or useful.
With the exception of verifiable brain injury caused by automobile collision, lead exposure, or in utero drug and alcohol exposure or related injuries and toxic exposure, there has never been any evidence that faulty brain wiring, chemistry, or genetics are the cause of learning disabilities. Sure, there are decades of studies using impressive, colorful brain scans and twins raised apart. But such studies involve correlation only – this goes with that, not this is caused by that.
In fact, there exists plenty of evidence that the opposite causal direction is true: the brain’s structure and function are changed by advances in academic proficiency.
Your brain rewires its 500 trillion or so connections between its more than a trillion neurons all day long based upon things you repeatedly do as well as things you do not do. Engaging cortical plasticity is the basis behind physical therapy after a stroke, learning how to drive a stick shift, or practicing that face-melting guitar solo. You get better at whatever you practice and you lose what you do not practice.
So here are seven facets of effective instructional approaches:
1. Students know what is expected and can witness someone else competently engaging in the skill.
2. Prerequisite skills are taught first and then built upon. This requires a well-planned sequence of skill teaching from easy to difficult with mastery at each step as a goal before moving forward to the next step.
3. Students practice accurate responses, not incorrect responses (practicing a skill incorrectly only cements the incorrect response into place). This requires immediate feedback on accuracy, immediate correction, and then immediate practice of the correct response, with such help faded out gradually. We don’t want children practicing new skills incorrectly.
4. Engaged time-on-task is increased and wasted time is eliminated. If the student is not engaged in the learning process, no progress is possible.
5. Student responding is increased without penalty for mistakes. If the student doesn’t respond, but only the teacher is talking, no progress is possible.
6. Progress is measured so the teacher can make adjustments as necessary to remain successful and the student can find motivation in beating yesterday’s performance.
7. Students may progress at different rates; otherwise, those needing more successful repetition (given their learning history to that moment) get lost and those who have achieved mastery already lose momentum and motivation.
Most teachers are, however, trained in other approaches. So much of what is taught to future teachers is worthless and new teachers don’t realize it until they enter the classroom.
For example, most teachers were trained to believe that children at different ages are not yet ready to learn some skills. Research has debunked that, however. Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky were wrong. It’s not about what the child is able to learn at any particular stage in development, but instead what the child is able to learn at any particular point in his or her cumulative learning. And the teacher’s role is not to respect where the child is in his or her development but instead to show up with a set of powerful tools and planning and offer the learner effective leadership in the instructional moment.
Most teachers during their training also were made aware that children have different learning styles. Some are visual learners, and so on. The actual research on this has debunked that whole nonscientific theory some time ago. It's not the student’s learning style but the teacher’s teaching effectiveness that counts. And overall, children labeled as learning disabled learn no differently than those who are not so labeled. All children generally learn the same way. If this is controversial it's because most teachers learned teaching as an art instead of as a science.
When I need a mechanic to fix my car, if the car doesn’t get fixed then the mechanic hasn’t yet fixed it. If the mechanic has the wrong tools, fixing my car is going to be a rough task. Similarly, and said in support of teachers who all entered the profession to help children and be successful in an extremely rewarding career, it must be acknowledged that when a child hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t yet taught. The car not being fixed is not the fault of the car, nor is it really the fault of the newly trained mechanic who was given the wrong tools during his training. The child not learning is not the fault of the child or his brain. It is not a learning disability but an institutional instructional failure. The teacher showed up with the wrong tools, as did last year’s teacher. This includes cases in which the child’s behavior has been disruptive to his or her own learning and that of others. Very similar tools exist to teach appropriate behavior also, but teachers are not being given those tools either.
So let’s stop blaming the brain. Diagnosing learning disabilities is not done by biological marker as are verifiable medical conditions and as such is subjective and based only on the current academic politics of the day. Learning disabilities are, after all, considered disabling conditions by law and not by science while instructional practices are dictated by tradition and policy and not by science. Many parents and teachers are, for example, aware of the Response to Intervention (RTI) model – this valuable process assumes that the Intervention is evidence-based, yet few educators are trained to offer it which is why RTI itself appears useless. Preceding this was the discrepancy model – achievement must be at least a standard deviation lower than IQ – which is still used by most psychologists despite its known lack of validity. And just because a child continues to reverse symbols doesn’t mean there’s a brain problem – all children start out making that same mistake and over time with effective instruction that mistake drops out. Those for whom it does not drop out tend to be those whose instruction has been far removed from the guidelines listed above.
We might also do well to stop blaming teachers, newer ones in particular, failed early on by their training programs which by and large continue to live in the 1800s and continue to do so thanks to our tax dollars and little accountability for how effective the training they offer is in the real world.
Instead, let’s all take it upon ourselves to learn about, adopt, and advocate for evidence-based instructional methods. Education is the key that unlocks doors that otherwise remain locked tight. School boards and building principals should hire only those new teachers who have been trained in such methods, and support their current teachers with adequate inservice training and support so they obtain the tools that will lead to success and less professional burnout. Ultimately, we can and should expect our schools to offer gymnastics coaching for something as basic as learning to read.
We should also expect much, much more from our colleges and universities as they train the next generation of our children’s educators. If an instructional approach is not evidence-based, it should not be given to future teachers except as an example of what not to do.
So what is a learning disability? If you want to win the gold, you need to know what it is you are trying to accomplish, what stepping stones you must traverse in turn to achieve it, a coach who knows not only how to perform the skill but how to help you achieve it and keep you motivated along the path, and plenty of practice doing it the right way, not the wrong way. A learning disability therefore is just a label we use when some of these steps have been missing along the way.
A learning disability is the effect, not the cause.
Dr. Chris McGinnis is a family psychologist in private practice based in Jupiter, Florida. He is Board Certified Behavior Analyst and also a Nationally Certified School Psychologist. His website is www.mcginnisbehavioral.com.