Keeley OGrady

32549854

EDN509 Final Assignment Reflections

I found this entire assignment to be a valuable learning experience. The
assignment as a whole mimicked the work of teachers and gave me an
opportunity to practice and experiment with it. It follows the same procedure as
teaching a subject: firstly you need to find reliable information, understand it in
great detail, and synthesise separate components into a bigger picture to
understand how parts relate to each other. This is similar to the literature search
portion. Then you need to take what you have learnt, simplify it to the important
components, change it so that your audience can understand it, and present it in
a way that maximises learning for that audience, similar to the workshop
planning and presentation.
The literature review was useful not for teaching practice but in the information I
learnt. When starting this topic, I did so because I had an idea that it would be a
fairly common issue in schools so I was likely to come across learning disabled
students at some stage in my work, and I wanted to have some idea of where to
begin in that situation. I had previously never taught or known students with
learning disabilities and knew almost nothing about them. The literature review
forced me to learn in depth, rather than covering just the basics on a simple
level. As there is a great deal of disagreement and misinformation on this
subject, studying it at such depth not only taught me a great deal but helped
prevent confusion as I could keep researching or put multiple sources together
until I understood. What I have learnt emphasised how difficult diagnosis is and
how much effort I will need to put into observation. It also emphasised the
importance of knowing your students, and having a good working relationship
with them. I feel I could have improved my literature review by focusing it more
on my specific topic. I did find it difficult to narrow down the focus, as it was hard
to clearly describe the diagnosis without first explaining the disorders.
When I began this project I had planned to create a checklist teachers could use
to actively observe students in their classes for indicators of learning disorders.
This ended up being much more tricky than I had anticipated it wasnt simply a
case of finding the information and combining it. I thought learning disorders
were so well researched that it must be clear and simple, but it was very
complicated and there wasnt a clear consensus or universal test for diagnosis. I
had originally planned to list all symptoms by disorder, but then realised the
degree of overlap and how there were no clear distinguishers between disorders,
and between learning disorders and other causes, as well as the sheer number of
indicators (I found over a hundred). My project could be improved by better
organisation within this database, I was not prepared for the sheer number of
indicators and a better way to display them would help. I still believe a checklist
would be useful so that teachers can be proactive observers rather than reactive,
avoiding the wait to fail model, but it will need to be context specific so that it
can be shortened. Otherwise my checklist, as it is, is simply too long to be useful
(Please see attached Learning disorders Indicators spreadsheet). Teachers could
not effectively conduct their regular work and observe ~30 children at a time for
so many possible indicators. Perhaps further research into which indicators are

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most accurate at predicting which disorders would be useful as then the checklist
could focus on them.

While the literature review taught me a great deal about learning disorders, it
was the workshop that most effectively allowed me to better understand how
people are effected by them. Presenting this workshop allowed me to see how
people reacted, to interact with them, and to hear different perspectives which
extend my understanding. Both my workshop and another I watched were on the
topic of learning disorders, and both used experiential learning activities to great
effect. For my activities, my goal was to make it real and allow the audience to
actually experience what it would be like to have a learning disorder or to try to
diagnose one. It is very different to read about something compared to
experiencing it. Judging by audience reactions, these were very effective, eyeopening and engaging. For my first activity, I did not warn the audience, rather
presented for a short time while displaying possible indicators for learning
disorders. No one in the audience was willing to remark that something was
wrong until I had admitted it was an act and this realisation very effectively
opened their eyes as to how difficult diagnosis was and some of the reasons
people would shy away from diagnosing. Another presenter used a similar
experiential activity which I also found particularly effective as an audience
member, in that it forced me to walk in someone elses shoes. To display how
our brains associations between letters and sounds gave them meaning, she
asked us to read a passage in Arabic script. Without recognising individual
letters, or being able to match them to a sound, it was not language but a
drawing to me. This was effective in demonstrating how issues in the brain
hinders dyslexia sufferers reading ability, and that it was not at all related to
effort. This helped me to better understand and thus empathise with people with
learning difficulties, as well as think about ways to teach them better, by thinking
about my own experience with what I learnt from most effectively. Making
lessons relevant and real is one thing that has been emphasised thorough out
this course, and this workshop both presenting and watching others has
demonstrated how effective it is. Without it I possibly would have simply
memorised a collection of facts, quickly forgotten them, and been unable to
utilise them effectively in my teaching practice. I will be endeavouring to include
this in my lessons.
The workshop in general went very well. I received positive feedback from
audience members, who noted that my general presentation skills were very
good, the activities were particularly well received, and the information conveyed
was relevant and useful to them as pre-service teachers. They found the
checklist idea particularly useful and one is going to try to implement one at the
school they are employed at. I believe my workshop could be improved by
focusing more on my topic of diagnosis as I spent more time than I had planned
on the effects of learning disorders on students. I could speak slower and have
less information on each slide to make it easier for the audience to understand.

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Consolidating information to the essential points is usually useful to do this, but

due to the topic a lot of what I needed to present was lists, and emphasising how
numerous the effects/indicators were, so this was not easy to do. I could also
practice my act in activity one more so that each symptom was clearer,
especially to an audience sitting further away.