Difficulty learning: there are two sides to every story

Should teachers tell parents about suspected learning difficulties? This is a question that I am asked often, and stumped by always. Why? The answer seems simple to me. Of course teachers should be communicating with the parents about specific learning struggles that they are seeing.

Why does this question keep being asked? Where is the confusion? So I began looking at it from a different angle.

• Angle one: teachers want to do the right thing.
• Angle two: they can’t be certain that they are 100% accurate.
• Angle three: they don’t want to be remembered as “the bad guy”.

Doing the right thing takes courage to speak the truth. If you are sick and you go to a doctor you expect to be told what is causing the sickness and how to get better.

If the doctor doesn’t specialize in that specific problem then he refers you to a specialist who can help. He does not ignore the problem hoping that it will eventually go away.

The same is true about parents and teachers. We send our children to school to be taught by teachers who are specialists in education. We expect them to tell us if there is a problem.

So why the confusion on whether a teacher should or should not speak the truth?

There are no guarantees. While teachers are experts in the skill of teaching they are not experts in the problems that cause learning issues. An expert in learning struggle happens with additional training, experience, and specific degrees. This often leads to insecurity on the part of the teachers and stories being written in their heads:

What if I am wrong? What if I say this to the parent and they don’t believe me? What if they hate me? “I don’t want to be remembered as THAT teacher”

There are so many ways to write each of the chapters in the book titled “No Guarantee”. What if we changed the title of the book? What if we changed the story to read like this?

Chapter one: the teacher approaches the parents and plants a seed of curiosity that allow parents to know his/her “concerns” and provides valid data points that clearly state what lead to this recommendation? At this point the story takes a twist. The plot thickens and it starts to look like this: Teacher tells parents, parents receive the information, find the problem, fix the problem, child no longer struggles and the parents are eternally grateful for the truth that was spoken to them by the teacher. The teacher then becomes the hero in the story of early intervention; the end. OR the plot thickens and in this story, the teacher tells the parent the parent is not ready to receive the information at that time, the parent does not follow the recommendation, the child moves to the next grade still struggling.

Chapter two: the story continues and the next year the child’s teacher makes the parents aware of the same concerns. There may be a chapter three , four, five, and six, before the child gets help. There is no guarantee on how the information will be received. A teachers role is simply to be the messenger of truth, by providing the data, to support the recommendation. They can whisper the truth of struggle to the parents with the hope that each year that goes by the whispers become louder and eventually turn into screams that the parents cannot ignore.

So what is the final chapter in this story? What is the ending to the story?

It concludes the same way all good stories do: with a hero saving the day. That hero is the change agent that had enough courage to speak the truth and made people stop and think. After all, isn’t that what good teaching is all about?