Frontline Blog

One special population that is often overlooked? Gifted students. Schools rightly spend substantial time and resources ensuring that those students with learning disabilities or who face other challenges receive the support they need to thrive.

In mid-March 2020, schools across the nation closed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This sudden and massive interruption of instruction is unprecedented and represents a cataclysm with no playbook on how schools should respond. And there is the further possibility that — even after schools reconvene — future instructional lockdowns may be ordered due to flareups of the virus.

Take a random walk through any school on any day and you may see challenging behaviors. These surface behaviors are easily observed. However, what may remain hidden from the observer (and perhaps from the teachers of Sean, Alyssa and Ahmed, is that each of these students engage in these behaviors as a fight-flight-or-freeze survival response triggered by their unique history of complex trauma.

In the world of IDEA, documentation is a requirement. However, documentation practices in school districts have no universal standard. This can lead to major problems both for students and districts ― like due process hearings and issues with continuity of service. So, in the absence of universal standards, your district should create best practices of its own. Here is some information to help you get started.

The primary purpose of schools is to educate. At times however, students display challenging behaviors or significant social-emotional concerns that interfere with their learning. In such cases, our goal as educators, counselors and service providers is to identify who those students are and match them to appropriate behavioral or social-emotional interventions.

Schools have made leaps and bounds in supporting students’ social-emotional and behavioral needs since the tragedy at Columbine High School. However, implementing a framework for social-emotional learning (SEL) can still be extremely challenging for educators. What does SEL look like in your school or district? Have you run into any obstacles? Take the poll to share your thoughts.

Dyslexia, a neuro-biological disorder that affects language processing, has no bearing on intelligence, but complicates a student’s ability to learn by making both reading and verbal communication difficult. Because dyslexia notoriously flies under the radar, a child can go years with the disorder unidentified and with no answer for why schoolwork is so difficult ― or worse, with teachers and parents assuming that laziness is to blame for poor performance in school.

Excitement is in the air as a new school year begins! Students find out who their teachers will be, discover which friends are in their classes, and of course, shop for new school supplies! But there is a particular group of students who might not be quite as excited as some of the others to start school, and that group might surprise you — I am talking about students identified as gifted.

Whenever I can, I like to visit the American southwest and hike in rocky desert terrain. I often find small piles of stones (cairns) placed at intervals as trail markers. Hikers are always on the lookout to spot the next cairn, moving from signpost to signpost to successfully navigate the trail. Trekkers who ignore the progress-monitoring information of these trail markers can quickly wander off the track and become lost.