Rick LaVoie

Oct 29^th, 2010

In Educational Psychology, we’ve been watching a video about children with learning disabilities, by Rick LaVoie. He put about thirty people into classroom together and told them that they were going to learn how it felt to be a child with a learning disability. The people in the room all had some sort of connection to children with learning disabilities. They ranged from parents to social workers to friends to teachers, etc. They were all given a booklet of pictures, writings, and activities. As they went through the book, Rick LaVoie would fire off questions to confuse them, and some of the activities themselves were skewed to represent how a child with a learning disability would perceive it. The point of this is to have these people feel like they had learning disabilities so they could properly see how it felt. He demonstrated things like how distractions affect learning, and how blaming the child is not helping at all. I think that these people all understood a little bit more how it feels to have a learning disability. It would be great if we could get Rick LaVoie to come here, I’d love to participate in something like this! Even watching the video helped me start to understand which mistakes are being made by teachers, and how I could possibly handle it in the future.