Gathering information for proper diagnosis

Hello everyone,

In many ways, teachers are like doctors. We diagnose and treat ailments all the time. (I know; we'd love to be paid the same, but that's an issue for another day.) The ailments that we're looking at are related to learning--things ranging from how well the student understood the lesson all the way to recognizing major cognitive dysfunction--and our treatment is usually pedagogical, but the functions are very similar.

It behooves us, then, to be careful in our diagnoses so that our treatment is correct.

Imagine that disaster that would arise from a patient who had cancer but was diagnosed with a cold, or someone that was treated for epilepsy who had eczema.

The same caliber of problem happens when a student with dyslexia is simply thought to have bad parents, or an extremely intelligent child is thought to be slow.

Unlike doctors, we do not need to make our diagnoses rapidly, which is a good thing because our patients seldom come to us begging to be cured. Further, we are required to determine the problems that our students are having--and prescribe and administer the cure--without being able to openly ask many questions or use many diagnostic tools.

Still, there is a lot at our disposal, and we have many advantages that will help us.

We have complete student records available to us, some of which are accessible online in ISIS. Clicking on the underlined student ID number next to a students' name will open a window that will reveal special programs that the student has been assigned to, whether or not the student has had serious disciplinary problems in the past, the student's language level, the approximate socio-economic level (based on Title 1 eligibility), and whether or not the student has an IEP.

For more detailed information, teachers may go to the counseling office and read the students' "cums" (cumulative records), which include the entire academic record from the earliest grade attended in the United States. These may not be copies, and are confidential, so they may not be removed from the counseling office (which makes reading them a little tedious), but they provide an unmatched resource.

Past test scores, available from the computer office, give a good sense of where a student stands--even if the teacher knows that the score is inaccurate (that tells something about the student's attitude, for instance).

Phone calls home and conversations with previous teachers are very helpful.

Now, I have known teachers to avoid finding any information about students in an effort to help all students have an equal footing in the classroom. There is much wisdom in this. Kids make horrible mistakes all the time, and they often need the chance to repent and start fresh (don't we all?). But there are times when, working with a child, we are not connecting no matter what we do; or there are times when we can see that there is a more serious problem than we can deal with without sufficient information; or there are times when we have just been teaching the wrong way, and we know it, and we need a clear path to make corrections in.

Most of the time, I think, it is better to work from the perspective of having the most and the best information. When the information we are receiving in the classroom is insufficient, it is necessary for us to gather from the other sources available to us.

Then, knowing all the possible symptoms, we can diagnose correctly. If we diagnose correctly, we are much more likely to treat correctly.

Jeff Combe