accommodations help students access learning, but they don’t change how students learn.

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Accommodations bypass cognitive weaknesses — they don’t strengthen them.

That’s the focus of this month’s Learning Brain Monthly session:
🎓 Students Need More Than Accommodations
🗓 November 11, 2025, 12 p.m. Central Time
💻 Live + replay included

In this 60-minute, research-grounded session, you’ll learn:

  • The real differences between accommodations, modifications, and compensatory strategies — and what each does (and doesn’t) change.
  • Why students with IEPs and 504s often make incremental progress, not the gains they need to catch up.
  • The cognitive skills that drive learning — attention, working memory, processing speed, inhibitory control, memory — and how to identify them.
  • How cognitive training can change learning capacity itself.
  • Questions that should be asked at IEP/504 meetings to focus on growth, not just access.
     

Whether you’re a classroom teacher, instructional coach, special educator, administrator or parent, this session will help you reframe how support services can truly close the gap.

👉 Register for the Learning Brain Monthly and Students Need More Than Accommodations

There are not enough special education teachers

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These critical professionals assist students with learning, physical, emotional, or developmental disabilities, helping to foster their success both academically and professionally.

When news of teacher shortages dies down, they almost always start up again after only a short reprieve. This constant state of “one step forward, two steps back” has an even more worrying underlying issue: a shortage of special education teachers.

Read the full story HERE

Understanding the Complexity of Dyscalculia

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In classrooms across the world, children engage daily with mathematics—counting, solving word problems, and learning how numbers relate to the real world. But for some students, math isn’t just hard; it’s persistently confusing in a way that goes beyond typical struggles. These learners may be experiencing dyscalculia, a specific kind of mathematics learning disability that affects their number sense, problem solving, and overall math skills.

Dyscalculia is often called math dyslexia, though the two are not the same. While dyslexia affects reading and written expression, dyscalculia interferes with how a person’s brain processes numerical symbols, arithmetic, and math concepts. This condition is more than just a learning hiccup—it’s classified by experts as a neurodevelopmental disorder, part of the wider group of learning disorders and developmental disabilities that can significantly impact a person’s ability to function academically and in daily life.

Read all about it HERE

The Gift Beneath the Struggle

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In psychology, there is a concept known as twice exceptionality. This is a term used for individuals who are both gifted and challenged.

They may have exceptional talents in art, intellect or creativity, yet live with a learning disability such as dyslexia, ADHD, or dyscalculia.

Often, the disability hides the gift so effectively that teachers, parents, and even the individuals themselves fail to recognize it.
But perhaps “twice exceptionality” isn’t just a psychological label – maybe it’s a reflection of the human condition itself.

Read the whole story HERE

Dyscalculia: the cultural lie

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We still treat math as a moral test. If you cannot do mental arithmetic on command you must be lazy distracted or irresponsible.

That myth starts early. A child who struggles with multiplication gets told to try harder. That same child grows up downloads a budgeting app and is told again to just be more disciplined.

Read all about it HERE