Understanding Learning and Related Disabilities: Inconvenient Brains

Children with developmental disabilities inhabit a gray zone: they live and learn under normal conditions in some aspects of their lives, while their "inconvenient brains" present a range of challenges in other school and life contexts. Dr. Martha Bridge Denckla provides parents and educators with general knowledge, research findings, and practical recommendations about a variety of these developmental conditions, including dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, problems with motor coordination, and executive dysfunction. Inspired by her efforts to explain these conditions to parents over 45 years of clinical practice, she provides a science-based understanding of the issues in an accessible format. She uses the science of cognitive and behavioral neurology to help readers understand how the interrelationships of brain, environment, and behavior produce these developmental disorders, and to provide a basis for parenting and education programs based upon understanding how variations in brain development should guide plans for what is taught when to whom. Such developmentally appropriate, evidence-based, differentiated instruction within general education can diminish the demand for separate special education, and will thus serve all kinds of brains, whether "typical" or "inconvenient."