Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
Behaviour is usually the visible end of a skill that has not been built. What you are watching in a classroom is the shape of the difficulty rather than the shape of the child.
It is a single sentence you can say in a meeting, and it tends to move the conversation away from what to do about the behaviour towards what the child cannot yet do. Follow it with a question rather than a claim: what is being asked of them at the exact moment things go wrong. The answer is usually reading, or writing, or holding four instructions at once, and each of those has a name and a way forward.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Everyone does things their own way, but your Lord is fully aware of who follows the best-guided path (Quran 17:84). Judging the person is not our job from the outside, which leaves us free to be curious about what is actually happening.
قُلۡ كُلࣱّ يَعۡمَلُ عَلَىٰ شَاكِلَتِهِۦ فَرَبُّكُمۡ أَعۡلَمُ بِمَنۡ هُوَ أَهۡدَىٰ سَبِيلࣰ ا
Say, ‘Everyone does things their own way, but your Lord is fully aware of who follows the best-guided path.’
Qur’an 17:84read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Reviews following dyslexia from childhood into adulthood find it comes with executive function difficulties and emotional strain, not with reading accuracy alone, so the trouble genuinely does show up away from the page. That is a narrative review, so it maps what tends to travel together rather than proving that a particular behaviour comes from a particular skill gap. It is enough to make looking underneath the sensible first move.
Farah R, Ionta S, Horowitz-Kraus T. (2021). Neuro-Behavioral Correlates of Executive Dysfunctions in Dyslexia Over Development From Childhood to Adulthood.. Frontiers in psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A child pushed every day to do something they cannot do will show it in how they act long before they can explain it.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Find something the child already loves, a team, an orchestra, a game, and lay their results over it. These players are strong, these ones need coaching, and none of it means the team is no good.
If a parent has been saying since the first year of school that something is wrong with their child's reading, start from the assumption that they are right. They have watched more of it than anyone else has.
When reading results lift across a whole state after every teacher is retrained, the lesson is uncomfortable and hopeful at once. A good part of what looks like children failing is teaching that has not caught up yet.