Comprehensive LD Evaluations: Understanding Why a Student is Struggling

Jenny Ponzuric is a licensed educational psychologist, educational consultant, IEP master coach, and certified leadership and mindset coach. In this episode, Jenny discusses the importance of understanding a student's full learning profile, factors school psychologists should keep in mind when performing learning disability evaluations, and how to ensure that parents and practitioners are on the same page. 

Transcript

Lauren Clouser:

Welcome to the LDA Podcast, a series by the Learning Disabilities Association of America. Our podcast is dedicated to exploring topics of interest to educators, individuals with learning disabilities, parents and professionals to work towards our goal of creating a more equitable world. Hi everyone. Welcome to the LDA Podcast. I'm here today with Jenny Ponzuric, who is a licensed educational psychologist, educational consultant, IEP master coach, and certified leadership and mindset coach. Jenny, thank you so much for being here today.

Jenny Ponzuric:

Thank you so much for having me, Lauren.

Lauren Clouser:

Of course. We're so excited to talk to you a little bit more about your work as a school psychologist. But first I wanted to give you the chance to tell us a little bit about yourself and your work.

Jenny Ponzuric:

So, as you mentioned, my background is in school psychology. So I worked a very typical school psychologist role for 13 years in a pretty modest size school district here in Southern California. While I was there, I worked a lot at the elementary level. However, during my time there, I got my school neuropsych certificate, and once I had that, I had the wonderful opportunity— that was the term my directors would use. Would you like an opportunity? Some opportunities to work on some really interesting cases, preschool through high school. So I worked for the school district for about 13 years, and then I thought I wanted to go into administration. So I became a director at Teacher Support Services at my county Office of Education where I help to support our special ed teachers who are finishing up their credentialing process. I always say it took me about three years to figure out that administration was not my path.

I learned a lot, but it wasn't my passion. So for the last decade or so I have been working for myself. I get the opportunity to do a lot of professional development around topics like learning disabilities and report rating and working with English learners. I also am a podcast host myself, as well as have some online platforms to help support the work that school psychologists are doing in the school. So I get to do a lot of different things, which I've always loved to do.

Lauren Clouser:

Yeah, that's really exciting. So what are some of the unique supports that you offer school psychologists? And again, what inspired you to make this a focus of your work? You learned that being an administrator wasn't necessarily for you. So how did you get to where you are now?

Jenny Ponzuric:

One of the things that I had, again, I'll use the fun term opportunity, to do when I was a school psychologist was be a supervisor for practicum students and interns, which I loved. I also got some opportunities to mentor new hires, and so people walking in, whether they were brand new to the field or just brand new to our district. Every district works a little bit differently. And sometimes the role of a school psychologist or the role of a special ed might be a little bit different district to district, much less state to state. And so when I started out on my own, I kind of was thinking back to that position of being able to help support people who are hanging out there. Sometimes school psychologists feel very lonely. A lot of times, they're the only school psychologist in their building. And I really wanted to provide support for those that needed it.

There are many school psychologists who get hired in districts that have amazing support systems and people who can answer questions and ongoing mentoring. And there are school psychologists who just don't get hired in those types of districts. And so I provide some online platforms to help support school psychologists with resources and with support. So whether they want to get on a zoom call and ask some questions about what's going on, maybe talk through a case a little bit, we have those options. And then I have another online platform specifically around learning disabilities, and that one is around the pattern of strengths and weaknesses model for SLD identification.

Lauren Clouser:

That's fantastic. And to talk a little bit more about that model, too, we know that students with specific learning disabilities are the largest population of students served by the IDEA, so most school psychologists will be working with these students. So could you tell us, what is a PSW approach to an SLD evaluation?

Jenny Ponzuric:

So we know from a federal perspective, way back the last time I got reauthorized, which was a while ago. Now there are three main models that IDEA laid out. So there's continuation of the discrepancy model, which, if you've been in the field as long as I have, we all remember that there's an RTI model, which is a fabulous model if your school is doing really good interventions and ongoing progress monitoring, not always consistent in many of the districts that I personally have been a part of. And then they gave us this third option called the pattern of Strengths and Weaknesses model. Now, when the federal information got released that states could not, you know, mandate the use of discrepancy, every state had to allow an RTI model. And then they were like, and if you want to, there's this third option. So some states don't have that third option of PSW. And then some states, like mine in California, gave us all three options.

And so a lot of different groups within California really were looking at this alternative to the discrepancy model. A lot of people were kind of frustrated with how a lot of people practice the discrepancy model that you just take this intelligence score and you subtract achievement scores, and then you cross your fingers for some numbers. And we know that's not really embedded in research and what we know about kids who are struggling with learning. And so the pattern of strengths and weaknesses approach, in my perspective, because there's a lot of controversy around SLD approaches, let's just throw that one out there, the way that I think about this is it's using research, updated information about what we know about students’ brains and how they're learning how to read, how they're learning how to write and do math and really trying to figure out what are we noticing in their pattern of learning. Where are those strengths in their ability to think and problem solve?

And then I think one of the most important pieces in learning disabilities is really figuring out what's getting in the way. What is that? Processing disorder, processing deficit, whatever term we want to use, so that we can really identify how to help the student in the best way possible. So PSW is an option that we have. I think it differs on how it's practiced state-to-state, knowing, like I mentioned before, not every state has it as an option. There are some states in their regulation language that have like three pages of explanation on exactly what this is and how to do this. And then my state as an example, all they did was copy and paste over the sentence from IDEA, which gives us permission to use it and then gives us a lot of vague language, including things like whatever the group has determined is relevant to the identification of a learning disability. But there's no clarification on who the group is and who gets to decide what is relevant to the identification of a learning disability.

So I think the really incredible thing right now is that there's, because like you mentioned, SLD is the biggest category that exists and therefore there's so many people who are out there researching it. And so districts and states that are using this model don't have to just sit around and stare at one another and figure out what this might look like. We have these amazing people who have done all this research to help us really figure out what we mean by this thing called the pattern of strengths and weaknesses model. I'm sorry, I could go on and on, so I'll pause right there.

Lauren Clouser:

No, that was fantastic. A really great overview of why we like the PSW approach. So I wanted to, based on what you were saying too, about how things can vary so much from district to district, from state to state. What are some of the big ideas that you try to keep in mind when doing SLD evaluations?

Jenny Ponzuric:

So, just piggybacking on some things that I mentioned before. When I think about learning disabilities, there's kind of two main categories of things that I like to think about, all the things we want to rule out, and then what we're trying to figure out. So fortunately, there's a lot of vagueness again, and a lot of our exclusionary factors. As someone who provides professional development, I get the question all the time about attendance. How exactly do we get to rule out attendance as being a primary factor? Is there a certain number? We're looking at all of those different pieces. So we know we have to make sure that the student's learning, that the learning issue isn't mainly because they're not showing up to school, or the fact they can't see, or they're learning a second language. And a lot of those pieces are difficult to examine and rule out just by giving standardized tests.

My background is as a school neuropsychologist. I love a good standardized test. Absolutely. Sometimes I have to pause and stop myself from giving more just because I'm always so curious. However, a lot of those pieces, we have to figure out other ways to gather that information. But those pieces are important for the context on how to interpret our standardized testing information. So, for instance, if we are doing an evaluation and we are finding, again, going back to the ruling in, wow, this student really is struggling with phonemic awareness and they're struggling with reading.

Our first thought is, I figured it out. I figured out why they're struggling with reading. However, if they've never had instruction in phonemic awareness, if they missed 50% of school in those early elementary years where we teach those skills, well, now we're going to interpret my low phonemic awareness scores a little bit differently than a student who's been at school regularly, whose school is actually using the science of reading to teach these different skills. And so when I think about learning disabilities, it's what are we needing to make sure that we are ruling out as primary? And then have we figured it out? Have we figured out, okay, it's not attendance, it's not instruction. So why is a student struggling with reading? And I think that's an important connection for the family. I think it's an important connection for the educators, whether the student is going to meet IDEA eligibility or not, really figuring it out. What did we figure out about the student's learning?

Lauren Clouser:

Yeah, definitely. Well, and to talk about your podcast a little bit, you recently discussed evaluations of suspected dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia. So would you say it's important for psychologists to use these specific terms when diagnosing or classifying students with SLDs?

Jenny Ponzuric:

I think that's such an interesting question. And the reason why is because when I reflect back when I started in this field in the late 90s, if a parent walked in and said, I think my child has dyslexia, we would literally say something like, we don't do that here. That's a medical diagnosis. Like, you need to go talk to your doctor about that. And things have changed. Now, if I have a parent who brings in a doctor's note that says, this child has dyslexia, I'm like, no, that's mine. Like, why are you looking at that pediatrician? That's actually my area of expertise. So I think one of the most important things is that things have changed in our field.

And when I think back to stuff we've gotten from the federal level that said you are allowed to use these words, you're allowed to use them in reports, you can use them in meetings. While we don't have a box to check that says dyslexia on our IEP document, I do think it's important. There's so many families who are using these terms. We have so many teachers who are learning about all this information, and I think it is important if we think it's going to help the rest of the team out with understanding what's really going on, definitely use the term. If a parent says I think my child has dyslexia, I think it's important at the meeting in our report to address that question. I think that question might be a little bit different in comparison to, is my child eligible? Right. Those can be some separate kinds of discussions, but I do think it's important to address that.

And again, being able to go in and provide professional development for a lot of different school districts, I still come across special education teachers and school psychologists who are like, we're allowed to use those words. And I'm like, let me show you this document. Yes, we are allowed to use these words. And once again, if you think they're going to be helpful for the family to better understand their child, please bring up these words. Absolutely. Yeah.

Lauren Clouser:

That's a great answer. It sounds like it's a great way to make sure that everybody on the team is on the same page and has the same understanding. So when evaluating for dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia, what are the specific things that psychologists should be mindful of?

Jenny Ponzuric:

I think one of the things that I find very important is, it sounds really basic, but what's everyone's definition of these words? Because as I mentioned, there's still a lot of people using these terms. But I still have parents and teachers who, when they're using the term dyslexia, when we ask them follow up questions, they're talking about B, D reversals for a first grader. And that's not quite my definition of dyslexia, and that's not quite the definition from the International Dyslexia Association, or with a lot of our state guidelines regarding that. So I think it's important for us to use the words. But if a parent says, I think my child has dyslexia, I think one of the most important things is to say, there are so many definitions of this term. What do you mean by this term? Because before I launch into your child does have it, I do see a lot of characteristics. I want to make sure we're on the same page about this conversation. I think that's also very true with the term dysgraphia.

When I hear the term dysgraphia and when I have psychologists consult with me and say, oh, a family's concerned about dysgraphia, again, my first question is, what is the family really concerned about? Because you can look this up in Google and when you put up dysgraphia, there's two main discussions there. There's the motor part of writing and there's getting thoughts down on paper. And sometimes we have one definition, and the person using the word has the absolute opposite. And I don't want to go through an entire evaluation, come to a meeting, write this beautiful report. And I actually didn't address the parent's question because they have a different definition than I do. So I think number one is making sure anyone who's using these terms that we are all on the same page regarding the definition, especially if you're bringing up the definition like we talked about before. I remember the first time I used the word dyslexia without the parent bringing it up first. And the parents' eyes got very wide in the conversation and they were like, I've never noticed B, D reversals.

And I said, oh, that's not what I meant by it at all. Like this is what I mean by the term. So I think that's an important thing for the school psychologist. But everyone on the evaluation team, when I do trainings, I love doing team training so that the special ed teacher, whoever's doing the academic part of the evaluation, a lot of times our speech and language pathologists are involved in these evaluations. I think it's important for all of us to be trained equally as well as understand across the board what are these different definitions that we're using? Because once we really understand what the concern is, then I think it makes it easier to pick the correct tools. Because if a parent testing for dysgraphia is more concerned with the motor component, then I've got one set of tools that I'm going to be using. But if they're like, oh no, their writing is beautiful, they just can't get their thoughts down on the paper, well, now I can set aside some tools, and now I definitely want to use other tools. And I think, you know, with shortages of so many school psychs and special educators across our nation, one of the terms I hear over and over again is how can we be more efficient with our time? And I think one of the ways we can be efficient is not over testing students.

And one of the best ways to avoid that is to really understand what's going on before we pick out the protocols. So doing all of that homework ahead of time so that we can really understand, oh, no, no, this is the concern. These are the best tools for us to be using. So I don't have to be having that student out of class even longer, having to write a longer report, having to discuss things that aren't relevant to this case.

Lauren Clouser:

That's such a good point. And to touch on that a bit more too, we had talked about earlier that the PSW approach to evaluation can help identify where students are struggling. So could you expand on how that can help to identify, not just identify a learning disability, but also help with the intervention and accommodation planning?

Jenny Ponzuric:

Again, there can be some controversy in this discussion here. So I just want to preface that if a student has a reading decoding difficulty, we definitely want interventions that are supporting a reading decoding difficulty. I'm going to talk about the learning profile of the student. I'm going to talk about processing areas of the student. There are certain processing areas that I can improve upon, but there's many that I can't. 

So for example, I personally struggle a lot with visual spatial skills. Like I never parallel park my car. I do not understand the space around my car. So if you're in the car with me, we're going to walk. That's what you just need to know. I don't know how to fix my visual spatial weaknesses. So if my visual spatial weaknesses are causing academic difficulties, trying to fix visual spatial difficulties isn't going to help support the academic area of concern. However, there are some areas that we can influence and help support. So going back to our dyslexia conversation, I have had students that are in an intervention program and their reading still is not improving. And when we've done this evaluation, it's because they're in the wrong intervention program.

They're in an intervention program that's really focusing on blending and segmenting, which are important skills. And this student has them. But this student is struggling with reading because of…fill in the blank. Another issue, perhaps orthographic processing. That could be a different intervention program. It depends on the school. Many schools have intervention programs that work on a lot of these different skills, but sometimes we don't. And we have a student who's in there 30 minutes, three times a week or five times a week, and they're not making progress because the intervention program isn't working for them, because that's not their issue.

And so I think it's important for us to figure out what is the main cause of some of these deficits academically that we're seeing so that the reading program that we are choosing is going to be most beneficial for this student's time, as well as the time of the person who's providing the intervention. I think it's also important when we think about accommodations. A lot of times when I do trainings, we kind of joke about, like, the top 10 accommodations that are on almost everyone's IEP. Like, it's not very individualized. If I could rattle off 10 accommodations that I see on, like, 90% of IEPs, I will throw out one: extra time.

Does every student need extra time? No. Many students do, but not everyone does. So what about what we learned in the evaluation would make us think that extra time would actually be useful for this student? There's so many times that we're at these IEP meetings for middle school students or high school students, and they've been in for a couple of years, and we notice there's like, 50 accommodations. I might be exaggerating a little bit. Accommodations on their IEP, and we're just like, are you even using this? Do you actually need this? And, you know, we sometimes are frustrated that general education teachers aren't providing every single accommodation on the list. Well, that's because sometimes not every accommodation is necessary for the student. So if we know the student is still struggling with decoding or is reading really slowly, or has really slow processing speed, these types of things would make us think, wow, extra time could be very useful for this student. But I think it's hard when we just give blanket accommodations just based on the fact that you're under SLD or you're under autism or something like that.

We don't want to overgeneralize and just assume this accommodation would be necessary for this student.

Lauren Clouser:

Definitely. Again, great points to bring up. So I think you're familiar with LDA's SLD evaluation standards, so I wanted to talk to you more about the ways that the standards align with how you approach evaluations. It sounds like we have a lot of overlap.

Jenny Ponzuric:

Absolutely. I think one of the important things that the standards talk about are making sure that we are tapping into all of the important people that need to be part of the evaluation. So I know, again, this kind of varies state to state and district to district, but if we are thinking about a student who may be struggling with reading because of underlying language concerns, we need to make sure our speech and language pathologists are part of that team, Whoever's doing that academic part of the evaluation. Not only are we making sure that all the important people are participating in the evaluation, but are we communicating and collaborating during this evaluation process so that we can really identify, you know, the patterns that we're seeing across all of these different evaluators? I think it's also really important. I mentioned a couple of them before, but when we're talking about, like, our second language learners, how are we gathering information about their cultural background, about their linguistic background, to make sure that we're not labeling a student as having a learning disability, when in fact they're just learning the language? I love special education. I love that we have this. And I also want to make sure we're not labeling students who actually don't have disabilities and removing them from their general education peers if that's actually not the most appropriate thing for this student to be able to continue to learn. So I think there's so many different aspects to the standards that are really important when we are taking a look at doing comprehensive evaluations for our students, writing reports that people can understand and not just full of jargon, and then communicating that information at the IEP meeting, again, in a way that families can understand.

This is definitely one of my passion topics, and is around explaining our evaluation results. When I left graduate school, I was taught to write for my graduate professors, which I'm just going to say I don't remember if we ever used the term ‘parent friendly.’ In all of my years of graduate school, we wrote at a really high level. And then I was taught to just explain. I gave this test. This is the score, that's interesting that the kid got a score of fill in the blank. But what does that actually mean in the instructional setting? And one of the things I keep coming back to is the fact that when you look at the list of people who are required to be at an IEP meeting, right. We know the gen-ed teacher has to be there.

We have to have an LEA rep. Of course the parent needs to be there. It doesn't say a school psychologist, like, it doesn't label people in that way. It says someone who can explain the instructional implications of our evaluation results. And that's a deeper level than just saying I gave the WISC and your kid's score is this. That next step is so what, like, what does that tell you about why the kid's doing really well over here or why this kid is struggling over here? And that takes time, and that takes knowledge, and that takes a little extra deeper understanding of our tools to be able to make that next step of connection. But I think that's the important piece.

Otherwise all we're doing is just sharing with parents what scores are again. Interesting, but maybe not the most useful in isolation.

Lauren Clouser:

Yeah, that's so true. Well, Jenny, before I let you go, I wanted to give you a chance to plug your podcast to tell people how they can get in contact with you. All that good stuff.

Jenny Ponzuric:

Excellent. Well, my podcast is called Tomorrow's School Psychologist. And you can find that wherever you get your podcasts. And then the best way to find out more information about all of my offerings is on my website, which is just my name, jennyponzuric.com, and that's where you can find out things like the prepared School Psych platform or the PSW Monthly. I also have a lot of blog posts and a lot of other freebies that if people may have your background, the school psychologist stuff might not be for you. We've got stuff for all of the different people who participate in the evaluation process. So head over to the website and check out the different resources that are over there.

Lauren Clouser:

Fantastic. Jenny, thank you so much for this great conversation.

Jenny Ponzuric:

Well, thank you so much for having me, Lauren.

Lauren Clouser:

Thank you for listening to the LDA podcast to learn more about LDA and to get valuable resources and support, visit LDAAmerica.org.