ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews ways of understanding and responding to children with learning difficulties. It begins by arguing that, rather than viewing the child alone, or the context alone, we will achieve a better understanding of learning difficulties if we observe the child in the context in which the difficulties are arising. Strategies for teaching children to enhance achievement, participation and active learning, and the links between them, are then explored; these include target-setting, scaffolding and teaching thinking skills. Finally, it is argued that the teaching of children with learning difficulties, in the current absence of a solid, generalisable and educationally applicable theory of learning problems, works most effectively when professional knowledge of learning difficulties is shared amongst colleagues, when the area of learning causing difficulty is thoroughly understood, and when the teacher invests time to research carefully the precise nature of the child’s difficulties.
