Following the Neurology Meets 2e Educational Needs

Rockaway College assumes Twice-Exceptionality as a synthesis of both giftedness/talentedness and cognitive/social-emotional deficit where strength compensates for weakness creating a unique and indivisible learning style.  It also fully acknowledges cognitive deficits will never be remediated to approach strength as innate neurological construction sets inelastic cognitive capacities even as children grow to maturity; however, the College recognizes that compensatory strategies can work together with strengths to achieve tasks.  The College additionally assumes the individual neuro-learning style of each child will emerge as an intrinsic motivation toward different aspects of learning content and skills, establishing quality differentiated outcomes for the different neuro-learning styles. 

Thus, Rockaway College follows the neurology of children in the way Susan Baum follows the Talent (To Be Gifted and Learning Disabled: Strategies for Helping Bright Students with LD, ADHD, and More, 2004), in the way Thomas Armstrong follows the gifts (Neurodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia and Other Brain Differences, 2010), in the way Stanley Greenspan follows the autistic child’s abilities in Floortime (The Floortime Approach to Helping Children Relate, Communicate and Think, 2003), in the way Maria Montessori follows children’s sensitive periods (The Secret of Childhood,1966).  

Following the individual neuro-learning style will satisfy the 2e need:

• to develop cognitive and social-emotional growth in subject and affective areas according to individual differences and pace

• to cultivate compensatory strategies for deficits complimenting talent development

• to possess high self-esteem

• to exercise a high degree of self-direction

• to form and employ their heightened curiosity and questioning

• to engage a wide range of interests

• as well as to connect with a specific talent or consuming interest area for which they have an exceptional memory and knowledge

• to effect high levels of problem-solving and reasoning skills leading to penetrating insights, advanced ideas and opinions which they will be encouraged to express

• to think divergently

• to apply a heightened creativity and imagination in approach to tasks

• to foster an outstanding vocabulary and a superior verbal expression

• to nurture expressive capacities across neuro-compatible media.

In other words, Rockaway College’s approach to learning in following the neuro-learning style to quality differentiate outcomes will satisfy the Twice-Exceptional need to individually acquire the knowledge and skills enabling each in their own way/in their own time to be next schooling level or career ready upon graduation and will satisfy their collective need to have developed the Mindfulness and the Empowerment to take full responsibility for the course of their lives.