Paraprofessionals in Learning Disabilities

Abstract

The purpose of this manuscript is to generate information about the paraprofessional concept as it relates to learning disabilities. A brief review of the paraprofessional literature is reported. The possible roles and responsibilities that could be included in a paraprofessional's job description were delineated and discussed. A structured, comprehensive, and flexible approach that LEA's could use to implement the concept was proposed. And the problems that are “inherent” in the paraprofessional concept were identified and possible strategies to eliminate or prevent these difficulties were suggested.

Supervising Paraprofessionals

“…For many years, paraprofessionals have been employed to provide assistance in special education programs, and special education teachers have held de facto responsibility for their supervision (Alexander, 1987;French & Pickett, 1997;Pickett, 1980Pickett, , 1986Pickett, , 1989Vasa, Steckelberg, & Ulrich-Ronning, 1982). There is some agreement that paraprofessionals perform their duties most effectively when they are appropriately supervised (Blalock, 1984;Boomer, 1980), when their roles are clearly defined (Blalock, 1991; Lindsey, 1983), when they are trained for assigned tasks (Courson & Heward, 1988;Frank, Keith, & Steil, 1988), and when they participate in regularly scheduled planning meetings (Miramontes, 1990;Pickett, Vasa, & Steckelberg, 1993).…”

Specific connectivity optimizes learning in thalamocortical loops

“…It is possible that there are feedback pathways communicating error signals to the thalamus that are themselves optimized by evolution and confer corticothalamic synapses with the potential for error-driven plasticity. Modeling studies have shown that such an approach is effective in the context of feedforward networks (Lee, Zhang, Biard, & Bengio, 2014; Akrout, Wilson, Humphreys, Lillicrap, & Tweed, 2019; Lindsey & Litwin-Kumar, 2020), and would make for an interesting alternative hypothesis of learning in thalamocortical loops. However, the predictions of such a model would be difficult to test because to our knowledge, pathways conveying error signals to the thalamus, if any, are yet to be mapped out.…”