When a child struggles in school, teachers must first determine the underlying factors contributing to the learning or behavior problem: When a child misbehaves, the reason may not be readily apparent. Similarly, when a child fails to or refuses to complete work, it is rarely because of poor motivation. Lowered motivation in students is often a secondary symptom, resulting from chronic school difficulties.

Over many years of working with students, psychologists, special education teachers, general education teachers, and parents, we have developed a simple framework for explaining why children experience learning and behavior problems in the classroom. We call this framework the Building Blocks of Learning, and it contains 10 building blocks stacked into the shape of a pyramid.

Foundational Blocks

The foundational blocks provide the support system for all learning. Just as the foundation of a house must be strong enough to support the structure, these four blocks must be strong in order for learning to occur:

• Attention and Impulse Control
  
  This building block includes the abilities to pay attention and control impulses, abilities critical to all learning. The basis of some students' attention and behavior difficulties stem from poor self-regulation, and problems with impulse control can prevent students from focusing on the relevant requirements of classroom learning tasks. Some students have trouble maintaining persistent effort and are easily distracted when attempting to pursue a goal.
  
  
• Emotions and Behavior
  
  The building block of emotions and behavior includes the child's general temperament, as well as his or her moods. Conditions such as depression, anxiety, oppositionality, and motivation can significantly affect a child's availability for learning. Difficulties in school also affect attitude and performance. For example, a student's difficulties with spelling can affect his or her attitude and willingness to persevere on tasks requiring writing.
  
  
• Self-Esteem
  
  The building block of self-esteem is related to how a child perceives him- or herself and to what factors he or she attributes successes and failures. These are learned attitudes, developed in part through feedback from parents, teachers, and peers. Poor academic self-esteem affects a child's willingness to persist on tasks until they are completed. For example, one student's writing difficulties were affecting her self-perception, and she was beginning to believe that she was not good at anything.
  
  
• Learning Environment
  
  The learning environment block includes the supports provided for the child in the home and school, as well as the types of services, such as speech-language or occupational therapy, that he or she receives. Although we know the home environment exerts a powerful influence on a child's school adjustment, our focus here is on the learning environment at school. Children with learning and behavior problems benefit from certain types of environments. For example, one student's lack of support coupled with the chaos at home were having a significant effect on his self-image and his emotional availability to engage in academic tasks. The teacher has a primary responsibility for creating a nurturing, supportive classroom environment.

Symbolic Blocks

The second level of the building blocks involves the processing of information through the senses. The abilities in these blocks help children to gain access to, produce, recall, and retrieve information about the symbolic aspects of language. In general, symbolic processing abilities are conceptualized as secretarial in nature because they primarily involve the coding systems of language: decoding (i.e., word identification), encoding (i.e., spelling), and motor coding (i.e., handwriting); and strengths and weaknesses within these blocks affect basic skill performance. Isaacson (1989) aptly distinguished between the roles of the secretary and the author in the writing process. The secretary manages the mechanical concerns of writing, such as spelling, punctuation, and handwriting (i.e., skills of the symbolic blocks), whereas the author formulates, organizes, and expresses ideas (i.e., abilities of the conceptual blocks).

Some children have trouble with the visual aspects of learning to read and spell, such as remembering which way to write the letter b. Other children have trouble with phonological tasks (e.g., rhyming words, identifying the discrete sounds in words) or with aspects of verbal memory (e.g., trying to recall the names of the months in correct order). Still, others do poorly with the motor aspects of learning and have trouble cutting with scissors or forming letters. These cognitive and motor difficulties often cause academic problems, and children with marked weaknesses in these blocks are likely to be diagnosed as having a reading disability or LD. The skills in the symbolic blocks depend heavily on rote memory and must be automatic for performance to be the most effective:

• Visual Block
  
  A major part of the visual block is the perception and recall of letter strings and word forms. This ability, known as orthographic awareness, allows one to form a mental representation of the appearance of a letter or word. In addition, orthographic sensitivity helps one to become aware of the common spelling patterns that exist in a language.
  
  Another part of the visual block involves automatic retrieval of letters and words. This ability is needed to recall basic sight vocabulary for both reading and spelling. A student with initial weaknesses in this block is likely to have a slow reading rate in later years. Major problems with spelling, for example, can be due to poor orthographic awareness.
  
  
• Auditory Block
  
  A major part of the auditory block is an ability identified as phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is the oral language ability to understand the sound structure of speech. This awareness allows one to manipulate language sounds. As students learn an alphabetic language such as English, a critical first step is becoming aware that speech can be divided or sequenced into a series of discrete sounds, words, syllables, and phonemes, the smallest units of sound. In most instances, this awareness develops gradually during the preschool and early elementary years. Difficulties with reading and spelling can be caused by poor phonological awareness. Some students have trouble discriminating similar speech sounds and often omit sounds when spelling a word or confuse certain sounds, such as writing ck for ch.
  
  Another part of the auditory block involves verbal short-term memory, or the ability to repeat back what has just been heard. This type of skill is needed in order to follow directions in a classroom or write down notes during a lecture. Difficulty with this block is related to remembering rote information, such as learning letter names or memorizing multiplication tables. In some cases, difficulties are primarily related to memory. In other cases, problems with short-term memory tasks can be more related to weaknesses in attention or language.
  
  
• Motor Block
  
  The motor block consists of two types of abilities: gross motor skills, the skills involving large muscle movements such as jumping and running, and fine motor skills, the skills involving small muscles such as writing or drawing. A child may have a strength or weakness in one or both of these areas. In other words, a child skilled in soccer may or may not possess the ability to produce neat handwriting in the classroom. In addition, fine motor skills can be broken into two types: the skills involved in symbol production (i.e., writing letters and numbers) and the skills involved in artistic expression (i.e., drawing a picture). Some children can sketch or draw wonderful illustrations but are stymied by the production of symbols. This difficulty with producing the motor patterns needed for writing is referred to as dysgraphia. Some students possess weaknesses in motor planning that make it difficult to perform all types of fine motor and gross motor tasks.

Conceptual Blocks

The top of the pyramid includes conceptual abilities: thinking with language, images, and strategies. The abilities in the conceptual blocks help children to understand meanings, comprehend relationships, visualize complex designs, and apply previously acquired knowledge as they engage in academic tasks:

• Language
  
  Thinking with language involves tasks such as comprehending written text, expressing ideas through speaking and writing, and learning and using new vocabulary. Students with strengths in language tend to speak easily and possess an expansive vocabulary. Students with weaknesses in language often experience difficulty with tasks involving comprehension or production of text. For example, one student had weaknesses in language, and subsequently, her answers often missed the mark. One day, her teacher showed her a picture of four trees and then asked her, "Half of these trees would be how many?" The student asked as she drew a horizontal line across the trees, "You mean if you cut them this way?"
  
  
• Images
  
  Thinking with images involves reproducing complex visual patterns and designs, as well as understanding and judging spatial relationships. Some children struggling in school have extremely advanced visual-spatial abilities. For example, one child could produce intricate sketches of machines and rebuild a motorcycle engine, but he had trouble spelling even common words. Other children have more difficulty with tasks of a nonverbal nature and tend to have particular difficulty grasping and acquiring mathematical concepts. These children may also have trouble with developing social competence. They have trouble recognizing, evaluating, and interpreting gestures and facial expressions.

Strategies

Thinking with strategies involves thinking about thinking or what is referred to as metacognition. This block includes the executive functions used to direct all cognitive activities and includes the abilities to plan, organize, monitor, evaluate, and reflect on one's own learning. This block is placed at the top because of its importance. Strengths in this block help students to be purposeful and self-regulated and to engage in goal-directed behavior. Ultimately, if a student becomes a strategic learner, he or she is usually able to compensate and adjust for weaknesses in other areas.

In thinking about the learning and behavior of students, one can understand the role that specific weaknesses in one or more of the building blocks can play in creating school difficulties. When the blocks are stacked together as a model, one can understand how a child's unique learning and behavior characteristics, as well as the child's support system and strengths, affect his or her success in school. The first goal is to identify and cultivate a student's strengths; the second is to identify and address the weaker areas and abilities so that appropriate accommodations and instructional plans can be developed.

Many different combinations of skills are possible. The slogan "one size fits all" does not apply to the learning abilities or disabilities of children. Children's difficulties result from qualitative differences. When designing academic and behavioral interventions for specific students, a more accurate adage is "one size fits one."