Brilliance Unleashed: Extraordinary Success in Kids with Severe Learning Disabilities (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798996178902)

Twelve children. Twelve prognoses that turned out to be wrong.

For decades, children with severe learning disabilities have been defined by what they cannot do. They are labeled, underestimated, and quietly written off by systems that mistake a diagnosis for a ceiling.

In Brilliance Unleashed, developmental psychologist Dr. Marion Blank tells the true stories of twelve children she treated over more than fifty years of clinical work. They faced autism, dyslexia, deafness, blindness, cerebral palsy, and language impairments so severe that speech was considered out of reach. Every one of them was expected to live a life bounded by their diagnosis.

They didn't.

This is not a method book with case studies bolted on. Each chapter is one child, one situation everyone agreed was hopeless, and an honest account of what was tried and why, including the months where nothing moved and the approaches that nearly failed.

Dr. Blank's work centers on something most reading programs skip: the hundred or so small non-content words that carry roughly sixty percent of everything we read, write and say. Mastery of those words, not phonics drill, is where she found the leverage.

For parents who have been told to lower their expectations, and for the teachers, clinicians and therapists who suspect the child in front of them is capable of more.