Teach Effectively!

Over on EBDblog, I’ve commented on the importance of providing services kids need in a couple of entries, one on selective mutism and another on denying services to a young man with EBD. The folks over at Mental Health Update picked up on the note about selective mutism and commented “Sometimes the ‘kids will be kids’ explanation falls short.”

Exactly! So I got to thinking about some of the excuses we make:

• Kids will be kids.
• She’ll outgrow it.
• He’s not ready to learn it.
• It’s just a phase or stage.
• He’s just being a boy.

And that reminded me of Jim’s fine article:

Kauffman, J. M. (1999). How we prevent the prevention of emotional and behavioral disorders. Exceptional Children, 65, 448-468.

Anyway, all of these things are simply ways to shirk the educational or instructional obligation. I suspect I’ll be returning to this topic, perhaps under the subject “bologna….”

Consistent with Doug Carnine’s focus, here are resources that provide a means of examining outcomes at individual schools.

• SchoolMatters
• The Education Trust
• GreatSchoolsNet (used to be Standard & Poors)
• Just for the Kids

Most of them appear to use similar data (scores on state’s high-stakes tests or NAEP) and aggregate them by school, LEA, or SEA.

Douglas Carnine received an award for his outstanding contributions to education. In a ceremony at the annual convention of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) in Baltimore (MD, US), CEC president Jim McCormick presented the J. E. Wallace Wallin Special Education Lifetime Achievement Award to Carnine on Friday 8 April 2005.

Carnine, who has conducted research, authored programs, written reports, and spoken frequently about effective instructional practices, was recognized for having “Shaped special education practice and legislation, leading to significant improvements [in] how millions of students with disabilities are taught.”

The word “millions” is not hyperbolic. Working tirelessly behind the scenes, Doug has helped many individuals, governmental agencies, and private organizations recognize the value of having clear standards and employing practices that allow students with and without disabilities to meet those standards. Doug’s influence, always exercised quietly and gently, has been equaled by few, if any, contemporary figures in education.

I mean “irritated” rather than “irrational.” Professor Plum’s annotated a news story about how the Rockford (IL, US) City Schools have lost funding for a Reading First project. See Kozloff’s edited version of the story. I’m wondering how many grants have been terminated at the (a) local or the (b) state education agency level.

Just in case our fearless readers don’t know, Peggy and I co-edit the Web site of the Division for Learning Disabilities, TeachingLD.org, where one can find lots of valuable information about effective teaching practices.

In a previous blog, I referred to linking learning goals, instruction, and evaluation. Much has been written about curriculum-based measurement (CBM) and its use in evaluating student performance, particularly in reading. (Click here for a tutorial by Stan Deno).

CBM is useful for connecting learning and instruction and for measuring the progress of students that do not appear to be moving along on standardized achievement tests. Unfortunately, many teachers think CBM requires a tremendous amount of front-end time to develop. It takes no time to use and is a great way to communicate progress to both students and parents.

Fortunately, there are resources for teachers who want to use CBM in the areas of phonological awareness, alphabetic principle, and fluency but who don’t have the time to create their own measures. The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy (or DIBELS) system is available on the web and, according to the site, “For the 2004-2005 school year, 7113 schools are actively using the DIBELS Data System, across 2234 districts in 49 states and Canada, totaling over 1.5 million students (K-3).” For more information and free downloads, check out the DIBELS website.

Ok. I’m a reluctant blogger but I’m going to take the plunge. I’ve read the posts on Teach Effectively and want to add my two cents (or perhaps 25 cents).

I am a former special educator at the middle and high school levels. I’ve worked with students with learning disabilities, emotional/behavioral disorders, traumatic brain injury, and Attention Deficit Disorder. I’ve worked in almost every special education environment: co-taught classrooms, resource rooms, self-contained classrooms, and a special school. I am completely convinced (by both anecdotal and empirical evidence) that good instruction and quality teachers make a difference.

In the last four years, I have had two children. Watching them learn, both incidentally and through planned activities, has made me understand how well-planned, quality instruction is vital to a child’s or an adult’s learning. I define well-planned (as many others before me) as instruction that is a series of progressive steps toward a goal. For example, one of the goals for my daughter (she’s almost 4) is for her to be able to write all of her letters correctly. Her teachers have helped her learn to accurately trace shapes that contain all of the lines used to make letters. She colors in those shapes to improve her fine motor skills. She has completed many other activities to hone the skills necessary to write letters. She has practiced each one of these skills over and over again. She can now write any letter you ask her to write—and they are all “in the lines.”

Why am I telling you this? Because this is a perfect example of TASK ANALYSIS. These teachers (or someone involved in developing these activities) have broken the task of writing into its basic components, taught those components, and therefore, the child has achieved the goal of writing letters. The art of task analysis is a lost skill, particularly at the secondary level. Complex tasks such as reading comprehension must be broken down into component steps in order for students to be taught. You can find a very thorough description of how to do a task analysis here

Once completed, a task analysis leads a teacher from instruction to evaluation—did the student achieve the goal? Where are the problems? What does my instruction need to address?
To me, the linking of learning goal, instruction, and evaluation is the only way to teach effectively.

Here’re some fun reads:

• The blog at Educationation.org, where Martin Kozloff holds forth as Professor Plum and tolerates little bologna;
• The Cranky Professor’s blog, where Michael Tinkler connects the medieval and the contemporary; and
• the witnit.