Teachers who surf the Internet looking for guidance about instruction for students with disabilities might come upon recommendations that border on bogus. I found a page authored by Sue Watson that provides one valuable suggestion—”Ignore and avoid the labels - your main focus is on effective interventions”—and otherwise is chocked full of balogna. Here’s an abbreviated list of some of her recommendations.
- Use multiple-intelligences learning styles;
- Use study carrells;
- “Provide opportunities for a 3 minute stretch or a quick 5 minute by your desk workout”;
- Play “soft music”;
- “Use concrete manipulatives on a regular basis, once the student fully understands, you can move to the abstract” (sic);
- Use problem-based learning rather than drill and practice.
Arrrgh….I sure would like to see the evidence that those are effective interventions. I’ve written about the quality of another of Ms. Watson’s posts from About.com’s education guides previously; given that both of my encounters with her contributions have resulted in finding not-good recommendations, I’m going to scour the site more thoroughly now. This deserves careful scruitny.
Follow this link to read Ms. Watson’s entry on maximizing learning.
Cameron Marlow of the MIT Media Lab is collecting data about Weblogs. If you maintain a blog or contribute to one, you can help the folks there develop a statistical picture of the people who contribute to blogs by completing an anonymous survey. I gave at home. The image is a link.
Here’s one that should rouse a response among some readers: “A parent of a child with ADD has come up with a clothing line that aims at boosting self-esteem in people with ADD.”
Links to the story and to the clothing Web site.
In cost cutting moves, the New Orleans (LA, US) local education agency will reduce its teaching staff by 520 teachers, 150 of whom will be special educators, according to Brian Thevenot of the Times-Picayune. “It’s unclear whether the cuts, while in some cases severe, will affect the system’s delivery of services to students,” Mr. Thevenot reported.
Responding to concerns over the cuts to special-education teachers from 950 to 800, [Interim superintendent Ora] Watson said the reduction stemmed in part from a plan to stop the inappropriately high identification of special-education students. Many, she said, have no learning disability other than the year-after-year failure of the city’s public schools to teach them properly.
Moreover, a study unearthed some special-education teachers who seemed to be hardly working, teaching as few as two class periods per day while students rotated into regular education classes.
Link.
Humane discipline policies that recognize students’ difficulties are needed in schools, according to Charlotte Observer columnist Kay McSpadden (who is a high school English teacher). Ms. McSpadden recommends that policies eschew simple punishment in favor of, “addressing the underlying brain dysfunctions or social ills.” In addition, she argued for greater support of and better training for teachers.
Frontline classroom teachers need to be better trained to recognize learning disabilities and mental illnesses in young children. Special education teachers need more time to collaborate with regular education teachers to craft meaningful individualized education plans for those children.
Link.
The Institute for Educational Studies (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education is inviting comments about the priorities that it will propose to its advisory group, the National Board for Education Sciences. These priorities will guide the research that the IES will fund. The general priority is described in this way:
The Institute’s over-arching priority is research that contributes to improved academic achievement for all students, and particularly for those students whose education prospects are hindered by inadequate education services and conditions associated with poverty, race/ethnicity, limited English proficiency, disability, and family circumstance.
The full document develops the priorities in a more fine-grained way.
Links to the Federal Register entry as a PDF or as HTML.
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