Teach Effectively!

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.

1. Use multiple-intelligences learning styles;
2. Use study carrells;
3. “Provide opportunities for a 3 minute stretch or a quick 5 minute by your desk workout”;
4. Play “soft music”;
5. “Use concrete manipulatives on a regular basis, once the student fully understands, you can move to the abstract” (sic);
6. 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.

Mayhaps we should start a list of sham therapies. We could call it The Hall of Hokum.

All in favor, add a nominee to the comments for this article. Just make sure to use the word “hokum” in the body.

Every now and again, I see something that leaves me at a loss about whether I should giggle or sob. One of those times occurred this evening. While I was working on something else entirely unrelated, I found an abstract that left me in siggle-gobs and from which I selected this excerpt:

Stereotypical behaviour, repetitive actions with no apparent purpose, are often found in people with learning disabilities and sensory impairment. Stereotypical behaviour can take the form of self injurious actions, such as eye poking, but even harmless activity such as rocking backwards and forwards can be undesirable. Such behaviour allows a person to create their own sensory stimulation and to retreat into a world that is safe, consistent and rewarding. This article reviews how aromatherapy and massage can play a role in reducing stereotypical behaviour.

Yes, you have that right. It recommends aromatherapy (and massage) for people with Learning Disability (in this case, apparently in the sense that LD is used in Great Britain). Not only that, but this abstract indicates that the accompanying article empowers the individual with disabilties and it purports to base its conclusions a review of the literature.

I like pleasant smells and touches just about as much as anybody, but can this be serious? Actually, mayhaps it’s a more gentle form of sensory integration therapy. Maybe there really is a literature showing not only that the limbic system is influenced by the olfactory system, but that therapies based on smell have salutary positive effects on social interaction and learning. I just wish that effective teaching procedures didn’t have to compete with these sorts of therapies. Not everything is good. Just because we can respond to criticims by saying something like, “Well, it can’t hurt,” doesn’t mean it will help. Furthermore, investing time, effort, funds, and hope in therapies that can’t hurt probably does come at the expense of time, effort, funds, and hope for therapies that have a better-than-average record for producing benefits. Aaarrrrgh. Enough said. My siggle gobs are progressing too far in the direction of irritation.

Here’s the link. One can gain access to a full copy of the article for a fee.