Evidence-based teaching methods for helping students who are at risk for school failure or who have disabilities.
Sometimes when I grow weary of the happytalk and know-nothingness that seems all too common in education, I turn to various sources for reminders that there are some folks who take hard, clear, grounded looks at instructional issues. Here are a couple for all two readers of this source to peruse:
Over on Another Day in Pleasantville, a teacher who identifies herself as “Pleasantvillian” posts—with wry and understated wit—about her teaching experiences. One post is about her observation early in the school year in a special day class where she saw a teacher requesting that students practice raising their hands and answering “here” when the teacher called the roll.
Teacher: “Diane. Okay, now Diane, when I say your name, I need you to say here and raise your hand. Now what do you say?”
Diane: “Thank you”
Teacher: “No, you say “here”. Can you say “here”?”
Diane: “Here”
Teacher: “Good. Now raise your hand. (pause) Diane, raise your hand. (pause) “Come on.”And Diane just stared back. I tried to hold back a laugh. Apparently, the teacher had forgotten that Diane’s arms are velcroed to the side of her body because she engages in self injurous behaviors.
Ooops! Mayhaps it’s just a mistake. They happen. Mayhaps dysteachia is alive and well in Pleasantville.
Link to Ms. Pleasantville’s post.
Why, oh why, are the intrapsychic explanations so embedded in our culture? In a brief article headed by “Learning is affected by many factors,” Doreen Nagle (Gannett News Service) describes four reasons for a child’s not reading for pleasure. They are all based on the view that there are hidden explanations for human behavior. Here’s her lead and the first explanation.
You beg your 8-year-old (known for his advanced reading skills) to pick up a book and read. He responds by whining or worse.
…
Why is my child not motivated?
Could it be a learning disability? Testing may put your mind at ease. Ask your pediatrician as well as your child’s school for a full evaluation.
There are lots of reasons to reject Ms. Nagle’s analysis. This snippet shows only one: Learning Disability is not the result of a lack of motivation. If children with Learning Disabilities were not motivated, then all we would need would be some powerful reinforcers, as we have argued in earlier posts on TeachEffectively (here) and LDBlog (here).
The other explanations and solutions Ms. Nagle offers are about equally inane. She suggests
This is dime-store psychology. There is a much simpler, more direct, and likely-effective approach: Make reading at home fun! Engage the child in conversation about something he’s read and act interested in what he tells you (“Wow, that’s cool! Of course you can’t flush in weightlessness, so it makes sense that those astronauts have to use a hose”). Talk with him about interesting things you’ve read (“You know, just yesterday I was reading about Jackie Robinson. I didn’t know that he was also really good at basketball…and I found out that he refused to sit at the back of the bus in the 1940s! Way before all the civil rights protests.”). Crack up when he tells you something funny that he’s read (“Woooweee! I can’t believe a president would say somthing like that either!”). Do these things over and over again, referring to different readings, and the ball will roll downhill.
Link to Ms. Nagle’s story in the IndyStar (Indianapolis, IN, US).
An Australian site that bills itself as “The Institute of Perceptual Learning,” is “Introducing A Powerful Program That Guarantees Your 6 To 36 Month Old Child Will Learn The Essential Skills They Need To Excel In School And Life!” It advocates something, though it isn’t quite clear to me what it is. I read the text there, but I could not find an objective, procedural description of what the advocates propose to do to promote perceptual learning. (I’m also interested in what learning doesn’t involve perception, but that’s a different question.)
Perceptual learning in your child occurs when they are repeatedly exposed to specific reading and maths concepts. These long lasting and amazing changes to their perceptual system incredibly improve their ability to effectively and positively respond to life and school.
The site has enough typos to make me doubt the power of the program it is selling. As read the material, I began to think the arguments sounded a good bit like the look-say rationale of the 1950s and 60s. Later, I started to remember the patterning and such recommended by Doman and Delacato. Yikes!
I’m with Gary Feng on this one. He commented, “Claims about Brain-based Education are rarely materialized, and if they do, they often have little to do with the brain part of the hype. What matters is what you do to the child and what the child does. And I can’t see how Mr. Lim could fulfull his guarantees.”
Link to the Web site of the Institute of Perceptual Learning.
Ms. Erika-Renee L. teaches high school in the Boston (MA, US) area and maintains a blog where she sometimes has entries about her teaching experiences. In a post about the beginning of school, she wrote:
I’ve also taken on extra lower-level English classes, and I’m amazed at how much they struggle with reading. I know, for many of them, their last English class was anywhere between 6th and 8th grade, and it wasn’t a good experience. I had to make a deal with my last class of the day – if they each tried to read one line aloud, I’d let them out five minutes early. It was so, so hard for some of them, and it was painful to watch them struggle like that.
She’s got it right! It is terribly painful to listen as a student who’s got poor decoding skills reads a passage—let alone, a line from a poem with all the often less-predictable syntax and words they include.
I see this as a fine description of the consequences of not teaching effectively. Students simply shouldn’t get to HS with inadequate reading skills. I’m not suggesting that they should be “held back,” but that some time over the years someone should have taught them to read. We know how to do it.
Maleducation is afoot and Ms. L.’s experience reflects it. Bummer
Link to Ms. L.’s post.
Oceanside High School (CA, US) is touting an effort to provide inclusive course work for students with Learning Disabilities and other students receiving resource special education, according to a story by Louise Esola in the North County Times. The story has undercurrents of concern about stigma and motivation. Here’s a quote of the more objective aspects of it:
For the first time ever, about 90 percent of the school’s 300 special education students are now enrolled in mainstream classes alongside their peers, according to Oceanside High special education teacher Paulette Raye.
And the only time those students will break away from their regular classes is for a once-a-day academic assistant class or to take an extra math or English class —- known as a “ramp up” course —- to help them keep up with the general education students.
For students who still need the extra help, the school is offering optional, special education-only, after-school tutoring in half a dozen courses.
I have to wonder what evaluation they’ll conduct. If there is an evaluation, would anyone like to place a bet on what the outcome variables might be? Self-reports by students about preferences? Parents preferences? Teachers’ anecdotes? Students’ acquisition of content and skills? I wouldn’t bet on the last of these being used.
Link to Ms. Esola’s story.
Kris Wood, a high school special education teacher in Des Moines (IA, US), sometimes posts to her blog about her experiences in schools. In one recent post she gave us a glimpse behind the scenes into a scheduling problem for special education services at her school. It wasn’t a pretty portrait.
So we just conferenced between us, determining which students we DID see during the course of the day and which ones weren’t being seen by anyone. We divvied up the ones we saw, in order to make sure that the person monitoring their IEP progress was someone they actually SEE during the school day. There were quite a few who are being seen by NO-ONE — which is in direct violation of federal law.
Now realize what I say that we “see” a student, here’s what I mean. For example, let’s say I’m “collaborating” in a Conceptual Algebra class. Let’s say there are six Resource students in that class. Theoretically, those students are being “served” as Resource students because I’m IN their classroom with them.
Where this goes awry is that each individual student has individual goals. Four of those six students may not even have a math goal; they’re in Resource because of their low reading level. But they’re being “served” in a MATH class.
I may be misreading this, but it seems to me that Ms. Wood is describing a major impediment to providing effective services! If the students’ schedules are poorly coordinated and the provision of services is constrained in the way Ms. Wood describes, teachers are hamstrung. They do not get to see the students when they can help them and they can’t focus on the areas of concern.
Read her entry for yourself and see what you think.
Bonnie Slade, who writes an advice column about parenting for the Sebastian Sun (Stuart, FL, US), advised the parent of a 9-year old with reading problems to seek tutoring and to fund it via insurance or a McKay Scholarship. I was intrigued by the availability of the scholarships and will have to learn more about them, but I found myself wishing that Ms. Slade had advised the parent to confront the school more directly. Parents are allies in pressing schools to teach effectively. They have the clout to promote teaching effectively.
In the standard arrangement for advice columnist (teehee, do we have “Dear Abby” to thank for this?), the advice column begins:
Dear Dr. Slade:
My 9-year-old son has had part-time learning disabilities help for two years now because he has trouble reading. He is bright. The school tested him and said his IQ is in the top fifth, but he can barely read.
He has an IEP (individualized education plan), but the school program does not seem to get his reading better. I don’t know what to do. We don’t have alot of money for tutoring or private school. What other ideas are there? Signed, Micco Parent
Given that situation, I would probably have different advice. I would suggest that the parent request an IEP meeting immediately and, taking a copy of the Shannon Carter case with her, insist that the boy get powerful remedial reading instruction starting the next school day. Schools must be made aware that there are effective teaching practices they can employ and that just about anyone—even parents—can identify them. I’d recommend that the parent request weekly reports showing her son’s reading performance on simple, direct measures of decoding and comprehension—words read per minute from grade level texts and number of blanks completed in the maze procedure.
Ms. Slade recommends Lindamood Bell tutoring, which is probably better than the average dog, but certainly not the be-all. First, as Batya Elbaum and colleagues (2000, Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, 605-619) showed tutoring is not necessarily important, that small-group instruction is just as effective. Second, although the Lindamood-Bell program is better than a lot of the junk that masquerades as remedial reading instruction, it’s probably not the best; the school needs to employ the most effective methods as a standard and then use others as needed.
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