Teach Effectively!

That National Association of State directors of Special Education has launched a Web resource, Project Forum, aimed at administrators and policy makers concerned with special education. The developers plan to identify 15 “hot” topics per year and disseminate policy papers on each. Here’s the current list of topics.

• Bureau of Indian Affairs and State Education Agencies Roles and Responsibilities for IDEA
• Deaf-Blind
• Early Intervening Services
• Education Service Agencies
• English Language Learners with Disabilities
• Highly Mobile Children with Disabilities
• Juvenile Justice Policy Analysis
• Juvenile Justice State Infrastructures
• NLTS-2 Synthesis
• Publicly-Placed Private School Students with Disabilities
• Risk Pools
• School-based Medicaid
• SEELS Synthesis
• SEEP Synthesis
• Standards-based IEPs

Hmmmm….I guess I’d consider effective practices to be a pretty hot topic, but perhaps it isn’t among higher-level administrators. I wonder if future agendas will include anything on, say, research-validated procedures. I hope so.

Link to the Project Forum site.

Over on Letters from Lisa one can read Lisa’s clearly written comments on a conflict she experienced in fundamental teaching approaches. She describes her initial successes using discrete trials training (“ABA”) and how those experiences conflicted with what she was later told by graduate school professors was the right way to do things (child-centered, discovery, etc.).

The post is a very good treatment of the conflicting perspectives dominating education. People who are familiar with the instructivist-constructivist battles will recognize the arguments readily. What’s the resolution? Ultimately, Lisa describes her move to using systematic instruction embedded in more naturalistic situations.

Link to Lisa’s post.

That’s the title of an article by Joel Best, an academic at the University of Delaware, that is in the 14 April 2006 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Knowing what I know about the problemsome practice of special education, I turned to the article to see what arguments he was going to use in discussing the topic in higher education. As it happens, Mr. Best cataloged a lot of familiar sounding fads in his discussion. Here’s his lead.

I have spent nearly 25 years chairing academic departments at three universities. Department chairmen attend many meetings where the future is unveiled, priorities are articulated, and innovations are announced. Over the years, I have been assured that our university — if not all of higher education — was about to be transformed by the Pacific Rim, assessment, active learning, cooperative learning, distance learning, service learning, problem-based learning, responsibility-based management, zero-based budgeting, broadening the general-education requirements, narrowing the general-education requirements, capstone courses, writing across the curriculum, affirmative action, multicultural education, computer networking, the Internet, water (don’t ask), critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and I don’t know what else. I have gone on retreats; participated in program reviews; served on task forces; puzzled over mission statements; written five-year plans, three-year plans, and niche reports; and listened to proclamations from pro-vosts, assistant provosts, deans, associate deans, and wannabe deans.

Some of those much-heralded innovations are long forgotten. Others remain housed somewhere on the campus, but I think it is fair to say that higher education hasn’t changed all that much, that none of these ideas proved to be as transformative as their advocates predicted. Compared to their advance billing, they all turned out to be short-term enthusiasms or — more bluntly — educational fads.

Mr. Best notes that fads are not solely the province of higher education. He lists medicine, elementary and secondary education, and business as also susceptible to the plague. What is more, Mr. Best hits the theme of Teach Effectively squarely on the head later in the article. He notes that fads are routinely adopted—and abandoned—before there are careful examinations of their effects. He strongly recommends higher education to “wait for some evidence that [a fad] actually works.”

Link to Mr. Best’s column [subscription may be required].

Over on The Life that Chose Me, Dick has an entry about teachers who work in special education on only a temporary basis. Parking it in Special Ed. is worth a read.

Over on LD Blog I have a post seeking reviewers for CEC convention proposals; if you can help, please let me know.

This is, I aver, an actual quotation from an editorial attributed to a superintendent of schools named Randy McCoy. I have presented only the first part of it; you can read the remainder yourself.

The teaching of reading is the cornerstone of our educational process.

In the Tupelo Public School District we begin with teaching children to recognize letters, sounds of letters, sounds of letter combinations, and then words.

Reading is learned, and it is not innate like learning to walk and talk. Reading is more than just calling words.

Students must understand what they read and then be able to apply that knowledge.

In our school district we begin teaching by using the Guided Reading Process.

This process requires teachers to apply research-based approaches to reading instruction.

Randy McCoy’s email address is rdmccoy@tupelo.k12.ms.us. He is superintendent of the Tupelo Public Schools.

To me, this reads like an excellent example of saying lots of nothing. There are lots of buzz phrases here—”not innate”; “more than calling words”—and little substance.

The author asserts the reading program is research-based. Shall we just take his word for it? How do I know the “Guided Reading Process” is founded on scientific evidence? Sadly, this gobbleygook dominates the rap in education.

Please tell me, how do you know? What’s the basis for your certainty? Could you, please, show us your data?

Link to Mr. McCoy’s statement. I wonder whether Mr. McCoy wrote this himself.

A special educator who calls herself “mama t” in her blog and had previously reported that she was ready to bail from teaching, last week wrote that she has decided to stay. Although she is bothered by aspects of contemporary education—especially testing and matter of “highly qualified” imposed by NCLB (often called “nickle bee”; hence the title of this entry)—she has decided to opt for the stability and rewards she gets from teaching.

in the coming year i’ll be taking more certification tests. specifically for: ELA 4-8, ELA 8-12, Reading Specialist, and Librarian. this way, when my current job moves from a resource classroom to a co-teaching situation i’ll be able to get a job in which i can maintain my own classroom or leave the classroom for a library. longterm i would like to pursue a Master’s in Information Science and become a full-fledged librarian.

I hope this works for her. More importantly, I hope that she learns about evidence-based educational practices during her studies. (I have a post about an earlier posting of mama t’s in which she lauds the discredited modality view of learning; I should polish it and post it. I think I got lost with a lead about how she uses “missteach” in the URL and I sometimes use “misteach” in referring to bogus teaching ideas such as modality-based reading.)

Link to Ms. t’s statement about staying with teaching.