Over on The Life that Chose Me, Dick has an account of a meeting between school staff and the parent of a child with disabilities. Dick, who’s a special educator who has published multiple insightful entries on TLtCM, is the parent in this case. Regardless of whether one agrees with Dick’s view, his entry, “The Meeting that Chose Me,” should be required reading for most special educators.
Sphere: Related ContentArchive for August, 2006
Teach Effectively is joining Sheryl’s promotion of National De-lurking Week on Paper Napkin. I’m looking for a place to put this image in the navigation elements at the right (maybe with a countdown timer). Please provide suggestions about locating it by leaving a comments on this post [teehee].
The hope-and-optimism time of the school year is upon us. Have you seen examples? There is a hint of it in the welcome entry Jennifer Sadowski posted on a school’s blog.
Welcome Back! My name is Jennifer Sadowski and I am proud to say I am the school’s new Reading Specialist. I recently graduated from DePaul University with a master’s degree in Reading and Learning Disabilities along with a Reading Specialist certificate. Prior to this year, I taught first grade here at St. Bens. As much as I loved working in the wonderful world of first grade, I am greatly looking forward to working with the teachers and the students from grades K-8.
My responsibilities as the Reading Specialist include providing weekly professional development workshops to the teachers as well as providing remedial reading instruction, in the form of a pull-out program, to those students who struggle to acquire literacy concepts. In addition, I will also be providing supplementary assistance, again in the form of a pull-out program, to those students who excel in literacy.
I hope that Ms. Sadowski will be using effective teaching practices. I wondered whether the Depaul Web site might offer an indication, so I burrowed around there. You can see links to what I found at the end.
I learned that Depaul adheres pretty closely to the standards recommended by the International Reading Association (IRA), mixes in standards from other organizations (e.g., Illinois State Board of Education, ISBE), and employs standard rubrics for describing students’ knowledge and skills. There are 29 standards, covering competencies addressing “Disciplinary Foundations” (neither IRA or ISBE), “Inquiry & Reading Research,” Major Components of Reading” (IRA), “Reflection and Professional Development” (IRA), and “Communication with Wider Audiences” (ISBE not IRA). These are brief statements that say little. For example, here is the standard for “Effective Reading Instruction” indicating that the candidate for a degree with emphasis on reading and learning disabilities “Plans and uses appropriate instructional practices to provide effective reading instruction for students at varying developmental levels.”
The description reminds me of what I’ve seen elsewhere (sometimes including my august school of education, I’m sorry to say). It’s the usual mix of great emphasis on knowing a lot of somewhat relevant stuff but not knowing how to do the really important stuff. I think this sort of material would attract scorn from people who have little patience with contemporary schools’ emphasis on peripheral aspects of teacher education rather than on making dang sure that teachers can do the critical things needed. See, for example, Professor Plum’s EducatioNation commentaries (which sadly, are not updated often these days) or the Instructivist.
I hope, of course, that those criticisms would be inaccurate. I hope that the Depaul faculty showed Ms. Sadowski how to teach segmenting, blending, phoneme-grapheme relationships, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehesnion strategies—not, “Oh here are some strategies you could use” or “There are many equally good ways to introduce letter sounds” or “You need to find the mis of methods that fits your teaching style”—and then put Ms. Sadowski in difficult teaching situations where expert teachers provided models and feedback so that she could practice the effective strategies to mastery. In short, I hope that Ms. Sadowski learned exactly how to teach beginning and remedial reading effectively. I hope all the standards were there because, after she got really good at teaching, the faculty explained where those effective practices fit in the panolopy of opinions about reading and how the research on those practices far and away outruns the inquiry on other methods and views.
Link to Ms. Sadowski’s post. Link to the Depaul School of Education site where you can read about the program in reading and Learning Disabilities and download MS Word documents providing the standards and rubrics. Link to the section of the International Reading Association site on teacher education. Link to Professor Plum’s commentaries and the Instructivist.
Sphere: Related ContentBased on a story by a colleague, here’s a suggestion: If you are an elementary school teacher who attended a teacher education program and you were not taught expressly how to teach beginning reading (phoneme segmentation, blending, letter-sound associations, decoding, fluency), please write to the dean of your school, college, or department of education and explain that you were mal-educated and you hope that the school you attended is doing a better job of preparing teachers now.
Then, let me know that you did it, please.
Sphere: Related ContentResponse to intervention or instruction (RtI) models are to be employed in southeastern Pennysylvania (US), according to a story by Robyn Meadows of the Lancaster New Era. The concepts in this story are related to those described in earlier posts on LD Blog, including “IDEA regs examined” and “LD regs and RtI.”
As the references to the earlier posts imply, the publicity for the models stems, in part, from the announcement earlier in August of regulations for the implentation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004; those regulations describe how RtI models can be used as a part of the process for identifying students with Learning Disabilities. However, the concept for RtI are also closely connected with the Reading First initiative of the 2001 revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, now known as the No Child Left Behind act. The big idea is to provide primary prevention with supplemental services for those students who are found to experience difficulty, based on frequent and direct assessments of important reading components (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension); for students who continue to have difficulty, even when they have received supplemental services, there should be an even-more intense and focused level of instruction with continuing monitoring of progress.
What are the tiers?
In these multi-tiered models, general educators should provide evidence-based instruction that has the greatest likelihood of preventing problems (this is often called “tier 1”). When some students do not acquire important skills and knowledge, as indicated by direct and systematic monitoring of pupil progress, general educators should implement appropriate measures to help those students (what is often called “tier 2”); examples of appropriate measures are (a) additional practice opportunities (including more than additional time devoted to instruction, more opportunities to respond or practice, etc.), (b) enriched reinforcement schedules, and (c) reduced latency between student errors and teacher provision of correction of those errors.
- Tier 1 should be predicated on a broad, general literacy curriculum (akin to what’s sometimes called a “basal”) that provides explicit and intergrated instruction in all of the five basic areas. Ideally, the curriculum should have been tested by researchers and found to be effective. Literacy instruction should occupy at least 90 minutes of each student’s time each school day. Students’ progress should be monitored frequently. The educators with the greatest responsibility for instruction at this tier should be the general education teacher.
- Tier 2 should include additional time devoted to reading instruction, with supplemental materials focused on each student’s needs. The instruction should occur in smaller groups, afford the students more frequent opportunties to respond, and use strong reinforcement techniques. Again, frequent progress monitoring should be built into the instruction. The educators with the greatest responsibility for instruction at this tier should be the reading specialists.
- Tier 3 should be available to those students who have not succeded in the first two tiers. It should be even more intense and expressly geared to a student’s unique educational needs. Students’ performance should be monitored closely and interventions that do not result in clear progress should be discarded. In most RtI models, this is comparable to special education, though some reserve a fourth tier for special education; many people and professional organziations advocate full evaluations for special education as a part of advancement to tier-3 services.
What constitutes a “response” and how is it measured?
Students’ response to intervention, regardless of the tier, would be reflected in growth on measures of reading performance in the five areas. Measures should be direct, collected frequently, and used to make instructional decisions.
- Direct measures are those that assess students’ actual performance on tasks that are the most closely related to the relevant skill or content of concern. Examples include (a) words read correctly from a list, (b) words read correctly per minute from a passage, (c) percentage of key concepts from a passage reiterated in a retell, and so forth. These direct measures need to be fine-grained and objective.
- Frequent measurement is critical. Students’ performance should be assessed two or three times per week, if not daily. Perforce, then, the measures need to be easily and quickly administered.
- Educators should employ decision rules rather than subjective judgments. Discussions about alternative rules (e.g., “three days below aim line requires change in instruction”) are available in the literature on precision teaching and curriculum-based measurement.
A response to intervention should not be stated in terms of percentages or similar measures. Although objective, clear, and complete measurement is a necessity, the evaluation of the resulting data must still involve expert clinical judgment. Because students who are not responding may be performing a marked low levels, sometimes even a 100% improvement is insufficient.
Response should be predicated on a change in slope that is sufficient to predict reaching a given level of performance within a relatively brief period of time. The accompanying figure shows insufficient progress relative to the goal of reading 80 words per minute.
Goals should be predicated on a combination of local norms and empirical data from nationally representative samples. For example, if data from large-scale studies show that students should read at 120 wpm from grade-level material by the end of third grade and local norms show that the mean rate of reading for ending third graders is 112 wpm, then a reasonable aim would be somewhere between those two standards (tilting toward the former).
How long should students spend at each tier?
It is probably not sensible to specify an exact amount of time, because it is important that decisions be made on the basis of students’ performance. However, it is important that (a) interventions are used for long enough that students have time to respond, but (b) not so long that the student’s non-response wastes his or her time, delaying access to more intensive services. In my opinion, no process be allowed to continue for more than 90 days before referral for special education is initiated, and in no case should a student be subjected to more than two iterations of RtI procedures before referral for special education is initiated.
There are many other important aspects of the Reading First and the RtI concepts. There are many examples of resources available about Reading First from states (see, e.g., Florida, Oregon and Texas, ) and from university-affiliated facilities such as the Florida State’s Florida Center for Reading Research, University of Oregon’s Big Ideas in Beginning Reading, and University of Texas’ Vaughn Gross Center.
Here are some links related to Reading First and effective early reading instruction:
- Put Reading First: Helping Your Child Learn to Read; A Parent Guide (pdf) is a booklet that presents evidence-based reading research in a way that is accessible to parents. Get a copy here: http://www.nifl.gov/partnershipforreading/publications/PFRbrochure.pdf
- Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read (pdf) is aimed at classroom teachers in the primary grades; it describes the National Reading Panel’s findings in the five areas of reading instruction. Get a copy here: http://www.nifl.gov/partnershipforreading/publications/PFRbooklet.pdf
- Featured Reading First Websites: U.S. Department of Education Reading First site. These pages provide a lot of information about the Reading First initiative, which was primarily a set of grants to states that showed how they would implement multi-tier early literacy programs. The idea was to reduce reading failure by establishing high-quality, comprehensive, evidence-based reading instruction. See the site here: http://www.ed.gov/programs/readingfirst/.
If funding problems sound familiar to readers, rest assured that you are not alone. And it’s not just a problem in the US. According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, special education funding in Quebec is likely to be reduced, too.
Ottawa’s special needs students are likely to face the brunt of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board’s $32-million budget shortfall.
The board released a series of staff recommendations Wednesday that include cutting nearly 50 teaching and support positions to balance its budget.
“There are proposed cuts in other areas of the budget but special education is certainly affected to a considerable degree,” said school district chair Lynn Graham.
Link to the CBC story.
Sphere: Related ContentOver on Will at Work Learning, Will Thalheimer has a challenge for those who advocate differentiation of instruction based on the putative learning styles of learners. The lead for his post says a lot:
I will give $1000 (US dollars) to the first person or group who can prove that taking learning styles into account in designing instruction can produce meaningful learning benefits.
I dropped a comment in on his blog and I plan to track the results. Link to Will’s post. Flash of the electrons to Liz Ditz of I Speak of Dreams for alerting me to Will’s post.
Sphere: Related ContentEditor’s note: Kerry Hempenstall, Senior Lecturer in the Division of Psychology of the School of Health Sciences at RMIT University in Bundoora (Victoria, Australia), posted this quick summary of some research on coaching teachers in the use of effective teaching practices.–Thanks, Kerry!
“Coaching Teachers” by Ann Glang and Russell Gersten (DIRECT INSTRUCTION NEWS, WINTER, 1987 pp. 1, 4, 5, 7).
Some of the findings were:
Athough there are some conflicting findings on the effectiveness of coaching, there is evidence that coached skills are more likely to be used in the classroom. When teachers are learning new skills that are quite different from procedures they have previously used, coaching seems to beparticularly important (Showers, 1982).
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Research from the Direct Instruction Follow Through Project supports the general training methods described by Showers (1983). During this 14 year project, researchers were able to evaluate teacher training methods in the context of a comprehensive implementation effort. Teachers and instructional aides in 20 communities, previously untrained in the Direct Instruction Model, learned the highly structured teaching methods through participation in an intensive training program. This situation required teachers to make radical changes in their teaching behavior, and as a result, researchers were interested in teachers’ reactions to the training program as well as the training program’s effects on their skill levels in the classroom.
Like Showers and others reporting in the staff development literature, researchers who evaluated the teacher training procedures in the Direct Instruction Follow Through Project found that an effective training program consisted of: (a) presentation of rationale, (b) demonstrations, (c) practice and feedback, and (d) onsite coaching (called “supervision” in the Follow Through literature). However, several aspects of the Direct Instruction training program differ from the Showers model.
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Carnine and Fink (1978) used a multiple baseline design to determine if there was a functional relationship between the Direct Instruction training procedures and implementaion levels for two teaching techniques — rate of presentation and signaling.
This study demonstrated that training procedures that were effective in training hundreds of teachers involved in the Direct Instruction Follow Through program could be experimentally validated. Findings from Carnine and Fink (1978) and Gersten, et al. (1982) show that teachers and aides trained in the projects effectively used the skills they were taught in their classroom instruction. While it is impossible to determine the precise contribution of each training component, there is no doubt that coaches were instrumental in the training’s success. As Showers (1984) notes, teachers who practice new skills without receiving specific feedback tend to practise skills incorrectly and therefore fail to effectively implement skills in the classroom.
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