Teach Effectively!

Our tour of the Republic of Korea has been wonderful. The temples, the foods, and (especially) the people have been quite delightful. Although Pat Lloyd and I have been seeing some sights, I’ve also been meeting with special educators in Changwon, Busan, and Seoul.

During the visit to South Korea, this is the basic presentation I’ve been making. For the talk at one stop, because the technicians were unable to change a switch that would allow me to use the local projector, I carried my laptop around as if it was a book I was showing the attendees.

1. Successful economies have invested in education.
   • A small populace of educated people can get a country going, but broader education helps economies reach greater heights.
   • Individuals with disabilities represent an often-untapped resource, but they can make useful contributions to their countries.
   • So educating students with disabilities is important.
2. But students with disabilities, nearly by definition, do not learn well from incidental or sloppy teaching;
   • Their advantaged peers may succeed, but students with disabilities are likely to fail when given ill-developed and poorly delivered instruction.
   • What is more, faulty instruction is likely to make it much harder—if not impossible—for students with disabilities to learn.
3. For students with disabilities, we need educational services that are predicated on objective improvement in outcomes.
   • To identify objective improvements in outcomes, we need dependable research that is focused on showing causal relations between practices and outcomes.
   • Case studies, descriptive research, and developmental studies are nice, but they do not show causal relationships.
   • Studies that show causal relationships have these characteristics: (a) falsifiable questions, representative samples, trustworthy dependent variables…in short, good experimental designs.
4. But, one good experimental study is not enough; study results will vary across a distribution of outcomes, some making a practice appear more or less beneficial than others.
   • So, one or even two studies is not sufficient.
   • We need replicated results and we need to aggregate them, either by synthesizing according to pre-stated and vetted criteria (e.g., Work Works Clearinghouse) or by integrative literature reviews (e.g., meta-analysis).
5. In special education we have a lot of evidence about means for intervening with students with disabilities.
   • Meta-analyses of those methods show that some methods are more effective than others. Particularly importantly, successful methods (e.g., formative evaluation, Direct Instruction, systematic reading comprehension instruction, mnemonics strategies) all come from special education research.
   • So, special educators have a bases for implementing evidence-based instruction.
   • Furthermore, these methods have now begun to be adopted by general educators; thus, special educators who follow evidence are contributing to education in general.
6. So evidence-based practices in special education are important because they
   • help improve the outcomes of students with disabilities,
   • have promise for improving the outcomes of students in general education, and
   • improve outcomes for students which, in turn,helps the countries where those students live and work are likely to be more successful in the long run.
7. These students are our future. We should provide them with education that has the greatest likelihood of helping them contribute to our cultures and economies.

It’s a mouthful. I need to proof these notes, too. Time to move places right now, though.