I had the pleasure of hosting a series of important presentations on the currently hot topic of response to intervention at the 20 April meeting of the Council for Exceptional Children in Louisville. I have posted a page providing links for PDFs of many of these presentations. As I can get the others uploaded, I shall post additional entries reminding folks of where to find these papers. If you are reading this page on the Teach Effectively! then you can find a link to the page in in the section of the navigation element headed “Pages.” For a direct link, click here.
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Zig Engelmann’s original plan for publishing his recollections of the Follow Through Project called for PDFs of chapters to be available on Zigsite.com for two weeks each. In response to people who learned of their availability too late, he as created “something of a curtain call.” Get ‘em while you can!
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Good news for those who discovered too late that Zig Engelmann was publishing a history of his time in education. The chapters were available only briefly (2 weeks each) but Zig’s making the entire product available again briefly.
If you missed downloading any of the earlier chapters of “The Outrage of
Project Follow Through,” Zig is re posting ALL chapters on Monday, March 12
about 8am pacific and will leave them up until Monday, March 19, around 8am
pacific.Bryan
Bryan Wickman,
Executive Director
Association for Direct Instruction
Save the dates. Get it while it’s free. Go to zigsite.com.
Sphere: Related ContentWriting in the Washington (DC, US) Times, Paul Greenberg commented about Arkansas’ new governor, Mike Beebe, who objected to schools sending reports to parents about their children’s body mass index. In his column, entitled “Self-Esteem to the Extreme,” Mr. Greenberg used Mr. Beebe’s expression of concern about harming children’s self-esteem as the launching pad for deriding the idea of promoting self-esteem.
Remember self-esteem? It was one of the sillier — and more dangerous — fads in educational circles, which keep going round and round. The theory was that promoting kids’ self-esteem would convince them they were great. And it just might. But that’s no guarantee they are great.
Continue reading ‘Self-esteem’
Sphere: Related ContentSpecial Connections is a Web resource, developed by Suzanne Robinson and Sean Smith of Kansas University, that provides recommendations about teaching procedures for students with disabilities. There are modules about instruction, collaboration, assessment, and behavior plans, each describing research-based methods.
Special Connections is a Project of National Significance (CFDA #84.325N) funded through the federal Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) and coordinated through the University of Kansas. The ultimate goal of the project is to provide educators, both classroom teachers and university faculty, with tools and resources that support students with special needs in general education settings and in accessing the general education curriculum in meaningful ways.
Four main areas of focus include Instruction, Assessment, Behavior Plans, and Collaboration. Best practices are identified within each of these four areas and nationally recognized experts create materials for a module about that topic. Teacher tools for implementing specific practices, case study materials, and references and resources related to each practice are provided in each module. Suggestions on how to develop online collaboration are included along with technical specifications and examples of how online collaboration can improve teacher practices and outcomes for students.
Link to the Special Connections Web site.
Sphere: Related ContentThe What Works Clearinghouse has released additional reviews of reports summarizing the research on various interventions.
What Works Clearinghouse Releases 10 New Reports: Beginning Reading, Early Childhood Education, Character Education, English Language Learning, and Elementary School Mathematics
The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), an initiative of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, announces 10 new intervention reports highlighting available research on Beginning Reading, Early Childhood Education, Character Education, English Language Learning, and Elementary School Mathematics. New WWC Reports include:
Beginning Reading:More information about the Beginning Reading review is available at http://whatworks.ed.gov/Topic.asp?tid=01&ReturnPage=default.asp.
Early Childhood Education:More information about the Early Childhood review is available at http://www.whatworks.ed.gov/Topic.asp?tid=13&ReturnPage=default.asp.
Character Education:More information about the Character Education review is available at http://www.whatworks.ed.gov/Topic.asp?tid=12&ReturnPage=default.asp.
English Language Learning:More information regarding the English Language Learning review is available at http://www.whatworks.ed.gov/Topic.asp?tid=10&ReturnPage=default.asp.
Elementary School Mathematics:More information regarding the Elementary School Mathematics review is available at http://www.whatworks.ed.gov/Topic.asp?tid=04&ReturnPage=default.asp.
The WWC is releasing an ongoing series of reports over the next few months covering these topics, as well as releasing reports for Dropout Prevention and Middle School Mathematics. Approximately 30 additional reports will be released by the end of the year. Weekly updates will be sent to the WWC subscribers notifying them of the latest available findings.
See earlier posts on Teach Effectively! regarding reports from the W-W-C.
Sphere: Related ContentThe US government’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention provides a Model Programs Guide (MPG) that is extensive, detailed, and searchable. The databbase covers more than thirty types of programs ranging from “academic skills enhancement” to “wraparound services” and classifies the individual programs as “expemplary,” “effective,” or “promising” depending on the quality of the evidence for the benefits of each.
The MPG includes information about scientifically proven prevention and intervention programs that target problem behaviors among youth. To be included in the guide, programs must focus on one of the following problem behaviors: delinquency, violence, youth gang involvement, alcohol, tobacco and drug use, academic difficulties, family functioning, trauma exposure or sexual activity/exploitation and accompanying mental health issues.
Because it is very broad and the standards are not quite as rigorous as some other projects (e.g., What Works Clearinghouse), MPG should serve only as an screening system for identifying effective models. However, it provides an excellent first cut and some of the model programs rated “exemplary” would be ones that would be recognized by experts employing demanding standards for evaluating programs.
Link to the home page and a link for a specific search (exemplary, prevention, academic skills enhancement, 6-12 years age) as an example of using the MPG data base.
Sphere: Related ContentKansas (US) State Board of Education met to hear proposed guidelines for the use of restraints that might be needed for students who are out of control, according to a story by Gena Terlizzi Lawrence Journal-World.
Advocates for the disabled said the mandates are necessary to prevent mistreatment of the students.
Rocky Nichols, executive director of the Disability Rights Center, said during the 2005 legislative session he heard many parents speak about the mistreatment of their children.
“Hundreds and hundreds of parents from around the state came forward, testified and talked about how their kids were secluded and restrained inappropriately,” Nichols said. “We have kids who have been sat on by gym teachers. Their arms have been duct-taped together as a form of restraint. They’ve been rolled up in gym mats. They’ve been placed in little boxes.”
There are effective instrucational procedures to (a) create environments that reduce the probability of students behavior escalating to out-of-control status and (b) teach student appropriate ways to respond to difficult situations without losing control. One would hope that local and state education agencies (as well as teacher education institutions) prepare special and general educators (and administrators) to use those procedures. Sadly, this is too rarely the case. (See Ms. Frizzle’s illustration of a staff development session devoted to this topic reported previously here on Teach Effectively.)
Although Ms. Terlizzi’s story is about restraints, it also mentions “time out” (TO). Sadly, the discussion of TO perpetuates myths about the procedure. The term “time out” is routinely used in a generic way to refer to exclusion, especially placing a child in a physical space away from others. There is a more formal use referring to a well-studied procedure which involves, essentially, making reinforcement temporarily unavailable. I would like to encourage folks to distinguish between the informal and the formal uses, if for no other reason than that the formal use of TO very effectively reduces the frequency of targeted behavior whereas the informal use has, as far as I know, little or no scientifically documented effectiveness.
Link to Ms. Terlizzi’s story. Check the sidelinks to other coverage, too.
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