By Sara Finegan

         I’m a big fan of homework, but it has to be meaningful homework, and it has to be customized to fit your learners and their current skill levels.  Here are my thoughts about designing home practice in a demanding classroom:

It must be purposeful.

         Homework for the sake of homework is detrimental to a struggling learner. Kids aren’t stupid, and they know on some level, no matter how old they are, if you are just making work for them because you think that’s what teachers are supposed to do.

         The purpose of homework in a demanding classroom is to:  

• give the child additional practice in a newly-learned concept or skill and
• to provide a structure for a task they should be doing on a regular basis.

         When it comes to additional practice, a demanding classroom teacher designs a set of practice problems or questions that address what was worked on that day in class.  Examples might be: 5-10 addition problems; a set of similar word problems that require the child to set up an equation; comprehension questions that pertain to one or two plot features; practice making inferences based on short pieces of text.

         There are some excellent workbooks available in stores and online that provide practice problems in many content areas.  There are also some awful ones.  I remember a child I worked with in an after-school program who had a reading homework packet that was obviously written in the 1960’s: it was dry, pedantic, and completely uninteresting to me and the student.

A goal should be to establish a sense of competence.

         I do not want my students to have their parents do their homework, spend hours with their child struggling to get it done, or to leave the kitchen table feeling utterly drained and unskilled.

         I want my students to leave the homework table feeling like they get it, or are on the way to getting it. I want them to feel able.  Now this is not going to happen all the time, particularly when we’re learning new skill sets.

But if, over time, the student is confident that in general, he or she is going to be able to master the skills, or retain the information, or do the task fairly well, most kids will be willing to struggle a bit from time to time at home.

A homework routine should create study habits.

         Almost every school urges children to read for 30 minutes or more per day at home.  Thirty minutes is a lot for a child who has little reading stamina, or who struggles mightily with decoding or comprehension. This kind of assignment, without any other components, isn’t going to help a child with learning disabilities as much as it could with a few modifications.

         If a child is not able to read for 30 minutes in class without losing focus or melting down, do not require it at home.  Build stamina slowly.  A student who can only read for three minutes should be given a 3-5 minute reading assignment for home, followed by a book on tape or a story a parent is willing to read out loud. (Reading homework is not always just about reading skill, but also about our relationship to text and how we think about stories – books on CD, tape or read aloud can do just fine.)

         At a certain age and stage, kids can be taught how to write a reading response.  This is an extremely important skill and needs to be built in layers, slowly, with lots of practice.  The practice can be done at home, provided that you give the child examples to follow or a formula to use in the initial practice stages.  In early grades, a reading response can be an illustration with two or three sentences about a character or your opinion about the book.

          My fifth and sixth graders are currently, in the fall of the year, writing three-paragraph responses: a summary of what they read; a description of a character or the problem; a connection that they are making to the story or to a character.  By the end of the year I hope they will be doing deeper thinking and writing, but we are taking it one step at a time. Right now, their daily reading homework includes writing the response (yes, daily, though at least one child dictates to his grandmother because the act of writing is driving him crazy) because I want it to become an automatic habit for them in preparation for middle school.

As much as possible, coordinate, communicate, and negotiate with your partners: the parents.

         We don’t want parents doing the homework, but we want them to support it.  Nobody knows a child better than his or her parents, and we need to be responsive to them with regard to the work we send home.

          Right now, I have a couple of students who have major difficulties with attention.  One of them has autism and ADHD; the other has ADHD.  Both of them have parents who are excellent about notifying me when homework is just too much.  In these kinds of cases, we need to make accommodations and reduce the amount of homework in one or more ways.

• We might limit the number of problems to solve on a math set, or require less reading.
• We might change the type of work to be done.  Multiple choice or short-answer, fill-in-the-blank homework works better for these kids than other kinds of comprehension or social studies assignments.
•  We might change the way the homework needs to be done.  Both of my students are allowed to dictate their reading responses to a parent or grandparent, because getting them to sit down and write after school, when meds are wearing off and the brain is tired is not going to be a pleasant experience.
• We might give choices.  One of my students, who has moderately-functioning autism, fought homework at home for a long time.  When he came to my classroom, I provided three to four tasks to be done at home – and instructed him to pick two.  This gives him the power over the work, not me over him, and has made him voluntarily do his homework, without difficulty, when he gets home.

A goal should be to build internal drive and the self-discipline to get the practice done.

         I don’t want my students’ parents to spend hours fighting with their kids to get work done.  I also don’t want students neglecting their home practice.  Home practice needs to become a routine, a habit.

          In a demanding classroom, this is done with incentives as well as consequences.

          An immediate, automatic, small reward needs to be given to kids with learning disabilities when they turn in their homework.  As homework is checked in, kids can receive a sticker, a punch on “daily work index card”, a raffle ticket (dollar store prizes at a drawing once a week or every two weeks) or some other desired privilege.  It should be automatic and not served with effusive praise unless the child has a history of not turning in homework, in which case positive comments are a good re-enforcement.

         If you have other students check in homework, kids will be far more invested in getting it done. It’s hard to face a teacher or aide and explain why homework was not done, but for some reason it’s even harder to face your peers when all of them have been working hard.  This can be especially true if there’s a class-wide reward for 100% homework turned in, a ploy I use every now and then ($5 pizzas from Little Caesars work every time).  In general, the incentives should be small and cheap.

         Consequences are more complicated.The traditional “you miss recess” consequence is not a good idea in most special education classrooms, where kids need to get outside and move around as a kinesthetic break from the intellectual activity you’re piling on.

         I’ve been experimenting with a form letter that goes home, filled out by the student, for parents to read and sign.  It’s on bright orange paper, and can’t be missed by anyone coming even close to a backpack, and it requires the student to acknowledge work that wasn’t done and ask for help creating a plan to do it.  I keep all of them in my students’ portfolio folders, and it’s a great visual – neon orange is eye-catching.

         Restriction of free time until the homework is made up is a pretty good consequence, though again, many students, particularly those with autism or who have sensory issues need to have some minutes of free time between tasks in order to keep their minds working well.

         I’m inclined to use restriction from weekly class-wide fun activities as a consequence for not doing homework.  If the last ½ hour of class on Friday is reserved for cupcakes or a great game, kids who didn’t do homework during the week can sit in another classroom or in the office to make up their work.

         The combination of incentives and meaningful but not devastating consequences in a demanding classroom helps students learn good work habits at home and in school.

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By Sara Finegan 

         I’m all in favor of worksheets, as long as they are challenging, require the students to write complete thoughts with detail as opposed to one-word answers, and as long as they are designed for a purpose other than just seat work. 

         The danger of using worksheets in a special ed classroom is that you will inadvertently or through ignorance keep the kids at the most basic levels of  intellectual behavior. 

          We want the kids to move up, not remain static.  This can be done when the information and concepts they learn are re-enforced at ever-increasing levels of intellectual demand.

          I use worksheets in social studies and science to teach and re-enforce students’ independent thinking and learning.  They are designed to get kids thinking, finding information that they’ve learned already, and using it appropriately.  When the system works well, it creates a ladder upwards for kids to move through the critical thinking levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy:

         In many special ed classrooms, students stay at the Knowledge level and never proceed upwards.  In others, Knowledge and Understanding are the sum total of the instructional plan.

         Such limitations will re-enforce student reliance on adults for learning. 

         Such limitations will teach kids that learning is all about knowledge, not what you do with it.

We use charts, and more charts 

        In a typical unit of Social Studies, we will create 5-10 charts of information about a culture, civilization, or era.

          I like to create “thinking maps” (also known as “mindmaps”) while we’re studying, and use different colors of marker to delineate the categories of data we are taking in. 

         We also create mindmaps that have a standard organization; for example, kids know that “Lifestyles” is usually on the right hand side of the “spider,” and time periods and locations are in the upper left and upper middle of the map.

         These charts are posted all around the room or pulled off of hangers to display when we are doing content-area work.  They are used for a variety of activity types, all designed to promote ever-increasing critical thinking among the students. 

         The purpose is for kids to learn where to find and retrieve information that they learn. I don’t require them to memorize historical information.  They will, of course, by the time we’re done with a unit, but the goal is actually for them to be able to apply the facts to ongoing themes of understanding and analyze these themes as we continue to learn.

          I create worksheets several times per week throughout the course of a unit.   When we begin to study a topic, the questions are all knowledge-based: 

• When did Menes unify Upper and Lower Egypt? 
• Where did Homo Habilis live? 
• Which tribes lived in the southeast region of North America?
• Who paid for the Mayflower Pilgrims’ passage to America? 
• List two grains grown by colonists in Virginia.

         Students are encouraged to get up and move around the room looking for the answers to the questions.   (See related topic, “Moving into Learning.”)   They quickly learn in my classroom that they can predict where they’ll find information, using the color-coded organization of the mindmaps. 

I repeat questions using different forms and formats, because I do want the kids to begin to really internalize the facts.  Thus, in almost every worksheet on the Ancient Maya, I’ll have similar questions about religion, clothing, food, and government.  Similar, but not identical, because I want kids to see that we can think of the same information in different ways.

         As we progress through the unit and the kids do more and more searching for and finding facts, the information begins to embed into the kids’ memory banks.  As this happens, I want them to start using the information they have more readily available, and I want them to  think more deeply about the information.

         My questions become more complex or demanding.  I might begin to ask: 

• What did Menes do to symbolize his control over both Upper and Lower Egypt? 
• Why didn’t Homo Habilis eat a lot of meat? 
• Why did many tribes in the southeast region have separate villages in the summer and winter? 
• Why did the  Virginia Company agreed to lend the Pilgrims the money to travel to America?  
• Why didn’t the colonists in Connecticut grow rice?

TIP:  One of the first things we decide in my class at the beginning of the year is how to answer questions. 

We decide what constitutes knowledge and what shows that someone is a smart thinker.  We decide that one or two word answers do not show either knowledge or smart thinking.  We determine that all questions should be answered in complete sentences, unless I specifically state otherwise. 

         We also decide that the use of appropriate word choice is important.  This is something that we work on strengthening throughout the year, and expectations raise as we go.  Within a few months, kids know that verbs such as  “were” and “had” need to be abandoned in favor of more specific ones, such as “resided,” “lived,” “created,” or “contained.”  “Many” and “numerous” replace “a lot.”  “Crafts,” “artifacts,” “tools,” and “belongings” are used instead of “things.”

         Later questions are more open-ended and require the kids to utilize the facts to come to and defend conclusions.  I might give a short paragraph describing an archeological excavation in Spain that uncovers a small settlement used by prehistoric peoples.  Archeologists find remnants of a campfire with animal bones, and a hand axe.  The time period in which they were used is approximately 1.5 million years ago. 

         The kids are asked to identify the probable species of early human who used the settlement, and explain their reasoning.   I will expect them to discuss the use of fire and tools as well as the time period to substantiate their conclusion that it belonged to Homo Erectus.

          By the middle of the year when we study Ancient Civilizations, my students are expected to answer the following question: 

If you were an archeologist wanting to begin an excavation in Ancient China looking for the remnants of the earliest settlements, what points would you look for on a map and why?

         I would expect all of my students to be able to articulate that one would look near a fresh water source, because people needed water to drink and to water their crops. 

         By mid-year, I expect my students to be describing  the types of information they are going to learn when they open to the newest unit in the textbook, and to make predictions using their considerable bank of background knowledge about what each culture or civilization contained as it grew and developed.

         In a demanding classroom, kids are expected to retrieve and use information, not just have it.

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By Sara Finegan 

         My colleague, Laurie Vierra, is a Special Education Intern this year with a special day class of third and fourth graders, having taken advantage of our district’s offer to pay for general education teachers to move into and obtain a Masters in Special Ed.  

         A background in the general education standards, pacing, and instructional methods are great assets in the special ed classroom.  Laurie knows what her students need to be able to do in order to function at grade level, and she’s interested in lifting them up to that level.  She has no sense of comfort with student dependence or any belief that a learning deficit is a static thing that can never be repaired. 

         She certainly isn’t under the impression that a learning disability prevents anyone from doing grade-level work.

         This was, at first, a little bit disconcerting to the students in her class and some of their parents, who are used to the program of the teacher she is replacing: 

• Gone are the days when the teacher and the teacher aide (para-educator) will go into student backpacks to retrieve homework:  she will not accept assignments turned in by anyone other than the student.   
• Nowhere in her classroom does the aide sit with students and follow a written script for instruction and support. 
• Students don’t get candy for behaving or finishing their work.   
• Students in Laurie’s class have homework every day, including weekends.  And parents can’t do it for their kids.
• Kids have to get their own pencils and paper; the aide is no longer running across the room to bring the students supplies.
• The work the kids do at home and in class is meaningful; there’s no such thing as “sponge work,” and every lesson and assignment is directed toward a reachable educational goal.  

         I’m interested to see what will happen as the year progresses, and Laurie alters her students’ IEP goals to better reflect state standards.   Almost all of the kids in her class had identical goals during the past couple of years, regardless of what their needs and strengths were.  

         I have a feeling that Laurie is already redesigning and reworking the expectations for each child; I know for a fact that she’s got a clear idea of what each child needs to learn in order to reach higher objectives.  If I know Laurie, she will be custom-creating goals that will actually move her students toward grade-level work.

         That class is moving, kicking and screaming perhaps at first, but more and more confidently into demanding, high-quality work.  I’m delighted, because it means that when the kids come my room for fifth and sixth grade, I won’t spend a year working to develop independent learners.

It was not always this way… 

         A few years ago, I opened my classroom to five new fourth graders, three of whom were GATE (gifted and talented) certified and all of whom, the teacher told me, were proficient in math, reading, and writing. 

         They’d scored high on the state’s standardized tests the previous spring and were just wonderful kids.  She advised that they should all be mainstreamed for math, and that four of them could attend a general education social studies or science class. 

She was right that they were wonderful kids.  I adore them.  But they were not wonderful students, not yet.

• During the first week, one of them spent six hours in the classroom crying because she wanted the lower-grades special day class (SDC) aide to come and sit with her. 
• During the first week, all of them failed the beginning of the year math inventory which reflected what they had learned the previous year.  Only one of them demonstrated anything close to mastery of some of the math modules for the previous year.
• During the first month, I discovered that they had no idea how to talk or think about what they were reading:  their idea of reading comprehension was to parrot back what the text said. 
• When I administered an On-Demand writing assessment that asked them to describe their favorite experience the previous summer, none of them wrote more than three sentences. 
• Three of them lasted less than two weeks in a general education math class because they weren’t able to follow the lessons.   
• None of them were able to participate in science or social studies, because they couldn’t get accustomed to the concept of active, engaged learning.  They sat passively through instruction, and waited during independent work time for someone to tell them what to do instead of reading the directions.
• I discovered on their first benchmark test that they were used to having all assessments read to them, even though four of them read at the third grade level or higher.  When they did in-class assignments, they expected me or our aide to sit with them and tell them what to do next.

The children were shorthchanged…

         Their previous teacher did them a grave disservice.  She sent me five very intelligent kids who hadn’t a clue how to learn.  It wasn’t their fault; they’d never been taught how to think or had thinking skills modeled for them. 

         My former colleague never worked in general education, never entered a general education classroom, and felt safe only in her cocooned Special Day Classroom, where she could nurture her students and coddle them.

         Laurie’s work is already showing results, and it’s just the beginning of November.  She’s participating in a fourth-grade team with two other general education teachers:  she took on social studies, and has a reverse-mainstreaming thing going on in her classroom; she teaches a rigorous math class to her students and some of the lower-scoring kids in general ed (and three of my students, fifth and sixth graders who are still needing support with basic math skills in a very small group situation). 

         When you walk into her classroom, it’s student work you see, not artwork done by her or her aide. 

         Laurie and I can finish each others’ sentences when we discuss rigor and independent learning.  This shorthand is based on a mutual understanding of what special education is:  a service designed to bridge the gap between ability and capacity, not an educational system to protect kids with special needs.

         When we smother kids with support and don’t teach them how to think for themselves, even the brightest of them will atrophy as learners.

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 By Sara Finegan

           Way too many Special Education classrooms are quiet rooms where kids remain at their desks and do seatwork, supervised by staff who either sit at the front of the room monitoring behavior or roam the room, monitoring the student work. 

           I believe this teaches kids to be passive receptors of information, regurgitating facts on demand. 

         I believe this enables kids in their expectation that learning is when someone gives you knowledge.  There’s no impetus to go and get knowledge, or to use it other than to show that you learned a fact.

           Passive learners are not successful students.  Productive lives do not get lived by people who wait for things to come to them.  Critical thinkers do not develop from children who believe that a teacher’s job is to give them information.  

         In a demanding classroom, the teacher is the facilitator, and the kids are the ones doing the work.

         In a demanding classroom, there’s movement.  Kids are asked to physically get up and go find information, and to physically gather facts and evaluate them or apply them.

         There’s engagement in this way with the world they are studying, and the concepts they are mastering.  They perceive a relationship between themselves and knowledge that involves action on their part.

          We create not just the opportunities for movement in learning, but requirements for it in a variety of different learning formats.

• Kids have to get up and move around the room to read charts and find information with which to answer worksheet questions. 
• Study and reading or writing groups are assigned to different areas of the room to congregate for cooperative learning activities. 
• In math, the kids look forward to me creating equations all over the two room white boards and allowing them to come up and choose one or two each to solve. 
• We have centers set up for kids to revolve through, fifteen minutes at a time:  a table with history sorting cards to organize; one with paper to create a mindmap or analogy list from a set of listen facts; a table with scenarios for them to respond to using knowledge they have learned about a civilization or culture. 
• In math, we study multiplication facts on the playground by bouncing a ball to one another as we skip count or recite numbers. 

         We see great intellectual growth when our students are required to move through learning, not absorb it.  In a demanding classroom, intellectual movement is often accompanied by physical activity.

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By Sara Finegan

         In a demanding classroom, student work isn’t just the work they produce themselves, but also their  thinking and talking about other people’s work.  If our students aren’t able to evaluate the job that others are doing, they won’t be able to discern the quality of their own work, and make the appropriate adjustements.

         In my classroom, students know what constitutes a Proficient Level job on any given assignment.  (In California, achievement is based on the following levels:  Proficient, which indicates mastery, Advanced, which indicates that the work is too easy for the student, Basic, which is the minimal standard of competence, Below Basic, and Far Below Basic.) 

         My students are always aiming for Proficiency Level in their work and that is the standard upon which we base evaluations of our work.

         When my students engage in reading, writing, social studies, science, or math activities, they become quickly involved in helping to create a checklist or rubric for each type of work.

          We all know, for example, that a Proficient Level math assignment involving word problems has the following components:  the student has underlined the key vocabulary that tells us what type of operation to use; the student has drawn a diagram or picture of the problem; the student has created and solved a numerical equation, and the student has written the answer in a complete sentence.

         When assignments are completed, other students go over the work using the checklist we’ve created and determines which of the components are present and which are missing.  It’s a quick and easy way for both the worker and the evaluator to get a picture of how close to Proficient Level the work is.  If the work has been done in class, the student has the opportunity to immediately add in missing components.  If the work was done at home, it is sent back to be done as additional homework.

This practice can be done with almost any grade and competency level.  In younger kids, perhaps the checklist has clip art and just a few words for each item to be evaluated.  I’ve also seen instances where the teacher prepares a model assignment and highlights the required features, so that student graders can easily see and compare student work to the standard. 

         I usually type up the checklist on three columns of paper and cut them in strips.  My Peer Checkers staple the checklist to assignments as they are turned in.  We aim for a one-day turnaround. 

         Evaluation activities done by Peer Checkers takes several different forms.  When we are learning a new skill, my preferred method for going over work is have all students exchange work with someone else.  We each get a copy of the checklist and staple it to the work we are evaluating.

         Then, using the document camera, I will take a blank worksheet or one student’s work and we will go through the checklist together.  Students have the opportunity to ask me and the other students questions.

          This is particularly important in writing, science, or social studies worksheets where students use their own words to answer questions.  There are, of course, many ways of stating the answer, and the kids need to see that proficiency can look like several different ways.  They also need help sometimes to see that even though an answer may appear to be content-correct, if our standard for Proficiency is that the answer be written as a complete sentence, a one or two word answer, or one without a pronoun, will not match the expected level for work.  

Proficient, Basic, or Below Basic

         Once we’ve gone through the checklist, Peer Checkers will determine whether the answer is Proficient, Basic, or Below Basic (P, B, or BB) and mark it at the top of the paper before returning it to the original student for review. 

         At this point, we take a quick survey of the class to see how many achieved Proficiency for that assignment, and talk briefly about what the next steps might be to improve.  It’s important that each student be able to verbalize what he or she will be focusing on the next time around.

Later in the unit, as the kids are more competent and confident about the concepts or skills they are using, I will assign small groups of 2 or 3 students per day to evaluate assignments.  This is a classroom privilege, as it indicates our trust in them to objectively review the work, be supportive of others rather than tearing down, and notify us all when a celebration is in order.

          And celebrations are important.  Because we are all evaluating one another’s work, students are very aware of who is struggling and needs support, and who has surmounted an obstacle and needs recognition.  Our class Celebrations Committee keeps track of those sorts of things and provides peer mentoring and extra help as well as notifying me that it’s time to bake cupcakes or dig out the dance cds.

         The benefits of these systems are many.  Kids see numerous examples of the type of work they and others are doing, and have ownership of their work product.  They have a yardstick by which to measure their progress and immediate feedback, quite often, about their product.  Grading in this way helps the kids see what things they need to do to improve in a safe and inspiring way.

         When our grading process is a mystery to students, they become dependent on our feedback for their work.  The longer they remain dependent on our valuation of what they do, the more difficult it is for them to develop an objective internal measure of themselves. 

         If we involve them in the standards-setting, support them in the evaluation process, and keep challenging them to do better, they will take on more responsibility for their own work and learning.  They also will develop the confidence that they can achieve high things.

         This process also helps me as a teacher.  When we are all looking at student work and measuring progress in this fashion against a pre-determined standard, I can easily see when it is time to design a new or better intervention to boost skills that aren’t moving up the ladder towards Proficiency.

         I often think I’ve done a terrific job teaching a lesson and go home celebrating the fact that ‘everyone seems to be getting it’, only to discover over the course of the next few days that actually, they did not get it, or if they did, it didn’t stick.  At that point I can step back and rethink how I teach that skill, and try again. 

We never lower the bar, we re-teach

         It’s important to remember that we are never going to compromise the standard of Proficiency.  When kids aren’t meeting the mark, it’s cause for more practice and re-teaching, not lowering the bar.  We’re pushing each other up, not pulling the standard down.

          To begin to incorporate student evaluation of the work of others and their own work, you need to make sure everyone in the classroom knows what the standards are for each type of assignment.

         This happens naturally if you spend just a little time working with the kids to go over the components of a good example of any type of assignment.  I do a lot of charting in my class, with step-by-step procedures for most new skills and types of assignments.  We use those charts to create a new chart called “What does a Proficient Level ______ look like?”  The kids participate in making a list of the features or components of the assignment, and we keep it visible in the room as we work.

         I also will type up a copy of the chart to paste into student journals or folders.  There’s no point in assigning kids home practice if they can’t remember when they get there what their practice is supposed to look like. 

          So what happens with all of this involvement in one another’s work?  Well, in a demanding classroom, students are engaged in one another’s work in a positive way, they internalize expectations and quality standards, and they know what they need to do to improve.  There is less focus on what they can’t do and far more on what the next steps are along the road to mastery. 

         And that makes all the difference in the struggle to learn.

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By Sara Finegan

         One of my ongoing beefs with our math textbooks is that they don’t provide enough problems for the kids to practice with. 

          For years, I’ve been writing my own math worksheets and developing my own list of math problems for the kids to attack each day.  It’s time-consuming, but it also is a valuable part of my instruction, because, now that I’ve developed fluency in the task, it’s easy for me to create a set of practice problems that addresses exactly what task the kids are struggling with at any given time.

         And that is what “rinse and repeat” is all about for me.  

          My students do more math problems, more writing activities, and more different kinds of reading tasks per day than most kids do at our school.  They have to, because they know, and I know, that for them, mastery of new skills requires 20 times more practice than other kids. 

Pacing of instruction 

           Although I promote the idea of aiming high and moving the kids upwards from wherever they are, I refuse to move too quickly, because that will defeat the entire purpose of instruction in a demanding classroom.  Likewise, I don’t want to go too slowly, because I don’t want the kids to become too comfortable and complacent about learning.  We teachers have to find exactly the right balance for our group of kids – and that will change from year to year and also from subject area to subject area.

         Thus, when we learn a new math skill, I am not going to rely on the 25 problems in the math book.  My kids will use the skill 50 times in the classroom, and probably have another 20 problems for homework. 

         The more they repeat an action, whether it be identifying the setting in a story or decomposing a number in order to multiply it more easily, the more fluent they become, the more the concept is embedded in their minds, the more easily they will be able to retrieve it in the future a the need arises.

         Now, this doesn’t mean that my students are all going to stay at their desks and do worksheets all of the class period.    I want them to be active learners, and that means I can’t let them get stuck in a dull routine where everything becomes by rote.

Practice in a variety of ways

           Opportunities for practice need to be varied in nature, size, and extent.  Identifying the setting in a story can be done with a partner in a book talk, in a guided group, in a multiple choice worksheet, with a matching game, and in writing journals. 

         Solving math problems can be done on the class white board, in individual white board activities, worksheets, using manipulatives at a table, and by teaching someone else.  All of those can be done during the day, or separated out over the course of several days. 

         This year, I’ve been working with my students on writing daily responses to independent reading in journals every night at home.  Each part of a reading response needs to be taught separately, and practiced repeatedly until the student is able to perform the task independently.  

Guided writing of a paragraph describing a character

          On Friday, I taught the kids in a guided writing activity how to write a paragraph describing a character.  Their weekend homework calls for them to do at least one more before Monday:  I have no expectations that the results will be exemplary, but they will tell me what I need to emphasize in subsequent lesson and practices. 

            We will probably do at least two more guided writing activities on this very topic, followed by some partner writes, and, by Friday, the kids will be able to work on independent writing of character descriptions with a minimal level of  intervention from me and our aide.  Even then, the kids will need to practice this type of writing activity for at least a month before it becomes automatic.  

           In the meantime, I’m not going to lower my expectations or require less than excellent work from my kids.  Each day, we’ll go over some examples of their work, and together, as a group, determine what could be improved, what is missing, or what the student forgot to do.  (example:  Jay forgot to number his list of facts in the order that makes most sense; Roberto didn’t combine two facts in each sentence to form complex sentences; Darren’s paragraph reads like a list rather than a thoughtful description – he needs to use more powerful vocabulary, and a better voice). 

         There’s no shame in not meeting the standards; there is always an emphasis on doing better the next time.

 Lather, rinse,  repeat.  And repeat.  Again.

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By Sara Finegan 

         One of the hardest things I have  had to learn how to do as a teacher is to dissect skills that I do automatically or very well.  It’s crucial to be able to do it, because that is the primary way in which we investigate how to provide instruction. 

          Only if I know exactly how I make meaning in text when it is difficult to comprehend will I be able to teach my kids how to understand what they read. 

           This act of teasing out the different skills and concepts I use in academic and intellectual activities is much easier when it involves subjects I have myself struggled with.

           Figuring out how to teach math skills is a relative piece of cake for me, because math has never come easily to me and I do not work as fluently with numbers as I do with words.  Piecing out the individual strategies I use when I read was one of the most difficult activities I’ve worked on over a period of years, and I’m still making discoveries.  And we will not even begin to talk about the writing process, which for me is a natural one and oh, so difficult to break down.

         But it must be done. 

         That which is automatic to us is usually a struggle for our students.  They can get to the point of ease with many tasks, but we have to teach each skill  separately from beginning to end, and give them multiple, repeated, ongoing opportunities to practice.  Again and again. <grin>  Only then can we start putting the skills back together to form a whole action. 

          Be aware that this is very different from the dumming down process, where we make the mistake of lowering our expectations for the final project and do half of the work for our students instead of prompting them to take intellectual risks.   

         The fact that a student cannot write a paragraph using complete sentences, or cannot yet make inferences as she reads, or is not able, just yet, to use the order of operations to solve a math problem doesn’t mean that we should not expect them to be able, at the end of the year, to write a three-paragraph essay, or understand text close to grade level, or solve this expression:  3(6 x 9) – (2 +4) – 16. 

          And it’s certainly not cause to keep the student doing simple addition and subtraction problems , or having the kids work on fill-in-the-blank worksheets, or letting them deal only with the literal meaning of text.

            No, what a demanding classroom does is provide intensive instruction and opportunities for practice with gradual release of responsibility back to the student in ever-increasing levels of work.   

• You may be starting out with sentence practice, but you will be moving quickly from simple sentences to more complex ones, and adding powerful vocabulary quite soon. 

• You might just have the kids practice solving the parts of the problem in parenthesis first, ignoring the rest of the problem for days on end, but the time will come soon when they’ll be using more and more of the order of ops.

           It’s our job to tear the skill set apart, teach it, and paste it back together.  The kids will do the rest of the sewing, if we let them, push them, challenge them, demand it of them.

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By Sara Finegan 

           Some students are so far behind that they cannot keep up with a general education class.  Some students process in a way that requires more time, more space, more opportunities for practice, and a slower pace in order to master new concepts. 

           Some students need a small group – less noise, less activity, less chaos – in order to learn.   Some need instruction provided in ways that aren’t commonly found in a general education room – more visuals, more guided work, more modeling, more incremental. 

          All students with learning disabilities need at least one, if not most of these things in order to learn how to learn.  Notice that I didn’t say they  need them in order to learn everything.  Only to learn how to learn. 

 Full inclusion after rigorous preparation

         I favor inclusion of students with special needs in the general education classroom – after they have been given the appropriate, rigorous instruction and practice in the basics that will allow them to function on a par with everyone else.  I do not favor inclusion where the child enters too far behind to ever catch up and spends the rest of his or her school career vainly trying to do what the other students do.   

Our goal as special educators is to help our students bridge the gap between where they are and where they need to be in order to be able to follow along in a general ed classroom, at a general ed pace and in that kind of environment.

         In order to push our kids up to that level, we may have to enfold them in a Special Day Class or separate classroom environment for some or all subjects for a period of time.  In the best of all possible worlds, this would take place in the elementary school level, and by middle school, the vast majority of  kids with IEPs  who had spent time in a Special Day Class would be out in the general school population for most classes. 

How quickly depends on the child and on us

         How quickly we can bring kids up to the appropriate skill levels depends on each child’s areas of need and strength, and the level of rigor we infuse into our classrooms.  A demanding classroom will firmly and lovingly raise students who use their brains like a muscle in a gym, stretching, pressing, and moving from strength to strength.

I’ve had students arrive from other schools or lower grade Special Day Classes who lack the ability to do independent work, who have become so dependent on the assistance of aides and teachers that they are unable to problem-solve and try out new skills.

I’ve seen special education classrooms which rely on endless series of packets and worksheets, done quietly at student desks, where no questioning takes place and compliance with behavioral rules takes precedence over learning. 

And I’ve worked with many colleagues who become so frustrated with their students’ challenges that they lose sight of what we’re working toward and begin to teach so far below grade level that nobody will ever catch up. 

         None of this is going to move our kids from our classrooms into the general education population with any success.  All of this will perpetuate the deficits our kids arrive with. 

Keep in mind what we want for our students

         If we want kids with in our special education classrooms to move from deficit to ability to competence, we must be relentless in our rigor of instruction, and stand firm in our expectations of learning. 

          We must keep our eye on the ultimate goal, which is that we will shoo our students from our learning nest into the big wide world and watch them fly, fly into their lives as learners.

             Rigor is not the equivalent of harshness.  A demanding classroom is a nurturing environment where students are not expected to learn and function on their own, but where scaffolds and supports are in place and are gradually removed or reduced as mastery takes place. 

          A demanding classroom is one whose staff is attentive to the small signs of growth and need, and adjusts instruction accordingly. 

          A demanding classroom is one where students themselves, at all ages,  work with staff to set reasonable, achievable goal and celebrate success. 

          A demanding classroom is one where the teacher’s motto is “yes, you can, let’s work to find out how…” and where failure is seen as an opportunity to try again. 

          A demanding classroom is one where a student who doesn’t get it just hasn’t been taught it the right way yet – and where the staff is committed to finding the right way for that child. 

           A demanding classroom is one where laughter, curiosity, and determination are reflected in the faces and work of the children, and where academic behavior is as important as social behavior.

When we demand of our students…

           When we demand excellence of our students and fail to show them how to achieve it, we are not providing rigorous instruction.

           When we demand competency from our students and don’t support them in their learning, we are not providing rigorous instruction.

          When we require compliance from our students without understanding and ownership, we are not providing rigorous instruction.

           And when we reduce expectations to accommodate learning deficits, we are certainly not exhibiting any rigor at all in our own work.

 If we want our students to be able to do general education work in a general education classroom, we have to teach general education skills, not special education habits.

          We must demand of our own instruction and planning the same thing our colleagues in the general education classroom demand of themselves and their students.  To do less is to abdicate from the position as teacher.

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By Sara Finegan

          One of the cornerstones of demanding classrooms is that planning is done backwards.  When we begin our thinking by focusing on what we want the kids to be able to do at the end, we are already setting high expectations, and  high expectations are key.

          In a way, backwards planning is easier than the traditional way we think of developing instruction.  Doing it the old-fashioned way is discouraging:  if we start by focusing on what the kids can’t do, and see the destination as an uphill journey, we’re exhausted before we take our first step.  It’s no way to teach, and for a  child, it’s no way to be taught.

What do I want them to be able to do?

          Begin, therefore, with a list of what you want your students to be able to do at the end of a given unit of study.  For example,

•  I might want my students to be able to write a reading response that includes a summary, a description of the problem or a character, and a paragraph or two describing the child’s  connection to the story. 
• Or I might want my students to be able to add negative numbers fluently and with a minimum score of 80% on a given assessment. 
• Perhaps I want my students to be able to describe the plot features of a text. 
•  Maybe I want my students to be active participants in a literature circle.   
• Perhaps what I want is for my students to successfully complete a science notebook write-up that describes the purpose of an experiment, observations, methodology, materials, hypothesis and conclusions according to a standard rubric.

 Aim high.   

          Aim for the existing standards for any student at grade level.

          Once you know where you’re going, it’s time to take a look at what skills are required in order to get there. 

•  What does one need to be able to do in order to write a reading response? 
• What does a child need to be able to do in order to add and subtract negative numbers?  
• What does my class need to know in order to give me an accurate description of the plot features of a given story? 
• What skills does writing a grade-level science assignment entail?

Make a list. 

          Check it twice.  And then break it down some more.  By this I mean, piece apart all of the different sub-skills that are needed in order to achieve the items on your list. 

In order to write a summary paragraph, a student needs to be able to:  write complete sentences; learn to use his or her own words to describe what happens in a passage; organize facts in sequential order; keep track of who did what in a story; understand the main idea. 

In order to talk about a story in a literature circle, students need to:  know how to develop ideas as they read; jot down thoughts while they read; know how to raise topics in discussion; take turns; add on to someone else’s ideas; listen reflectively; listen responsively. 

          Don’t worry too much about getting everything broken down to the smallest degree.  There will be plenty of time for tweaking your skills list later, as you make discoveries with your students.  I’ve never been able to predict every single skill that is needed in order for my kids to accomplish something; I always end up adding a concept and then finding ways to teach it mid-stream.  That’s part of the excitement of teaching.

What can thhey already do?

           Once you’ve dissected the skills and concepts, it’s time to focus on your students.  Take a look at them with an objective eye:  What are they already able to do?  What are they close to mastering, just needing another push? 

           Obviously, our students aren’t a homogeneous lot, and some students have more skills than others for any given lesson.  Pay attention to that, and make a mental note about the ones who are further ahead – you will want to use them as peer mentors as  you go.    Your students are some of the best tutors, and most inspirational teachers in your classroom.

          At this point, you will need to start planning your instruction in detail.  Take one small piece of the puzzle at a time, and think about how you can bring your students to competency:  what strategies can you use to provide them with appropriate opportunities to learn?    Notice that I am using the plural:  strategies.  You will want to teach the same skills in a variety of ways to accommodate different learning styles, learning needs, and to reenforce the concepts repeatedly.

          As I tell my student teachers:  go forth and think.

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By Sara Finegan 

          There’s a misconception among many in the field of education about special education.  To many, “learning disabled” means “unable to learn” or “limited learning capacity.”  The focus is on the “dis” part of “disability” instead of the ability part.  They ask the wrong questions:  “how smart is he?” rather than “how is he smart?”   

          We’re all guilty of this to some extent, and the result is that in more cases than not, the special education classroom is one where the learning is “dumbed down” and expectations are too low to inspire growth.

          When this happens, our students become dependent on us for learning and information rather than independent thinkers.  When we lower our expectations because of assumptions about learning capacity or processing strengths, the kids learn not to think hard, think deeply, or use their strengths. 

         When kids aren’t taught to rigorous standards and to use and master important skills, they begin to abdicate responsibility for learning.  We cripple them  by modifying our expectations when what we should really be doing is  strengthening them by modifying our instruction to move them forward.

           Over the course of the last decade, I’ve taught all kinds of students, from those with emotional disabilities to language deficits, cognitive and processing deficits, autism, and everything in between.  My long-time aide, whose three children are in  general education classes, informs me regularly that our classroom goes deeper and works kids harder than many general education classes in our district.  Certainly, we don’t require less than they do in terms of the quality and quantity of work from our students. 

          My students work hard, and I expect them to meet the State standards in every subject area.  My job is to figure out for each student how to get them there.

         When I talk about having a demanding classroom, I’m not referring to the students.  I’m referring to my teaching.  

         This blog is intended to share the instructional strategies and practices that we use in our classroom, and to demonstrate how running a demanding classroom promotes the kind of intellectual growth and development of skills that students with mild to moderate learning disabilities need in order to be successful independent learners. 

         Your comments and questions are welcome as we embark on this journey.

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