To my way of thinking, there are two kinds of IEP goals:  remedial ones, and compensatory ones.  They are equally good; it is their purposes that differ.  A good IEP may contain some of both.

Remedial goals

A remedial goal is one which is intended to teach a student a skill which he has missed somewhere along the line.  I think of it as filling in a hole in the foundation of a child’s learning:  without this particular skill, progress in on grade-level standards is not achievable.

It’s important when considering remedial goals to choose ones which are reasonable and which are possible.  

I’ve written before about goals related to learning multiplication facts.  After fifth grade, I don’t think that should be a part of IEPs.   Knowing multiplication facts requires memory skills and sequencing.  Many kids really struggle with this – it may be a developmental thing and they’ll catch up later, or they may never get it.  

If parents really want the child to learn the multiplication tables, they can work on it at home.  Memorizing facts should not be an IEP goal.

Reasonable and possible remedial goals are ones which we believe a child can achieve with support and precise interventions.  

For example, we may discover that a sixth grade student doesn’t know what synonyms and antonyms are, and cannot use them in writing or to make meaning in reading.  This is something that has been taught in prior years, and is essential to progress in reading and writing. 

The student hasn’t “gotten it” in the general ed class,  so obviously a more direct and scaffolded approach is necessary.   Small group instruction or even a quick mini-lesson followed by 5-minute daily practice sessions could do the trick.  

Compensatory goals

Compensatory goals are ones which are designed to help a child perform a grade level standard with the necessary supports.  The goal is related to an academic standard, and it, as well as the benchmarks, specifies the types of supports that will be provided. 

Generally, we like to move from more to less.  

Lots of students have writing goals.  If the grade level standard requires that a child produce multi-paragraph essays (introductory paragraph with thesis statement, transition phrases, body paragraphs each with main idea and 3-5 supporting facts as well as a conclusion, and summary concluding paragraph, etc.) then that is the basic goal.  

Does the child need graphic organizers and visual prompts?  Checklists and rubrics?   A writing buddy?   Word banks and spellcheck?  

A goal might look like this:

“Given a topic, checklist of required assignment components, graphic organizer with word bank and rehearsal, Diana will produce a five-paragraph essay (introductory paragraph, 3 body paragraphs, conclusion) using compound sentences, rich vocabulary and proper spelling/punctuation, on 3 occasions with 80% accuracy as measured by checklist or rubric.”

If the child’s deficits are greater than Diana’s, perhaps the goal will read as follows: 

“Given a topic, checklist of required assignment components, and graphic organizer, Sam will use Dragon Speak or similar software to dictate 3 paragraphs, each with a main idea and 3-5 supporting details, on 3 occasions with 80% accuracy as measured by checklist or rubric.”

How about math?  Well, if Josh doesn’t know his multiplication facts in the fifth grade, he’s still going to have to be able to solve big multiplication problems.   As I said, Josh doesn’t need to learn to memorize.  He needs to learn strategies that will bridge the gap between his inability to memorize and fifth grade math problems.  Take a grade level standard and modify it.  How about one of these?

“Given 5 three-digit multiplication problems, a partial products template and a multiplication chart, Josh will show his work for each step in correctly solving them on 4/5 occasions with 80% accuracy.” 

Here, Josh is using compensatory strategies (multiplication chart and a partial products template) to do the same work as his grade-level peers.

Or

“Given 10 two-digit multiplication problems requiring knowledge of 8s facts and 9s facts, Josh will use compensatory strategies such as using the sum of the digits to write down his 9s facts and repeated addition to correctly solve them on 4/5 occasions with 80% accuracy as measured by student work.” 

If Josh can quickly jot down the 9s multiplication facts by writing 1 through 9 down the side of a page and then writing 1 through 9  up in the next space, he doesn’t need to have the nines memorized.  Similarly, if he can count on his fingers and write down the 8s through addition, he’s good to go!
 
Not every IEP needs both kinds of goals. 

Some kids are so close to grade level that they just need minimal supports in order to do the work that is required in their class.  Remedial goals might not be necessary.   Use your best judgment.

What I can say is that…

Only in IEPs for kids who are so severely disabled that the team decides they cannot access general education curriculum at all should you consider you omitting compensatory goals. 

Yes, a non-verbal child with autism who struggles with sensory issues can do some activity to demonstrate a component of a grade-level science standard.  It might be something simple, like correctly labeling the parts of a plant, or something more complex, such as growing a bean and making a chart of daily measurements.  

In a Special Day Class or a general ed class, our kids with IEPs are supposed to be accessing the gen ed curriculum.  They must have compensatory goals.

A really good IEP goal requires some thinking and reviewing of student work.  It also requires that you really know the standards for the subject area and grade level the student is in now, or will be in the coming year.  

GOAL!!!

It helps to identify what the baseline is for the student and to state it explicitly with as  much precision as possible.   

• Does Betsy write a paragraph that has a topic sentence and supporting details but no conclusion? 
• Does Joe write short, choppy sentences without detail?  How often?   70% of the time?   6/10 times?  
• Does Abby successfully solve three-step math problems using a “how-to” chart 60% of the time?  
• Can you say that Bobby correctly answers comprehension questions with 65% accuracy after reading a second grade text?

Looking at that baseline and comparing it to the grade-level standard will show you exactly what to write in  the goal.  

 If the grade-level standard states that a student will use both compound and simple sentences in written work, and Josh uses simple sentences 90% of the time in independent writing, or will write compound sentences 60% of the time with maximum prompts, then the goal will be that Josh write using a combination of some sort (be specific) on 4/5 occasions, with 85% accuracy. 

Once you have the baseline and the goal, you need to start backwards planning.  What specific things does the student need to be able to do, with what kinds of support, on the way to achieve what goal?  If Josh needs maximum prompts to write compound sentences, what benchmarks are appropriate?  Here are a few:

1. How about starting out by having him combine simple sentences using prepositions and conjunctions?   A benchmark might be  “Given 10 simple sentences, a rehearsal and prompts as needed, Amy will use prepositions and/or conjunctions to make 5 compound sentences, on 4/5 occasions with 80% accuracy as measured by student work.”
2. Can Josh already combine sentences but only with maximum support?  Reduce the number of prompts.  Maybe “Given a student-written text, a rehearsal and no more than 2 prompts, Josh will revise two paragraphs by combining simple sentences into compound ones, on 4/5 occasions with 80% accuracy.”
3. Perhaps a later benchmark might read “Given a topic, graphic organizer and word bank, rehearsal and a visual prompt, Josh will write 3 compound sentences containing appositive or prepositional phrases, on 4/5 occasions with 80% accuracy as measured by student work.”

I like to have at least three measurable, data-based benchmarks for each goal.  Sometimes I write as many  as five–it just depends on the complexity of the goal.   As for the spacing intervals, the norm is to schedule them around the end of marking periods.  This is ok most of the time, but there are times when you need to set dates closer together.  

Recently, a colleague asked me not to write so many benchmarks, because it creates too much work; we have to write progress reports for each benchmark interval.     I replied that perhaps it creates more work for me, since I’m the one who will have to write the progress notes, but that’s not likely. 

A really good case manager is constantly collecting data, reviewing it and planning from it.  It takes me 3-4 minutes to write a progress note for a benchmark, because I have a notebook or folder with the data I need right at hand. 

I’m not afraid of hard work or more work; I’m afraid of what will happen if I start cutting corners on IEPs because I don’t want to work as hard as I do.

(Photo by popofatticus, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)

One of the coolest things about writing IEPs is that you get to create customized goals for the student.  

Once you know and understand a student’s learning style and deficits, you pinpoint the specific needs of the student and design measurable goals with objectives or benchmarks spaced at reasonable intervals throughout the year.    

This creates a roadmap for all of the support providers and teachers who are working with the student.

One of the most awful things I’ve discovered in  my consultations with parents and districts from around the country is how generic and inappropriate many goals are.    

• They aren’t measurable.   What the hell does “will improve in-class attitude by 50% ” mean?
• They aren’t standards-based.   There is no reason why a 14-year old should have a goal to learn the multiplication facts.   If he doesn’t know them by heart yet, he needs to use other strategies.   Any math goals should be related to the standards for his grade level, not third grade.
• They aren’t specific.    If I never again see a goal like “given a topic Danny will write a 5-paragraph essay that fulfils 70% of the requirements for the assignment” , I will be a happy woman.   Really?   Which 70%?   What can he already do, and what does he need to learn how to do?
• They aren’t customized to student needs and learning styles.   Many districts have an IEP system online, and in many cases there’s a drop-down menu of goals available.  The thing that most teachers don’t know is that these goals were never intended to be used as-is and the district administrators assumed we’d use them only in a pinch.   Generic goals have to be revised to match the student.  

We special ed teachers and case managers simply cannot allow ourselves to take shortcuts and use drop-down menus on this part of an IEP.  

There is absolutely no excuse for generic, mushy goals.   None.    

There’s a reason that special ed teachers have a smaller class or caseload size than general ed teachers:   we have more complicated work to do to create and fulfill individual education plans.   Not “group” education plans.

Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor

Photo copyright Richard Finegan, Paraeducator Central

When we’re working with kids who struggle to learn, there are several things at play within us:

• Compassion – who doesn’t remember times when we were trying to learn something and found it hard?  And when we remember, don’t those awful feelings of frustration and panic come right back up?
• Desire to nurture – you don’t have to be a parent to feel that primal urge to take care of, to coddle and to make things easy and lovely for someone.
• Urgency – whether you’re in a separate classroom or in the middle of a group of gen. ed kids, there are deadlines and we can’t spend 6 hours learning how to carry and borrow right this minute.
• Curiosity and interest – I don’t know about you, but I’m fascinated by how my students’ minds process information and learn new things.  When I’m working directly with a child, I am utterly absorbed with what I’m seeing and hearing from them – even if what I’m hearing is silence.  I’m watching and noting the smallest details, and putting those details together with others and reframing my picture of the kiddo.
• Jumping ahead – There’s a part of me that is always looking forward to the desired outcome, the longterm one.  As I observe and show a child what to do now, I am thinking about how to release the responsibility fully back to him or her, and what I want to see him/her do. 

Many of these factors war with one another, and I think it’s a learned skill to master them sufficiently to be able to give just the proper support to an individual or small group of kids.  I often have to deal with the “urgency” factor by mentally chunking what we’re doing into smaller increments and focusing on just getting one tiny step done now, with the rest to come later. 

I frequently have to remind myself that I’m not the one who is struggling right now, so get over it.  And it is absolutely essential that I control my mothering instinct, because if I didn’t, I’d be an enabler or a crutch, not a teacher.

More damage is done to kids by helping them than by not.   That may sound far-fetched, but I believe it to be so.   We’re often so busy sheltering and scaffolding and supporting kids that we forget to release responsibility back to them, and as a result, kids are dependent on us.     

Who hasn’t worked with a child who quite obviously doesn’t know how to persevere and try a bunch of different ways to solve a problem?  Who hasn’t encountered a kiddo who says “I dunno” within 2 seconds of realizing he doesn’t know the answer?  What about those kids we see, in every school, who are passive learners, expecting everything to come to them, rather than reaching out and grabbing at knowledge? 

On my caseload over the years, I’ve seen quite a few.  In some years, they have approached the majority of my students; in others, about a third.

It’s not the kids’ fault.  It’s ours.  We’ve helped too much in the wrong way.

This doesn’t mean that we need to stop providing support .  It means that we need to change the manner in which we support, and be ever-vigilant about the effects of our help.  

Watch yourself.  Catch yourself if you:

• Find yourself giving the answer when the child should be finding it himself.
• Are jumping in to a silence instead of giving a child extra time to think and respond.
• Are cutting corners to get through a task with a child faster than he or she can process or work
• Are feeling frustrated and impatient – maybe you’ve taken on too much with the child
• Think, even subconsciously, that getting it right is more important than learning it. 

We are all susceptible to lapses, of course.  But the more we let the child do the thinking , reasoning, puzzling and work, the more he will be learning.

1.  Personal attention.  Children who are independent and self-motivated are a joy in the classroom, but they are the exception.  Most need prompting and pep talks to stay on task and do their best work.

2. Encouragement.  Most kids need to know that someone cares if they do the work, finish the assignment, understand the lesson.

3. Reassurance.  Being shown  that they can do it, get it, learn it.  Kids who have struggled and become accustomed to low grades easily internalize the idea that they just aren’t capable.

4. Focus.  So many kids struggle with attention deficits, some simply can’t stay on task without someone to redirect them frequently.

5. Repetition.  The para can repeat, in a variety of ways as necessary, what the teacher is explaining in the lesson.  This addresses the various learning styles of the students, and gives them more opportunities to “get it.”

6. Illustration.  Children, especially if they have auditory processing deficits, can’t visualize what is being described.  I use my white board to draw pictures, especially in math class, or in social studies.

7. Demonstration.  If they see something right in front of them, not all the way across the room where the teacher is, it is more likely to be remembered.

8. Motivation.  Exactly what motivates a particular child, or causes him to be unmotivated, can differ.  But if they like you they will want to please you.

9. Reward.  If the teacher agrees, some kids really respond well to the positive reinforcement of some sort of reward for doing their best.   I usually use cheap prizes that they earn with stickers.

10. Independence.  Never forget that what you are working toward is not a child who does well when attached to the umbilical cord of an aide, but a kid who continues to do well when the aide steps away to help another student.

(Reposted by the author from Paraeducator Central.)

We only slowly came to recognize the amount of interest there has been on posts about topics relating to those non-teacher personnel who serve our special needs kids, whether we call them special education assistants, paraprofessionals, classroom aides, educational assistants, or paraeducators.

We hope and believe that this new blog will serve a needed niche,  where paraeducators can speak for and among themselves.  Take a look and let us hear from you.

There seems to be lots of interest on the web in information about paraeducators and our work with special needs kids.  Plenty is written about us by teachers, administrators, union professionals or college professors who’ve never actually done our jobs.   Not much out here is written by paraprofessionals ourselves.  That is a shame.

Sara and Richard Finegan

Some, even some of our coworkers, may have the impression that we are little more than day care workers in the public schools.  Most of us have been asked by a general ed teacher to leave the classroom (and the kids we are there to help) to go run some menial errand.  Many of us are not even consulted about or included in IEPs relating to the kids we work with, as if our observations or insights are of no consequence.

If we are going to be taken seriously, as professionals, we need to support efforts to make our jobs more professional.  Continuing education classes should be required for us, in my opinion.  Certification by the state might be appropriate where that is not already done. 

But I’ve drifted from my point:  We need to speak for ourselves.  We need to assert ourselves as intelligent, articulate professionals capable of worthwhile contribution to the discussion of our own jobs and role in the special education system.

With the expansion of full inclusion, where kids with special needs are distributed among the general ed population ad not segregated in special classes, more of us than ever before will be working in general ed classrooms without the constant presence of a special ed teacher.  Many of the general ed teachers will turn to us for guidance in dealing with issues relating to our kids.  If you’ve worked as a one-on-one to an included child you know this to be true.

We need to be prepared to step up to the plate.  Don’t wait for the general ed teacher to identify problems to you; bring things to his or her attention.  Suggest solutions or consultations with the special ed case manager.  Be an advocate for your kids.  Be an advocate for yourself as a knowledgeable coworker in the classroom, more than just a warm-bodied adult.

We contribute to this acceptance of us as professionals when we stop letting the conversation, both in the schools and on the web, be ABOUT us and start being WITH us.

We need to speak for ourselves. 

So here is my invitation to all paraeducators with something to say to the world:  contact me.  I have no desire to be a lonely voice in the wilderness of the internet .  I can see that appropriate posts get published and, more importantly, FOUND by search engines like Google, bing, Yahoo, AOL. Together we can be stronger.

If there is enough interest in this, I am considering setting  up a separate blog that can serve as a forum and sounding board for paraeducators.  What do you think?

I am cross-posting this on The Demanding Classroom and Readers With Autism.  Each blog already contains earlier posts for and about us as paraeducators.  You can look for the category “Paraeducators” on either blog to find my posts, which are mostly different on each site.

In my tenure as a special educator, I’ve taught kids in a Special Day Class setting as well as those who would be classified as Resource and kept in the general education environment.    I’ve taught almost every subject area in separate classroom and general ed classroom, in grades 4 through 12.   I’ve taught kids with mild to moderate learning deficits, and even a few with more moderate to severe disabilities.

The more I work with these wonderful kids, the more I am made aware that it is not the content of the lessons, but the manner in which we teach them that makes the difference in learning.    Direct, explicit instruction, customized to the child’s individual learning style and need, is the key to the door that accesses, for the child, the material.    Even the best teachers using the best practices for instruction, may need to tweak how they do things to accommodate our learners’ deficits.

Let me give some examples:

Avery was born premature and since early childhood has exhibited difficulties with memory, particularly sequential memory.  He is now getting ready for middle school.  He does not know the months of the year in order, or the seasons in which the months belong.  He just learned his phone number.  He has difficulty memorizing multiplication tables.  He has significant deficits in the area of auditory processing, and may have receptive language deficits.  He certainly displays difficulties with expressive language – he has difficulty at times retrieving even the names of long-time friends.  He is friendly, funny, athletic, and popular in his class.

Justin is an upper primary student who has an anxiety disorder.  He has trouble falling asleep at night, is fearful of the dark and strange places, and desperate that nobody know when he doesn’t understand something in class.  He is shy, but friendly, and has a good sense of humor.  He masks his terrible fear of exposure with a feigned carelessness.  He refuses help at home from his parents and peers, which makes homework and remedial learning difficult.    Justin, like Avery, does not process what he hears, and tries to model his academic behavior after what he sees his peers doing, without understanding the concepts  being taught.   A popular kid, Justin’s learning is impeded by his internal anxiety and his processing deficits.

Shayna has ADHD and needs to be constantly moving in order to function at all in class.  She’s tried a variety of medications, all of which has side effects that made it impossible for her to continue.  With preferential seating and lots of visual cues, she can manage in class for the most part, but has frequent episodes of panic when, after emerging from a short episode of inattention, she realizes that she missed something important and doesn’t know what to do.    She is sloppy and careless in her work, but is motivated to learn.    Her writing skills are very limited; spelling is atrocious, punctuation non-existent, and she often skips words, writes run-on or incomplete sentences, and never, unless prompted, uses detail to support her ideas and flesh out the text.

Toby is a high-functioning autistic learner.  His expressive and receptive language deficits make understanding what the teacher is saying, including directions, difficult, so he does a lot of watching and copying what others are doing.  He thrives where there’s math calculations to do, but in terms of setting up problems, navigating through word problems, or showing mathematical reasoning, he is far below grade level.   Toby is a good mechanical reader, but his comprehension skills are limited to the surface, literal meaning of text.

All of these kids are in a general education class of 30 students, with a fabulous teacher who provides differentiated instruction better than anyone I’ve ever seen:  Every lesson includes kinesthetic, visual, auditory, and musical and/or artistic segments designed to address every type of learner.    She knows her stuff, and she knows how to make learning fun, energetic, and successful.   Everything is color-coded, rhythmic, and well-spaced so that kids aren’t overwhelmed by the material.

            And yet……….our four friends are falling seriously behind.    

Walk into the classroom, and take a seat in a corner.  You will see a dynamic teacher leading kids through a fun lesson.  There are pauses for movement, there are funny accents to keep your attention in the right place, open-ended questions, modeling, and cooperative learning activities.  Kids are active, engaged, and working together.

Look at our four friends.  They are smiling.  Eyes are glued on the teacher when she’s providing instruction.  They copy everything she does.  They are well-behaved. 

But when it comes time to work with partners or independently, they are helpless.  They look at what their partners are doing and try to follow along.  Ask them what they are doing, and they can’t really say.  If they’ve followed the modeled lesson and copied the info into the graphic organizer, using colored pencils, just like the teacher did, they don’t know what to DO with the information when left to their own devices.  They let their partners do most of the work and strive to look busy.

Avery needs 45 more minutes than anyone else to finish a task.  Justin doesn’t finish, but does enough to get by.  Toby copies exactly what his partner wrote.  Shayna walks over to the teacher eight times in 35 minutes to show her what she’s done so far and ask if it’s right.  It isn’t very good, but at least she’s trying.

Next scene:  math class.  The kids are working on multiple-step problem solving.  Avery and Justin are confused, and are using the wrong operation to solve equations.  Shayna loses track of what she’s doing and has to start over again three times.  Toby is sitting, staring at a word problem, unsure how to set up an equation.  He shuts down completely until the teacher approaches and writes an equation out for him, at which point he quickly solves it in his head.  He writes the answer without showing his work. 

You get the picture.  You’ve probably seen each of these kids somewhere in one of your classes.

            So what is missing?

            I think that what is missing is direct, explicit, step-by-step instruction. 

Instructional trends have been moving increasingly to the exploratory learning module, where kids are given open-ended questions and work together to explore and reason through answers using grade-level materials.    Understanding the concepts behind mathematical operations is given the same importance as being able to use the operations properly.  Experimenting with concepts and ideas and giving kids time to try on and try out different ways of writing, thinking about the content of the textbook constitute a good part of the day.    We want kids to be able to reason, not just answer by rote, right?  Absolutely. 

But there’s a problem with this.  If our kids can’t really understand the language, can’t process it or use it, if their processing deficits impede the reasoning needed to do the work at grade level, or if their reading and writing skills are below grade level so that they struggle just to make sense of the textbook, all of the exploratory learning in the world is not going to achieve anything at all.  In fact, it is going to confuse the kids and get them more tangled up with feelings of inadequacy and confusion, frustration and anxiety, than they need to be.

These kids need coping strategies, problem-solving strategies, and to be taught, shown, and given multiple opportunities to practice, the step-by-step process for doing the work.

• They need to have those steps provided to them clearly, in writing, on charts displayed in the room, and in their binders.  They need to be shown, over and over, each step, in isolation.  Practice just doing Step 1 ten times.  Then do Step 2 ten times.  Then practice Steps 1 and 2 five times.  And so on.
• They need to be told what you are looking to see them do.  “I want to see you reading the question, and underlining the key word.”   “I want to see you scanning the text, line by line, looking for the key word.”  “I want to see you lining up your problem one number right underneath the other.”  “I want to see you highlighting the operations words in the math problem.”

• Give them templates.  Give them checklists.  Give them small group supervision as they practice, without making them feel that they are being singled out because they’re dumb, or “special”.    Send them home with the step-by-step instructions and five practice opportunities as homework, with a reward when they bring it back. 

What does this require of us, the teachers?  It requires that we be willing to break tasks down into smaller bits, and to create clear, concise, and easy to remember explanations or instructions for each.  It requires that we be creative enough to find mnemonics, songs, goofy slogans, and pictures of the key elements of the lesson.  It requires that we  be flexible enough to create small group opportunities, DAILY,  to help guide our students with learning difficulties, in the general education classroom, not as a pull-out where they are singled out as “special”.  It requires that we be sometimes willing to go against the teaching modules that our newer textbooks and educational programs dictate , to include the older-fashioned direct instruction that these kids need.

I think that somewhere between one third and one half of the problems kids with learning disabilities have in class are related to the way the adults in the classroom talk.  I have absolutely no scientific evidence to back this up.  I just have a gut feeling.  It might be more than one half, actually.  It’s a lot.

If you’re a teacher, visualize yourself in the class with your students.  Visualize teaching a lesson, giving instructions for independent or group work, and yourself roaming the classroom, observing and intervening as necessary. 

Listen to yourself. 

Listen some more.

Now, step back out of your visualized classroom and think about what your lesson was about.  What was the purpose?  What did you want the kids to learn?  What did you want them to be able to do in independent or group work?  How did you anticipate that they would demonstrate what they learned? 

I can create a one-page, bulleted mock-up of a lesson that looks like this:

• What I want them to know/learn/be able to do: 
  • identify key vocabulary in a math word problem that indicates the type of operation to use to solve.
• Why this is important: 
  • Helps make word problems easier to decipher
• How I will teach it: 
  • On overhead, several word problems
  • Work to highlight the key vocabulary 
  • Model, model, model. 
  • Then, kids write words in graphic organizer 
  • Then, partner work
• How I will know they got it: 
  • I’ll see their graphic organizers completed 
  • I’ll see partners working to underline or highlight key vocabulary in practice questions and create the correct equations

I’m very clear on what I want them to learn how to do, why, and the steps involved in the lesson.  Putting the lesson into place, however, can result in instruction that is far less clear. 

The difference between an effective lesson using this lesson plan, and one that is not effective rests not on the plan itself, but on how it is delivered. 

Delivery of a lesson involves just about everything we are doing.  It involves our physical presence in the classroom:  where we stand or sit, and where, when and how we move.  It involves the visuals that we provide:  charts, overhead or document camera, Promethean board.  It involves the environmental surroundings in the classroom:  light, other sounds, movement, interference.   It involves our attitude:  are we energetic, frenetic, goofy, light-hearted, serious, stern, bored, frustrated? 

And, most of all to some students, it involves the words we use.  In particular, the number of words we use.

To those of us who are good with words, who understand them and use them effectively, the amount of teacher talk in a lesson doesn’t seem very important.  I can listen to a professor who intersperses, in his lectures about contemporary art, anecdotes about his experiences with famous and not-so-famous artists, lame jokes, and tangential diatribes about public funding for art.   I track him while he paces back and forth between the podium and the window.

While I’m listening, I am sorting through his words and identifying the most important concepts, writing down, in outline form, the notes that I am going to need to study for the test, and filing away some of the stories he’s telling to repeat to my husband someday.  If I get distracted by the mutterings of my seat partner or the note that she passes me asking if I want to meet for coffee on Saturday, I can easily come back to the lecture, filling what I missed using my background knowledge, or, in  a pinch, glance at my partner’s notes and copy.

There are other people in the class with me, and kids in the classes that I teach, who will not be able to do what I’m doing, and won’t get much, if anything, out of the lesson.   I’m referring to people with auditory processing deficits (or APDs).

For them, dealing with the words spoken by the professor, or by me, is a struggle not just for meaning, but for discernment, sequencing, associating, and storing.        

Some of the brightest people I have ever known have auditory processing deficits, and most were considered stupid when they were in elementary school, because they  could sit in class, pay attention to the teacher, and  not come away with any meaningful grasp of what was taught.

What are auditory processing deficits? 

Here’s what they’re not:  they aren’t hearing deficits.  People with auditory processing deficits hear just fine.  Their brains simply don’t process the sounds properly.  Think of it as having extreme near or farsightedness with sounds.  Or partial paralysis of your legs while you’re walking. 

There are a variety of types of auditory processing deficits.  I will cover those in another post.  But regardless of the particular form of APD, you need to know that no matter how clearly you speak, what you say in class to your students may be incomprehensible or, at the very least, extremely difficult to understand by many students.

Let’s take a couple of scenarios. 

• Here, the lesson is about a book the kids need to choose for their next book report:

“Ok, kids, I just finished grading the last book report and I’m really pleased with how everyone did.  I saw a lot of really excellent thinking and writing and by the way, some of your artwork on the book covers was outstanding!  I’m going to put some of the best reports and book covers on the bulletin board so that y’all can see them and celebrate the excellence.  Nice job.   Now, it’s time to get started on next month’s reading assignment.  The book report for next month is going to be a little different.  Instead of writing a plain report, you’re going to write it in the form of a newspaper, with feature articles, interviews, even an advice column, and of course, pictures. 

“I’m going to pass around some examples of exemplary work done by last year’s students.  You’ll see that they used really creative headlines and that the newspapers looked very professional.  It’s okay to have your parents help you if they have newsletter or other software that will help you layout the materials you type in, but they can’t do the writing for you.  Ok, so, your book choice this month is going to be the life story of an important person in American culture.  You can pick a biography or autobiography or memoir.  Who knows what a memoir is?  Sandy?  Yes, it’s the life reminiscences of a person.  How is that different from an autobiography?  John?  Right.  An autobiography is in sequential order, from birth onwards.  Memoirs can move around between ages.  Good job! 

“Ok, so you need to pick a book in the next few days.  The book should be a least 150 pages long, so nobody had better pick up one of the easy-peasy readers that we use with our reading buddies in the first grade!  You can use a book on tape, too, if you like. A  lot of people, like my mom, love to listen to books on tape instead of just reading the text, because it seems more alive to them, and that’s just fine.  Your choice.  We’ll go to the library tomorrow morning and you can look there as well as in our classroom book bins.  Remember, it has to be an American person, not someone from Europe.  So could you pick a biography of King Henry II of England?  No, you could not, because he wasn’t American.  Could you do a biography of Levi Strauss, who invented blue jeans?  Sure, because he lived in America.  Ok, he wasn’t born here, but he moved here and he became an American.  Back then, it was easier to become a citizen.  Are we clear? 

“You are going to have three weeks to read the book and I will be giving you a packet with the instructions for each type of article or whatever that you need to include in the book report newsletter.  You can write it by hand but it will look a lot nicer if it’s typed, and if you don’t have a computer at home you can go to the computer lab during lunch or literacy time to do the typing, or even stay after school if Mrs. Sainz will allow it.  You have to ask her.  I think she usually has one hour of c omputer time available on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but you’d better ask her.  Are we clear?  Good.  Let’s look at some of these examples.  Pass them around, pass them around.”

The students who were listening to this teacher had to do a lot of things at once.  They had to look at the examples she passed around… identify and then keep track of which parts of what she was saying were important to know for the book report… remember the different requirements for the book choice… listen to the questions she asked and the answers… file away the information about the computer center…identify the time period in which the book (a) needed to be chosen and (b) needed to be finished… and discard extraeneous information.

That’s a lot to do.  If this teacher was moving around the classroom while she was talking, the student also had to both look at the materials in front of him or her and track the teacher.  If the teacher turned away from the students, and kept talking, the student had to listen harder to make sure he or she got all of the words.   If the student stopped listening or tuned out even briefly while looking at the examples being passed around, he or she would have to fill in the blanks missed from the teacher’s speech.

• In the following example, the kids are learning about totem poles:

“Kids, Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest had some unique arts and crafts.  They used the natural resources of their region – who can tell me what one of them was?  Jane?  Right.  Wood.  Another one?  Danielle?  Right!  Whale bone.  Jack?  Ivory, yep, that too.  All right.  Let’s turn to page 178 and start learning about what they used those items for besides tools and other implements.    I said open your book, David.  Open.  The.  Book.  Turn to the page.  I said page 178.  Ok.  No, not 176.  178.  EIGHT.  Good. 

“All right, let’s look at the page.  What text features do you notice?  Alex?  And what does the title say?  Totem.  Prounced like Toe, Tem.  Totem.  Totem poles.  Right.  So what is this part of the chapter going to be about?  Totem poles.  What other text features do you notice?  Ricky?  Picture?  What is the academic word for the picture in the textbook?  Starts with ill……right, illustration.  What goes along with the illustration, who knows?  Kim?  Caption.  The caption describes the picture, tells you what it is.  In this case, what does the caption tell us?  Roxanne?  Read it, please.  Good.  Ok, so let’s start reading.  Kim, read the first paragraph, please….

(Later).…”Nice job.   So now we know about the totem poles.  Who can raise their hand and, in your own words, tell me what a totem pole is?  Ralphie?  Good!  Yes, it is a piece of sculpture made of wood that the Indians used to represent important animals spirits, or totems, in their clans or culture.  Write that down.  In your social studies notebook, write totem pole, and your definition.  Then, write, in bullet form, at least 3 animals that were commonly used in totem poles.   Next to each animal, write the attribute or characteristic of that animal in the Pacific Northwest Indian culture.  I’ll come around and look at what you’re doing.”

Here, the students had to retrieve academic vocabulary in the form of text features…remember the page number…take notes…listen while their peers read from the text out loud… recall important parts of the reading…identify the important parts… segment or organize the different types of information…remember the sequence of certain details… multi-task visual and auditory…fill in any blanks using background knowledge..recall important information.

There are kids who cannot do any of these with ease, and there are kids who can do only a few of them with ease, and there are kids who can do any one of them with ease but not combinations of them. 

These are the kids who are going to become completely entangled in your words and, in so doing, miss most of, part of, or some of the lesson. 

It’s not their fault.  It’s not your fault.   But one of you needs to change, and it’s not going to be the child. 

Auditory Processing Deficits are not something you can really cure, though some remediating work can be done.  They are things that we have to accommodate.  And accommodate we must.

What follows are some suggestions, if not concrete rules, for how to deal with auditory processing deficits in your classroom.

You, your body, and what you do with it.

• If you are a wanderer during instruction, i.e., when you’re giving the lesson, consider becoming more of a stationary speaker.  If you can’t do that, and many of us just need to move, then consider limiting the area in which you are moving.    We can teach kids to track us while we’re talking, but too much movement can be difficult.
• If you are standing or moving in front of a window or light, pay attention to whether the glare or shadow impedes a child from seeing your face.  If the light from my classroom windows shines at a certain angle behind me, my students to my left cannot really see my face.  They need to be able to in order to get the most from what I’m saying.
• Make sure that no matter what, you are facing the class while you are talking.  Again, the kids need to be able to see your face while you speak.

Repeat, repeat, repeat.  Rephrase.

Most of us are adept, in the classroom, at rephrasing the same information or directions several times, perhaps in a variety of ways.  This is an excellent skill and we shouldn’t stop using it.  But kids with certain types of auditory processing deficits actually need us to also repeat the exact information we said earlier. 

• Repeat the page number five times.
• Repeat the instructions two or three times. 
• Repeat the words the kids are learning at least three times.
• When you want kids copying things down, repeat it several times.

Chart the important stuff.

Kids who struggle to identify, sequence, and organize the important information in a lesson need to have visual re-enforcement.  I sometimes use both chart paper and a graphic organizer under the document camera. 

On the chart paper, I record the step-by-step instructions the kids need to follow.  On blank paper under the document camera I write the key concepts or important vocabulary that we are learning or talking about. 

• Chart the step-by-step, sequential information and leave it up during the entire lesson.
• Chart the important vocabulary or key concepts the kids need to know.
• Post clearly what you expect to see the kids doing or what the completed work should contain.

Provide note-taking assistance.

Effective note-taking involves reading or hearing information, narrowing it down to the most important facts or concepts, organizing it, and writing it in a way that can be easily read.  Kids with auditory processing deficits have a really hard time with this.

• Share your own notes our outline with the students with APD.
• Have peers share their notes or take notes for others.  (If you make this a matter-of-fact thing, nobody will think it’s odd or that the receiving student is “special”.)
• Create templates or fill-in sheets for kids to use to take notes.

Choose your own words carefully.

You may need to speak less in class, and choreograph the times you do speak.  If you’re like me, this can be a painful thing to contemplate, but contemplate it we must.  But consider the following:

• What if the teacher in the book report example had first given the kids an opportunity to look at the examples of the newspaper-style book report and then started talking about the assignment? 
• What if the teacher had charted the essential points she needed to convey about the new book report assignment, and, pointing to each one, ticked them off?
• What if she’d given everyone kudos for the previous book report, then allowed everyone to get up and go look at the best ones on the board, and only then started talking about the next one?
• What if she had charted the key info about the genres (biography, autobiography, memoir) when the kids answered her questions?
• What if she saved the information about typing and computer lab for another occasion, perhaps after she’d handed out the assignment packet?
• What if, in the Totem Pole example, she’d modeled the note-taking with the kids, showing how she went back into the text to find the information to copy into her notebook?

By spacing what you say and when you say it, combining your words with visual supports, and eliminating extraneous words or postponing them, your lessons and instructions will become more purposeful, succinct, and easy to understand by all of your students.