By Richard Finegan 

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.)

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 By Sara Finegan

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.

accommodations · differentiated instruction · direct instruction · directions · explicit instruction · exploratory learning · Inclusion · learning · learning disabilities · learning styles · repitition · resource · rote learning · Sara Finegan · special education · teaching strategies

By Sara Finegan

Having special needs in the classroom doesn’t mean that you lack the ability to learn; it means that you learn differently.   It’s not about how smart a child is; it’s about how he or she is smart.

For years, educators and parents believed that students with cognitive impairments and other moderate-severe disabilities were not well-served by inclusion in general education classes.  It was a natural extension of this philosophy to decide that these children also couldn’t follow the general education curriculum.    At first glance, this makes sense; it is only when one pauses to look more carefully that one sees the distortions.

It’s certainly true that a child with cognitive impairments, who can’t read independently cannot read the science textbook and keep a science notebook like his or her gen ed peers.   There’s no doubt that a child who has limited verbal capacity can’t write a five-paragraph essay about the Sioux Indians, or read and understand the Mayflower Compact.

But that doesn’t mean that the kids aren’t able to learn about and demonstrate their understanding of Native American daily life or the Pilgrims’ ordeal in the New World.   You don’t have to be able to read to access text.  You don’t have to be able to write to show what you know.

This year my class had the gift of accepting a fourth grader with autism and mild cognitive impairment into our five-six combo class.  Jack (name changed to protect the fabulous and amazing) had no  choice but to learn about Ancient Greece and Rome with us.  To be sure, he couldn’t use the text book the way the others could, and he didn’t have the ability to make connections between the Greek and Roman forms of government and the current U.S. political system.

• But he could, and did, read fables and do a report on them.  He could, and did, handle the tallying of votes as we explored democracy.
• He could, and did, learn all about the different Greek gods and goddesses and served as the go-to expert when we played Jeopardy!
• He could, and did,  learn 25 vocabulary words related to the units of study.
• He could, and did, create a power point presentation about Harry Potter (ok, not related to social studies or science, but still!)

There’s an ongoing debate, albeit a quiet one, about whether someone like Jack really would be better off learning about Ancient History when he might be, instead, learning independent living skills and the kind of reading and writing he will have to do as an adult.   I confess that I don’t know.  What I do know is that I have never been able to determine what a child’s capacity actually is, and thus have not been privy to knowing what he or she will be able to do as an adult.    Jack came to me unable to do anything independently and very averse to trying difficult things.  By the end of the year, he was actively engaged with other kids in the class, participating in all of our lessons, and doing things nobody had thought he could.

All it took, besides my amazing aide Tamara, was a little planning time.  OK, a lot of planning time.

And there’s the rub: preparing materials and activities for kids with moderate-severe disabilities to access the gen ed curriculum is extremely time-consuming.   As far as I know, there aren’t pre-built units available on the market to use; you must be creative and innovative.

This kind of instruction can be provided in both special ed and general ed classrooms.  If you are designing it for a general ed classroom then it also has to be structured around the gen ed teacher’s time-frame, teaching style and structure, and areas of emphasis.   I suppose you can develop a generic set of tasks and materials, but if we’re serious about teaching every child at his or her level, then we need to provide our kids with special needs with work that makes sense.

And once you’ve created a resource bank to use, you can’t stop there.  You must constantly be building upon it, adding to it, revising, and customizing it to fit the needs of each child.

The task may seem daunting.  For some, it may appear to be an impossible responsibility.   But I think that, if we understand the proper methodology to use, we can, slowly but surely, create for our students and our gen ed colleagues a workable system that allows all of us to engage in the job of teaching in new and exciting ways.

autism · general education · Inclusion · learning styles · lesson planning · modifications · multiple intelligences · Sara Finegan · science · social studies · special education · teaching strategies · unit planning