By Sara Finegan

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.

accomodations · auditory processing · auditory processing deficits · charts · classroom language · determining relative importance · differentiated instruction · hearing vs. listening · Inclusion · learning disabilities · lesson planning · listening · repitition · Sara Finegan · sequencing · sequential memory · special education

By Sara Finegan

Now that I’ve got the standards identified and turned into tamed beasts, I turn my attention to the resources I’m going to need to teach them.  This is where I become a sleuth, poring through books and magazines and the internet to find materials to use in the classroom.  The following are some of the places I’ve used to build a bank of resources for use in my classroom and to support IEP students in the general education environment as well.

•  English Language Learner resources in your district

Most districts don’t have a ton of lower-level reading materials that can be used in  conjunction with grade-level science and social studies units.  Some, however, have materials for English Language Learners, and those should be grabbed by you whenever possible and used as a part of your instruction.  Second Language learning materials use simplified text and have more visual resources than the general ed texts we have in our classrooms.  If your district has them, find them and get at least one set.

• Visit the book room for primary grade materials

Most schools have a book room or closet containing books that teachers can use at a variety of levels.  One of my schools had a small walk-in closet with shelves full of baskets of leveled books as well as books by topics.    Another one had an entire room with bagged sets of books at each level.  Some were to be used for Extended Day Reading or Intersession classes, but all were available to any teacher who wanted to go through them.

I started at the lowest level and moved my way up, pulling books at every level that were related to anything I was teaching or that my general ed colleagues would be teaching.  I was initially surprised at how much was available from the primer level on up about things like rocks, magnets, landforms, stars and planets, plants, the food chain, and habitats.  I was even more surprised to find books about famous people at even the lowest grade level.

The unit bins that I’ve left for my third, fourth and fifth grade gen ed colleagues to use next year with their inclusion students have books for kids at every reading level.

• Discarded materials

When I first started teaching at the school I am now leaving, my principal didn’t give me the current texts for social studies, language arts, or science.  What she did do was introduce me to the book room at our school, where we had, for many years, an enormous library of discarded textbooks at every grade level.  I was encouraged to take whatever I wanted, and I did.

Discarded text?  you may ask. How exactly does an older version of the fourth grade social studies curriculum help teach my kids who read below grade level?  Hah!  The following are some ways that I have used discarded texts:

• I cut out illustrations and maps from the pages of discarded social studies and science textbooks and paste them on index cards.  In some cases, I label the photos/maps and use them as visual cues for the kids as we are teaching.  In other cases, I put the labels on a separate card, and we use entire sets of cards as sorting  cards.  This is how I got a bunch of pictures of prominent people in the early history of the U.S., and now my kids can play a memory game, matching portraits to names.

• Some social studies textbooks in my district have full-page illustrations that are great for laminating and using in a variety of activities.  I found three old California history texts that had a full-page illustration of each type of resident of California.  I cut them out of the book and laminated them, and now we have an easy-to-read, completely labeled picture of a Spanish explorer, a California Native, a Mexican Ranchero, A Gold Rush Miner, and a Railroad builder.  I can create questions for kids to answer using the illustrations, or let kids use them to write sentences, among other activities.

• Textbooks from lower grades often have stories or information that applies to standards at higher grades.  I found a short and easy story about a pioneer child in a primary grades language arts textbook that my own students can use as we learn about westward expansion.  There was a nice little story about the American flag in an old first grade book that I cut out and laminated for my students.   On more than one occasion I’ve found texts I can use for upper grades science instruction in a kindergarten or first grade book.  You just never know! 

• Districts don’t just discard textbooks; there are a variety of other books and materials that become outdated and can be culled for use in differentiated instruction.  In past years, I’ve been able to find timelines to post in my room for history units, supplementary math workbooks to use, graphic organizers, maps, two globes,  posters, and games designed to use with specific textbook activities. 

• Other teachers have given me old story books they no longer use, and that’s how I’ve obtained a goodly number of Native American tales, easy biographies of scientists, books about farm life to use in colonial and pioneer units, fiction stories about fish to use in an ocean habitat unit, and picture books about stars and the solar system to use in science instruction.  I recently found a whole booklet a fellow teacher, at the kindergarten level, had given me about Native Americans.  It had been part of a Thanksgiving unit or something, but it contained a plethora of things I could use in American history at levels all of my students could read.

All kinds of books can be recycled and re-used in any classroom, if you’re creative enough. 

• Teaching materials you can purchase

Awhile back, when I had some extra money for my classroom, I purchased several books of reading material at the second and third grade levels for my kids in the fourth, fifth and sixth grade.  They were put to great use in our reading instruction.   I discovered later that they are also terrific for science and social studies.   In the second  grade reading book, I found short biographies of American leaders, five short texts about plants and plant life, three short pieces about stars, the sun, and galaxies, and about eight pages of text about different aspects of the human body.  All of them provide basic information with comprehension questions to answer, and all of them became parts of my different unit resources for social studies or science.

The third grade book had stories about ocean life, pieces about landforms (mountains, lakes, rivers), and short biographies of famous Native Americans.  Once again, perfect for our upper elementary social studies and science units!

Ute children

As I was rummaging through my storage bins, I found some first and second grade level readers theater books I’d purchased at around the same time.  To my surprise, they had a bunch of short scripts that could be incorporated into our units of study:  one was about the solar system, one was about Johnny Appleseed, one was about the water cycle, and one was about Plains Indians.  Perfect!

Our local 99 cent store often has things I find useful.  I’ve gotten coloring books that have fairytale characters,  space and solar system pictures, and plants and flowers that can be incorporated into low-level literacy or science unit bins.  I’ve also found playing cards of the different American states, which are fabulous to use in US history.

I wouldn’t spend a lot of money on these kinds of materials, but if you find anything at used bookstores, discount stores, or yard sales, snap them right up.

• The internet:  materials to download

I have spent hours surfing the net for materials I can use with my students.  There are millions of websites with millions of things you can download or copy for free.  Most of my sorting card photos come from google images – the copyright laws allow you to use them in the classroom so long as you don’t disseminate them elsewhere.   I’ve gotten short stories and easy reading texts about science and social studies we have used for years.  I’ve pulled easy-to-read fairy tales and printed them out for kids to use.  You would be surprised at how much free stuff is out there that can be used directly or used to create other materials for our students.

Seminole dwelling

I found a great site that described the different kinds of houses that Native Americans lived in, complete with pictures.  I printed out information on each type of housing on separate sheets of paper to be used in small groups or the document camera.  Even though the text may be too difficult for some kids to read on their own, it can be read aloud to them.  Then, I copied each of the photos and printed them to be used to sorting cards.  Now my students, who will be learning about how Native Americans in each region of the U.S. lived, will be able to match the pictures to the names of the houses, and thus demonstrate what they’ve learned.

• The internet:  materials to download for a fee

Whenever possible, I try to get what I need for teaching without paying anything out of my own pocket.   However, there are a variety of websites that have materials that are available to members who pay a small fee.  Over the years, I’ve purchased one-year memberships and downloaded everything I could before allowing my subscription to lapse.  I now have, saved on my school computer, my home laptop, and a flashdrive, an enormous library of materials that I can pull out as needed.

Enchanted Learning is a teacher website that provides materials and activities, mostly for k-3 levels, on a huge variety of topics.   The fee to join is less than $30, I believe, and  for that money, I’ve gotten booklets, worksheets, and activities related to math, science, social studies, and literary genres.  They form an integral part of my resource bins for both my own classroom and gen ed inclusion:

• The fifth grader with severe cognitive impairment can make a weather words wheel and learn several new sight words.
• The  student reading at grade 1 can learn about famous American leaders by reading easy books about George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Cesar Chavez, and  Martin Luther King.

One thing I love about Enchanted Learning is that each thematic unit has activities that cross strands of the curriculum.  Thus:

• Kids can practice alphabetizing lists of words related to units about the solar system, Christopher Columbus, the weather, seasons, and mammals.
• When we study analogies, kids can practice using facts or ideas related to science or social studies units.
• Similes and Antonym matching sheets are available for most of the science units I’m preparing.

I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth from Enchanted Learning, and no, they have not compensated me for this endorsement at all!

School Express is another one of those fabulous websites with hours of downloading fun.  By joining this year, I was able to obtain thematic units on a variety of science and social studies topics – everything from landforms to the Revolutionary War to a biography of Thomas Edison.  The text isn’t at most of my students’ levels, but it can be read aloud in most cases and provides an alternative or supplement  to the even harder social studies textbooks.   Each thematic unit has a fun activity booklet from which you can pull things for kids to do.

School Express also has e-workbooks with  very low level math and literacy learning opportunities.  I’ve gotten series of booklets to use in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division activities, phonics materials, grammar resources, and vocabulary support.  My library of writing prompts for sentences, paragraphs, and narrative stories has been greatly enhanced.  I added to my resources for the fairy tale genre unit by downloading all of the fairy tales in booklet form that kids can read and color.  All in all, this is a terrific site, and again, they have not rewarded me in any manner and have no idea that I’m recommending them on this blog.

Awhile back I purchased a one-year membership to Reading A-Z, an online teaching resource site that has leveled booklets you can download.  I downloaded everything I could at the lowest levels, and now I have them, permanently, to use.  Initially, they became an integral part of my guided reading instruction resources, as the stories could be easily copied and then used and re-used.  Later, I realized how many of them, both fictional and expository, can be used in conjunction with science and social studies instruction.  For example:

• The story about a salmon became part of the bin on Indians of the Pacific Northwest as well as the Rivers Habitat unit bin.
• Booklets about pond life include, at level A, “Pond Animals”, level B, “Pond Life”, Level D, “The Busy Pond”, and Level I, “Life at the Pond”.

Reading A-Z costs a little more than the other sites, but it provides enough materials make it worth the cost in many cases.  If you can get your school to reimburse you, more’s the better.  (And yet again, they have not compensated me in any way for this mention.)

accessing grade-level · accommodations · grade-level standards · lesson planning · modifications · resources · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · science · social studies · sorting cards · 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

By Sara Finegan

I’ve spent my free time during the last month preparing learning activities for students along a wide spectrum of disabilities in third, fourth and fifth grade science and social studies.

I had a lot of free time, as I had not one, but two student teachers, who basically took over my classroom.  The job of a master teacher like me is to monitor and support, and since my tendency is to want to jump in a lot, I keep myself from doing so by working on related tasks.  More about the tasks I chose later.

Two things have rocked my world as a teacher this spring:

1. My school has lost one special education position, and despite my rather extensive years at the district, I’m junior in seniority at my school, so I get to go.
2. My school administrator has opted to take our school three giant steps in the direction of full inclusion by eliminating our Special Day Classes, so all of our kiddos are now going to be mainstreamed next year.

I’ve had several months to adjust to the fact that I am going to be at another school next year and to organize and sort my “stuff” preparatory to packing.  I’ve also had several months to listen to my general ed colleagues, hear the worry in their voices as they wonder how to accommodate kids with profound learning disabilities in their classrooms with less special education support, and to decide what to do about that.

What I’ve done is to create unit-by-unit resource bins and binders for our third, fourth and fifth grade science and social studies classes that contain activities and learning materials from the very lowest, pre-K level up to the third-grade level.    Gen ed and special ed staff can easily pull what they need to support everyone from the barely-verbal fifth grader with a four-year-old intellect to the fourth grader with autism and hyperactivity who becomes overwhelmed by words and activity around him.

The first thing I did was to look at the grade-level standards and pull strands that I thought kids at every level could access.  I delved into my own resource bank and our school’s book room and pulled books at every level that related in some way to each of the standards.   I located materials on the internet that pertain to the standards and downloaded them.  And what I couldn’t find, I wrote myself.

At the end of the my final day at the school, I had created boxes of books, sorting cards, stories, readers theater scripts, and art projects for each of the science and social studies units.    Each box has a binder containing a variety of materials and lesson ideas, plus coloring pages and other things for kids to do with support or on their own.

My hope is that the easily-accessible materials will allow kids to stay in the gen ed classroom with modified assignments and materials instead of becoming so frustrated that they need to leave.  My other hope is that my gen ed colleagues will have less stress as they begin this new phase of inclusion and that they will see, as they implement the lessons and pull activities and books to use, how they can continue the planning and gathering work in future years.

In the next few posts on The Demanding Classroom, I will talk about the work involved in preparing for inclusion and the tasks that gen ed and special ed staff face as we support all of our kids to learn grade level, standards-based curriculum.

general education · grade-level standards · Inclusion · lesson planning · modifications · readers theater · Sara Finegan · science · social studies · sorting cards · special day class · special education · standards · supports

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.

demanding classroom · high expectations · learning disabled · lesson planning · rigor · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · special education · standards

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.

backwards planning · demanding classroom · high expectations · learning disabled · lesson planning · rigor · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · special education · standards · teaching strategies