The Myth of the Average

 

"Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a set of principles for curriculum development that give all individuals equal opportunities to learn. UDL provides a blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone - not a single, one-size-fits-all solution but rather flexible approaches that can be customized and adjusted for individual needs." (Source: http://www.cast.org/udl/)

 

Perhaps the most profound line in this video is that the average hurts everyone.  This video gets to the heart of what inclusive education is actually about... designing our curriculum, classrooms and schools to the edges rather then to the average.  Recreating what we do in classrooms so that students come to understand themselves as learners.  What are their stengths? What are their challenges? What tools in their personalized toobox will allow them to reach their maximum potential?  Knowing that their profiles are complex and supporting them to figure what tools and strategies work for what tasks.  Fostering an understanding in each student of their unique process of learning so that they have the skills to live in a world that is rapidly changing. 

Inclusion Flowchart

Sometimes I think we make "inclusion" far to complicated.  But the flip side of that is that other times I feel we oversimplify it.  Inclusion is about recognizing that all students need flexible structures so that each is able learn.  We can't make blanket statements about student ability and then just "put them" in a specific place.  We need to be continually evaluating and responding to both their learning and ours.  We need to recognize learning as a dynamic social process.  For those who do not fit in the box, we need to be researching and trying other possible ways to enhance their learning.  Concepts of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Response to Intervention and Instruction (RTII) need to be approriately and flexibly applied.  Sue Buckley does an excellent job of speaking to this in her post "Every School Should be Inclusive". 

The Butterfly Circus

In the book Neurodiversity in the Classroom: Strength-Based Strategies to Help Students with Special Needs Succeed in School and Life Thomas Armstrong asks us to reimagine disability as a natural part of the human condition.  His message is not unlike so many others.  The first time I came across the view was probably shortly after I adopted my son and discovered Kathy Snow's book and website Diability is Natural.  Thomas Armstrong takes the idea of disability being a natural way of being a step futher and speaks to the celebration of the diversity of the human person.  He digs in to strengths that are often associated with specific "disability" labels and talks to how we should be capitalizing and focusing on these strenghts rather than focusing on the deficit inherit to a given disability. 

 

This stuff speaks to my heart.  We all have strengths in this world and I believe it is our job as educators to work with students to discover and nurture these gifts and strengths.  As we come to understand gifts and strengths we can co-create a path to excellence with our students.  When it comes to the students on my caseload, strengths give us a window in to the things we can do to break down barriers to social, academic and routine participation and learning.  If we don't profile a student's strengths, we will be less equipped to support that student's learning.

 

But it is not our job to do it for our students.  It is our job to help our students discover it in themselves.  And sometimes that means stepping back.  In the end, our job is not unlike the folks that run the butterfly circus in the following video.  I often try to explain the difference between supporting and helping and can't quite find the words.  This video speaks very eloquently to this idea. 

 

 

 

What we teach "the other students" when we include all students...

Resources

Effective Communication

The Social Construct of Disability

Equality is not always justice...

Source: Twitter Post by @culture_curate 

Using the Nonverbal Approach to Promote Literacy

Link: http://web.utk.edu/~mbc/KnoxCountyNRAPresentation.pdf

 

I came across this Power Point presentation a few weeks back and have since found a couple of research studies on the "Nonverbal Approach to Reading (NRA)".  When I attended the "Literacy and AAC" course put on by Karen Erickson and David Koppenhaver in May, they spoke of the goal of reading instruction being that of "reading silently (in your head) with comprehension".  Seems logical but for students who do not talk what does this mean?  From everything that I've read what it means is that we need to be explicit about teaching them to read silently in there head.  We need to actually talk to them in the teaching process about what they are hearing in their heads while reading. 

 



 

I'm excited to begin trying this NRA method with a few of my students after Christmas.  I am using a modified approach to Patricia Cunningham's "Systematic Sequential Phonics They Use: For Beginning Readers of All Ages" with three of my students and have now created NRA Power Points to go with the word wall words that are introduced with this program.  One of the research articles that I read talked about including a motoric prompt to go along with steps of the NRA approach as they were then able to tell when students transferred the skill and were using the approach with other words.  I'm excited to add in this NRA piece.

Interactive to Independent Literacy: A Model for Designing Literacy Goals for Children with Atypical Communication

Article Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10573560490429050

 

I knew immediately that this article was to like this article when I read the quote that it opened with: "Researchers and professionals need to work actively to reverse the forces at work in our culture that lead to the ostracism of children who are different." 

 

Over the past year and a half, my views about literacy instruction for the students that I have on my caseload have changed quite a bit.  I have been fortunate enough to take workshops and/or courses form Linda Burkhart (PODD Communication), Karen Erickson and David Koppenhaver (Literacy in AAC Course) and Caroline Musslewhite (Literacy Workshop and Communication Circle Workshop).  I have also participated, along with two different teachers from the school I work at, in the Literacy for All project last year and this year.

 

It is not that I didn't believe in literacy instruction for "my" students so much as I was thinking of literacy as a series of lock step skills that needed to be mastered.  Sadly, a drill based approach to literacy still seems to be a reality for many with disabilities even against that fact that so many classrooms have moved to approaches that are much more comprehensive and interactive.  The functions of literacy skills seem go quickly get lost in this approach and these students are then faced with the added challenge of low motivation on top of the challenges presented by their disabilities. Without the context of what one is doing, it is hard to stay motivated to to do it. 

"For all children to bcome members of their literate communities, we must consider reading and writing not as end products but rather as socially communicative practices that begin to emerge early in childhood as other communicative abilities do. Both oral and written language are thus viewed as primarily communicative practice, and an intervention to achieve that end is best viewed as situated practice."

This article goes on to present a model for five level literacy instruction that is influenced by the Social Interaction Model, the Participation Model and the Situated Pragmatics Model along with possible goals for each of the five levels. 

 

It reflects the path that we have started down with the students that I have on my caseload over the past couple of years.  It is not always an easy path as it is slow and the focus is on interactions and the process rather than individually produced products.  The model is based on interaction to create understanding in the emergent stage and only moving on to conventional literacy when there is a deeper understanding.  The reality is that we can push students in to the emergent stage long before understanding and get the paper products that some would equate to learning so much quicker. 

What is the benefit of this approach?  How much research has been done?

It's all still so new and when it's about students with complex communication needs it is sometimes hard to measure these things.  Sometimes we need to just assume that these students will develop literacy skills in much the same way as others but they will require more time and because of limitations, they will also require others to be more deligent of keeping it all going.  I believe in the end the benefit will be motivation.  The article itself speaks to the benefit being that focusing this way also focuses in communication and interaction and these two things result in an increased quality of life for anyone. 

 

What I know is that making this shift has resulted in increased levels of interaction and engagement both with others and with literacy skills.  I know that I am imagining going places with letter by letter generative reading and writing that I had never imagined before with some of my students.  I know that I can see a deeper link between communication and litearcy and have found new ways to teach both in the crossover between the two.  I know that these skills we are working on are more authentically transferable then what we had worked on in the past. 

 

Finding this article was exciting for me because it framed so much of the learning journey about literacy and communication that I've been on (and will continue to be on) over these past couple of years. 

Literacy for All Pilot Project Update

Way back at the beginning of the year, I posted about the "Literacy for All" pilot project that our school was going to a part of for the 2011-12 school year.  The project involved bringing educators from across the province of Alberta together to examine literacy learning for students with significant disabilities. In this past year we have met face to face, met online, participated in a online community, and used and examined the resources "MeVille to WeVille" and "Children with Disabilities: Reading and Writing the Four Blocks Way".  The project was built upon the premise that ALL students can learn literacy.  Being part of this project has given me the opportunity to further explore what it means when we say that we are going to teach literacy skills to students with significant disabilities and ultimately culminated in a desire to learn more.  It is evident that there is much that we can do by way of teaching literacy to students in this population and I'm excited to take what I've learned this year and continue to expand on it in years to come.

As the project wraps up, a wiki has been created to share information about literacy learning for students with significant disabilities.  My understanding is that the wiki will continue to be updated.  Check it out at http://abliteracyforall.wikispaces.com/.

Literacy in Augmentative and Alternative Communication

This past week I traveled to Toronto for a "Literacy in AAC" course that was delivered by Karen Erikson and David Koppenhaver (the authors of the book "Children with Disabilities: Reading and Writing the Four-Blocks Way").  The focus of the course was on developing literacy skills in students who have complex communication needs. 

I do believe in literacy learning for all students but this course challenged me to further redefine what "literacy learning" is for the students that I teach.  I have been moving towards an understanding of generative reading and writing over the past couple of years but coming to understand that and actually having a plan of action around how to make that happen are two different things.  I came out of this course feeling like there is now an action plan and that plan is rooted in ensuring that the students that I am responsible for have a comprehensive literacy program that includes interactions related to each of the four blocks of literacy during the course of their days.  For the elementary and junior high students that I have this will mean using curriculum overlapping as they will be in inclusive settings for a large portion of their day.  For the elements that are more important to do directly, we will do a pull out intervention time to work on this.  For the high school students that I have I am looking at creating a literacy class that is equivalent in time to a five-credit course as well as finding another time in the day for students to do self-selected reading.

With some of my students we will be starting at the beginning and for others we will be building on the emergent skills that they already have.  Being part of the Alberta Education "Literacy for All" Pilot project this year has put us in a situation where we have built some of the foundation that we can build on with this new information.  

I would have a hard time summarizing all that I have learned so am hoping to do it over time in reference to what we learn as we implement different aspects.  Where we start is to rethink the need for exploration and interaction without limits related to reading and writing for all of the students that I teach.  So that means using alternate pencils to "write" in the same way that preschool students "write" (i.e. scribble a bunch of letter like figures) without correcting or trying to direct - but rather just naming letters and exposing the student to purposes for writing.  A couple neat suggestions around finding purposes for writing included using remnant books (which I have tried using in the past to create opportunities for communication) where everyone in the students life adds pictures and items to the book related to some thing that happened in their life.  Whomever adds the picture and item also adds a sticky note with a brief description of what it is about.  Then when it is time to write, the student picks which item in his/her writing book that he/she wants to write about and then he/she writes using an alternate pencil.  Here is where what we would have traditionally done needs to be rethought.  Instead of showing the student how to use the alternate pencil to write the words that you want to write about the the thing that he/she has picked to write about, you allow the student to just write - put down whatever letters he or she says he/she wants to put down when writing and you talk to them about their writing - in the same way that you would look at your toddlers picture with scribbles under it and know that is his/her writing at that time.  They did say that it is okay to to pull out one letter and write a word related to the topic but to not do it in a way that corrects and to not take away or direct their writing at this point.  As students are exposed to a comprehensive literacy program, their writing evolves as a result of the interaction of the components of the program.  A second idea was to put "captions" on pictures - again not correcting or directing but allowing for exploration and interaction.  It is a bit of a shift.  I'm excited to get started.  

This is obviously only a small piece.  As I start to figure out how to take all of this stuff that is spinning around in my head and put it in to action I am sure I will be writing more.  

COACH3: Choosing Outcomes & Accommodations for Children: A Guide to Educatoinal Planning for Students with Disabilities

Planning for the 2012-13 school year is in full swing as we are looking to move all of the students that I have on my caseload to their age appropriate schools this fall.  I will continue to oversee their programs at each of the three schools.  There is still a lot in the air around what things will look like exactly (we have ideas but because they are new we will need to be flexible and responsive to situations and students).

One of the shifts we are trying to make is for the starting point to be what the individualized goals are for these students and then to build their individual programs, including where each aspect of those programs will be delivered, based on that.  This is really the way it should be done but somehow we have gotten caught up in putting them in to a program based on a diagnosis or perception and then building a program that ensures they fit in to the program as it exists.  It was never intentional. I think we just sometimes get stuck in things because they seem to be more efficient.  But really we should be looking for efficient and effective and sometimes that means sacrificing a little bit of the efficient.

Here is where the COACH3 model comes in.  Where are starting with planning individual programs for next year is to work through the COACH3 (Giangreco, Coloninger & Iverson) with parents so that we can discover what the learning priorities they have for their children are. It will be interesting to know if they match with what I think they are.  It will also be helpful as we continue to plan for what their programs will look like next year in their new settings. 

The family interview and figuring out what the priority learning outcomes in that meeting is just the first part of the process.  The next thing we do is look at supplemental outcomes based on what other team members feel is important and then look at the general supports that will be in place.  This information is then used to create annual goals, short term objectives and a program-at-a-glance.  Ultimately all of this is used to create the student's IEP.

I'm excited to try the model as I looked long and hard at both this one and "The Beyond Access Model".  In the end I decided on this because it is a little bit more laid out and right now we kind of need that.  As we continue to move forward we will continue to evaluate what the best tool to plan for programming for these students is.