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February 2007
| Volume 64 | Number 5
Improving Instruction for Students with Learning Needs
Challenges and Possibilities
Marge Scherer
Confronting Ableism
Thomas Hehir
Society's pervasive negative attitude about disability—which the author terms
ableism—often makes the world an unwelcoming and inaccessible place for disabled people. An abelist perspective asserts that it is preferable for a child to read print rather than Braille, walk rather than use a wheelchair, spell independently rather than use a spell-checker, read written text rather than listen to a book on tape, and be friends with nondisabled kids rather than with other disabled kids. Ableist assumptions harm students when the education services they receive focus on their disability. To counter ableist assumptions, Hehir recommends that educators base special education decisions on the following definition of the purpose of special education: minimizing the impact of disability and maximizing the opportunities for students with disabilities to participate in schooling and the community.
Discarding the Deficit Model
Beth Harry and Janette Klingner
The main criterion for eligibility for special education services in schools has been proof of intrinsic deficit. There are two problems with this focus: First, defining and identifying high-incidence disabilities are ambiguous and subjective processes. Second, the focus on disability has become so intertwined with the historical devaluing of minorities in the United States that these two deficit lens now deeply influence the special education placement process. The end result is a disproportionate placement of some minority groups in special education. Some encouraging directions are underway that may help schools focus on differences rather than on deficits. These include a change in the discrepancy model, the Response to Intervention model (RTI), which focuses on early intervention; and involving parents in the placement process. A new vision of special education is called for in which the notion of disability is reserved for students with clear-cut diagnoses of biological or psychological limitations and the categorization is used only for the purpose of delivering intensive, specialized services in the least restrictive education environment possible.
A New Approach to Attention Deficit Disorder
Thomas E. Brown
A recent study conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimated that approximately 7.8 percent of U.S. children ages 4–17 are currently diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). For decades, most educators, physicians, psychologists, and parents have thought of ADD/ADHD as essentially a cluster of behavior problems, a label for children who can't sit still, won't stop talking, and often are disruptive in class. Increasingly, specialists are recognizing that it is a complex syndrome of impairments in development of the brain's cognitive management system, or “executive functions.” The disorder affects one's ability to manage such activities as organizing and getting started on work tasks, attending to details, staying alert, remaining focused, and managing emotions appropriately. Children can manifest symptoms of ADD/ADHD as early as preschool or as late as the college years. Medication treatment can help some students by making them more available to learn. Other students will require both medication and special education services to alleviate their learning disability problems.
Autism from the Inside
Temple Grandin
Temple Grandin, a university professor and award-winning livestock designer with autism, describes how thinking, for her, means processing a series of photorealistic mental images. Thinking in pictures, according to Grandin, is the only possible mode of thinking for many autistic people: Others think with sound patterns, visual patterns, or long lists of facts. Grandin offers teachers suggestions, based on her own experiences struggling through school and her observations of others, for drawing on autistic students' strengths—strengths that are tied to autism and are often seen as drawbacks, such as Grandin's own early obsession with livestock architecture. She gives tips for accommodating differences in autistic thinking or sensitivities that threaten school success.
Extending Inclusive Opportunities
Michael F. Giangreco
Giangreco helps teachers answer one of the hardest questions in including students with disabilities in mainstream classes: How can teachers include students who function substantially below grade level? Giangreco describes a teacher who must help a boy working at kindergarten level participate in the academic work of her 5th grade class. He describes how a teacher created the positive conditions for curriculum modification in her classroom. He then provides strategies for using multi-level curriculum and curriculum overlapping. In the multi-level curriculum approach, students with disabilities participate in shared activities with nondisabled peers and have individualized learning outcomes that are within the same curricular area. In curriculum overlapping, special needs students work with nondisabled students, but the special needs students have different learning outcomes drawn from separate curricular areas, such as learning basic social and communication skills.
Special Education: A Service, Not a Sentence
Patrick A. Schwarz
No student should have to earn his or her way into the general education classroom, writes the author. The inclusive education model recognizes every student's right to be educated in the least restrictive environment, as provided under special education law. Yet many school districts still place students with special learning needs in separate programs. Through the story of one student, Oscar—whose educational team struggles to reintegrate him into the general classroom after his behavior has resulted in reassignment to an alternative school—the author illustrates how a commitment to inclusion can promote success for all students. He describes key components of a successful inclusion model, including neighborhood school placement, continual planning, a problem-solving mindset, and commitment to making inclusion work.
Differentiation: Lessons from Master Teachers
Jennifer Carolan and Abigail Guinn
Carolan and Guinn assert that differentiated instruction helps diversity thrive. Observing how experienced teachers practice differentiation in real-life situations helps teachers who are reluctant to try such strategies take the plunge. The authors draw on two observational studies they conducted of five expert teachers in a high-performing, heterogeneous district. They identify four characteristics common to teachers who are master differentiators: offering personalized scaffolding, using flexible means to reach defined ends, mining subject-area expertise, and creating a caring classroom where differences are seen as assets. The authors describe examples of each characteristic in action.
The Coteaching Partnership
Marilyn Friend
Students with special needs are more likely to spend most or all of the school day in a typical classroom than they did in the past, when separate classrooms were the norm. As a result, teachers are faced with the challenge of teaching students with a wide array of learning needs. Marilyn Friend suggests that coteaching, a partnership in which a classroom teacher and special education teacher share responsibility for instruction, is one option for supporting student learning. The classroom teacher specializes in the curriculum, while the special educator focuses on student learning. Friend says that such partnerships require careful planning from the beginning. The partners need to clarify their roles in the classroom, and administrators need to make sure that student and teacher schedules do not make the arrangement unnecessarily burdensome.
Peers Helping Peers
Margo A. Mastropieri, Thomas E. Scruggs and Sheri L. Berkeley
Mastropieri, Scruggs, and Berkeley describe three avenues for students with diverse learning needs to help one another learn: peer assistance, cooperative learning, and peer tutoring. In peer assistance, a student helps a peer with a disability by opening doors, gathering materials, or providing other supports as needed. Students in cooperative learning groups work together to complete an assignment. The authors describe several peer-tutoring examples in which partners ask each other questions about material they are studying. This model allows for differentiation by varying the amount of time spent on the material, the prompts the tutor provides, and the level of difficulty of the material used. The authors observed classrooms at different grade levels where these techniques increased overall class achievement and the achievement of students with disabilities.
Narrowing Gaps for Special-Needs Students
Vincent J. Hawkins
The most common factor among schools receiving a ranking of “low performing” and “in need of improvement” in Rhode Island was the failure of the subgroup with Individual Education Plans (IEPs) to meet annual measurable objectives on state assessments in both language arts and mathematics. Members of the Rhode Island ASCD affiliate conducted a longitudinal study of all public schools in the state, comparing the performance of students with IEPs with that of all students on state testing in language arts and math. By considering subgroup performance data from 2001-2004, the research team sought to determine which schools, including those not making Adequate Yearly Progress, were, in fact, making significant progress toward closing the gap. Responding to a survey, 60 schools identified models of successful practices that addressed diverse learning needs. Practices included inclusion, establishing high expectations for all learners, providing professional development, and employing a highly-trained staff that is committed and responsive to student needs.
Enhancing What Students Can Do
Elissa Wolfe Poel
The Human Function Model, as described in the University of Kentucky Assistive Technology Project, places assistive technology in its proper perspective, as an external support that can enhance an individual's ability to function within the environment. The National Assistive Technology Research Institute groups assistive technology and related services in seven categories that define an individual's needs: (1) existence (2) communication (3) body support, protection, and positioning (4) travel and mobility (5) environmental interaction (6) education and transition and (7) sports, fitness, and recreation. Using these devices can help students with disabilities actively participate in the classroom.
The Gully in the “Brain Glitch” Theory
Judy Willis
Learning to read is a complex process that requires multiple areas of the brain to operate together through intricate networks of neurons. The author of this article, a neurologist and middle school teacher, takes exception to interpretations of neuroimaging research that treat reading as an isolated, independent cognitive process. She specifically critiques the research of Shaywitz and colleagues, which linked reading difficulties to a “glitch” in the circuitry of the brain and concluded that all struggling readers need direct, intensive phonics instruction. The author describes evidence from cognitive psychology, affective filter data, and neuroscience that suggests the importance of enjoyment and motivation in learning to read. She concludes that reading instruction is still as much an art as a science, and depends on teachers using their training and experience as well as research findings to meet the needs of their students.
What Neuroscience Really Tells Us About Reading Instruction: A Response to Judy Willis
Sally E. Shaywitz and Bennett A. Shaywitz
Responding to Judy Willis's article “The Gully in the Brain Glitch Theory” in the same issue, the authors argue that their own neuroimaging studies and those of other researchers show that deficits in the brain regions influencing phonological ability are the key to reading problems. Scientific evidence, the authors claim, shows that the successful beginning reader must have phonological awareness, and that a deficit in phonology is closely tied with reading disability. Interventions for struggling readers that remediate this deficit can not only improve reading performance but also increase activation of the neural systems that influence effective reading.
The Twin-Win Tactic
W. James Popham
Academics and the Arts
Douglas Reeves
Asking for Strength
Joanne Rooney
Educational Leadership Themes for 2007–2008
The Best of the Blog
Parents' Voices
ASCD Community in Action
Journal Staff
A Model for Collaboration
Amy Brodesky, Fred Gross, Anna McTigue and Allysen Palmer
Placing students with disabilities in mainstream math classes is not enough to ensure their success; more targeted efforts are essential. These authors field-tested a professional development model with middle school math teachers and special educators who were encountering challenges in working together. Obstacles to powerful collaboration between math teachers and special education colleagues included lack of co-planning time and a lack of understanding of one another's approaches. Brodesky and colleagues discuss how, over two years, they successfully guided 16 study groups that included a trained facilitator and teachers from both spheres. In study groups, teachers learned how to set priorities for math lessons and create workable strategies for students with special needs.
Parents' Voices
Early Intervention
Amy M. Azzam
EL Study Guide
Naomi Thiers
Copyright © 2004 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
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