Special Education Today

The Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education at Indiana University, the flagship campus of the Indiana University system and a major comprehensive research university, invites applications for an open rank position in Autism Spectrum Disorders. The successful candidate will lead a major new initiative in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the ...

Time graphic To what extent does a US state's high-stakes test correspond with a consistent standard assessment? Using data from the Education Trust and the Colorado (US) Department of Education Time magazine's Feilding Cage (with help from Jackson Dykman) created one of those nifty Flashy things that provides an interactive means ...

On a couple of those ubiquitous self-help sites on the Web I found the same article about Learning Disabilities. Entitled “Dyslexia: Diagnosing If Your Child Has It,” the article presents an apparently heartfelt view, but the content is questionable on mutliple counts. It promotes the discrepancy approach to identification. It mixes phonemic awareness with phonics. It [...]

CSUCI is accepting applications for tenured/tenure track faculty at the Assistant, Associate or Professor level for each of the following positions. Educational Leadership and Administration Foundations of Education; Multicultural Multilingual Special Education; Mild Moderate Educational Leadership and Administration-Open Rank The successful candidate will be responsible for teaching in the Masters of Arts ...

Liz Ditz, who has often identified instances of bologna masquerading a fine cuisine, has posted notes about the Woo Handbook, a product of Skeptico. Check out her recent entry, "Just in Time: The Woo Handbook and The Woo-Woo Credo" Skeptico apparently has found a guide to countering scientific thinking. Skeptico ...

SCHOOL OF EDUCATION BOSTON UNIVERSITY Boston University invites nominations and applications for the position of Dean of the School of Education. The University has begun an exciting era in its history under the leadership of President Robert A. Brown and Provost David K. Campbell. At this moment of enormous opportunity, the School ...

In a comparison of students' literacy in 40 countries, fourth-grade-age children in Russia, Hong Kong, and Singapore have the highest levels of literacy. Although the average score for students in the United States and England was above the scale average, those scores ranked 17th and 18th, respectively.

Dogs as reading monitorsWouldn't it be great if kids would learn to read by reading aloud to dogs? According to Yolanne Almanzar of the Miami (FL, US) Herald, that is what's happening in some Florida schools. Writing under the headline, "Dogs lend ears to young readers: A program helps elementary ...

I thought I would write about a young man I taught 7 years ago, when he was 21. This young man has had a profound affect on me. I honestly think I learned more from him than he learned from me; we broke even, at least.

I first met James's mother when I had an information meeting to tell people what my reading clinics were all about. I held this particular meeting in a small town to make it easier for rural people. Since I knew everyone in the town, Jame's mother stood out for me as I had never seen her before. She was quiet, and didn't ask any questions during my speil. She did approach me at the end of the night and told me about her son. She had driven out from Kamloops to hear what I had to say.

James was 21 at the time, and was in his second year at the Unversity of BC. When she started telling me about him her eyes shone. Her love for her son filled the room. He was a talented hockey player, a humanitarian, and a wonderful son. He also couldn't read very well. He had had a very miserable time in school. He was taken out for a time and sent to a special school, and had learning assistance all through elementary school. He finally refused the help in grade 8."Why?" he asked. "I have been going for 7 years and I don't read any better now than when I started." His family worked extremely hard to keep his self esteem in tact. He was a brilliant hockey player, so the family spent hours at rinks, being his cheering section. His mother and father made a concerted effort to dwell on his strengths when he was at home- school was discussed with humour and grace, but it was never the measure of a man. They managed to avoid some of the terrible pitfalls that sometimes befall kids who experience repeated failure. James had just as many successes in other areas under his belt. She said he was so proud to have gotten into UBC, and had held his own in the first year, with the help of outside tutoring. In the second he was starting to drown. She teared up when she explained that her beautiful son who was always so positive and who met challenges head on with gusto- was starting to doubt himself, and he began to feel foolish for thinking he belonged at university. She asked me if I thought I could help him, and all I asked was if he was willing to go back to the beginning and build up his reading skills from ground level. She said she would get back to me. It turns out, he did.

James started in May, as soon as he returned from Vancouver. I tested James before we began and he was reading at a beginning grade 5 level. I shuddered thinking about the texts that he had had to read. He was very matter of fact about this reading level. He whistled and said, "I knew it wasn't going to be very high. I live with it!"
We did indeed start at the beginning, and I taught James the 44 phonemes of the English language and how they are made in the mouth. He loved this and was fascinated to look at his mouth in a mirror as he carefully pronounced each sound. He exclaimed after learning how vowel sounds are produced- " I could always tell you what the five vowels were, but I didn't really know what they were for!". Through the next three weeks we met and worked for two hours a day. He asked really good questions, and wanted to know WHY about everything. I was pleased to be able to answer most of his questions. When I couldn't, I did some research and came back with answers the next day. It was thrilling for me to work with a very bright young man who was excited about understanding how his own language worked for the first time in his life. He asked every other day, "Why don't they teach this in school?"

One day James mentioned that he had actually been on the honour roll for one term in grade 9. I asked him how he managed it. His answer floored me, and is solid proof for anyone who needs it that people with dyslexia are often extremely bright individuals. This is how James got on the honour roll. No doubt his popularity helped make this strategy work!

James acknowledged that he could not read the novels that they studied in English. So, he would hang around a group of guys during breaks and before and after school. He would put a general question about the novel out there for consideration. He would say something very general like, "Hey- you know that book we're reading in English? What do you think of it?" and the group would offer opinions with varying degrees of details. James would probe, mining for more details without anyone knowing that he hadn't read it. He had an extremely good memory,and he would take in all the discussion. He said that he read faces really well, so if he said something that was way off track, he would watch the expressions of the boys, and if they looked puzzled he would quickly back up and try something else. Then, he would go find a group of girls who got good marks, and hang out with them for awhile, using the info he had just received and asking questions that went deeper into the story. He said girls talked about stuff way more, so he always went to them as soon as he could converse half-way intelligently about the book.
He was able to pass all the chapter tests with good results from this method. For essays, he would get together with his girlfriend and talk over various topics. She wrote down what they discussed, and the James would rewrite it using the phrases and bits she wrote to construct an essay. His mother would proof read it for him.
I remember James telling this to me as though it was the most natural way to learn. I was amazed. I commented, "It must have taken so much energy for you to learn that way!"To which he shrugged and replied, "Not as much energy as it would take to read the book."

James finished the 3 week clinic and tested at a grade 9 level when we wrapped up. Still a long way from university level, but much better than grade 5. He was delighted and felt like a million bucks. He pledged to keep reading on his own and continue to improve.

I went and visited Robert in the spring of his next year at UBC. He continued to do well (still with a tutor, but getting good marks). He told me the story of how he first realized he was "reading like everyone else". He lived with three roommates in a residence apartment. One Saturday morning he was lazing on the couch reading the newspaper. He had done that before, usually reading the comics, but this time a political article caught his attention. He said he called out to a roommate who was sitting at the kitchen table, "Hey John! Listen to this!" James proceeded to read the entire article to his roommate. It was only afterwards that James realized that he had done this spontaneously, without thinking about it, and without a mistake. It was the first time he had ever volunteered to read anything outloud. Ever!
James graduated from university with a degree in Geography. He also became the spokesperson for of a junior hockey league and did lots of public speaking, including writing his own speeches.

James had the magic ingredient that successful people with dyslexia often have: resiliency. He also had parents that believed in him and helped him have balance in his life.

Professor Dorothy Bishop of the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology found the evidence favoring Dore Achievement Center efficacy to be wanting. Writing in an official journal of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, Professor Bishop cautioned physicians and other clinicians not to accept inadequate evidence for the program. Dore Achievement Centres are springing up [...]

In response to A's comment below, where she asks if there isn't a program that would be good for all children:
Yes, I'm sure there is... any program that has the five elements that are suggested for kids with LD, the Lindamood, Literacy Links, Fast Forward etc. would do that. However- there are many proponents of a more whole language approach who would argue that these are too stilted for regular learners. The key would be to use the program as a base, and then group the students like we did in the old days: do lots of lateral whole language stuff with one group, and stick to the basics with the other group until decoding has become automatic for them.
I find there are very few teachers who know how to group effectively, giving quality time to each group in a day. It takes some planning but that's how we used to do it "in the old days". Grouping is not discriminating- it's giving children what they need, instead of lumping them together and dragging some kids along who need to walk, and slowing kids down who need to fly. They can all get there in the end...

The points I mentioned are in Sally Shaywitz's book, Overcoming Dyslexia. if you don't have it you should get it. I stand corrected- there are 4 things that need to be included:
-Systematic and direct instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics
-Practice applying these in reading and writing
-Fluency building
-Enriched language experiences

Kathy

I have been having a great conversation with a woman who has a personal interest in special education.We have been communicating via email messages. She has given me permission to post the ongoing conversation here.
She was asking a question that is unrelated to a post, so I am just going to put it in a response here. The next few posts will be my response to her and her responses to mine. Hopefully you will get the gist!

The US Department of Education announced awards worth a total of $14 million to US states to help them improve assessment of students with disabilities. According to the press release, 27 states will benefit from the awards, with each state receiving about $400 thousand; some states banded collaborated on their ...

Time magazine, which has stopped somewhere just short of flatly endorsing unfounded concepts such as facilitated communication, seems not to be buying the vaccine-autism argument. In an article about vaccinations that currently appears on the front page of Time's Web site, reporter Laura Blue recites the litany of benefits that ...

How many students have Emotional and Behavioral Disoders? Is it 1%, 5%, 10%, or even more? What is the true prevalence of EBD? Some children and youth with problems in the emotional and behavioral area have difficulties that do not rise to the level of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders. Reasonable adults ...

Fuzzy Math SalesmanYes, I have more important things to do than browse cartoons, but I just spent a bit looking at "Weapons of Math Destruction," a string of cartoons conceived by Oak Norton and drawn by Bob Bonham. Many of these are a hoot. Follow this link to get to ...

John Merrow of Learning Matters examined ways that education administrators of US states could make their test scores look better than they are. Under the "No Child Left Behind" rules, states can (a) remove the scores of subgroups of students from the overall results, and the scores they remove are ...

Stephen Smith and colleagues have discovered why mothers who have been exposed to infectious agents during pregnancy produce offspring that have abnormalities in behavior, histology, and gene expression similar to what is seen in schizophrenia and autism. Working with rodents in the lab of Paul Patterson at California Institute of ...

Since starting Planet Literacy in 1999, I have taught scores of learners in individual reading clinics. I have taken my clinics on the road to different communities, and I have collaborated with many teachers along the way. There are a few things that are remarkably constant: a) teachers have a genuine desire to help these hard to reach learners, b)they don't have enough skills or time to do it, and c) parents know very early on that there is something preventing their child from learning the same way and at the same rate as their peers.

Regarding c), in most cases the parents are reassured when they approach teachers at early teacher/parent interviews, and they are asked to relax and give the child more time. He's just not ready, and when he is, he will catch up. By grade 2, the teachers are still suggesting the "wait and see" approach. By grade 3 and 4 the teacher is calling the parents saying, "I think your son/daughter has a problem."
By the time these issues hit the teacher's radar screen, the child has been struggling a good long while and is far behind her peers.

Actually, research is very clear that if a learner has a phonologically based learning problem, the WORST thing you can do is wait and see. What that means for this kind of learner is "Wait and fail". Not a good position to find yourself in at 8 or 9 years old. Many schools have adopted an early screening program for this phonological processing problem, and I am all for that. What I don't think is fair is that this is not uniformly practiced across the province. I also find that some schools say they are doing the early screening, but either they don't have the right kind of instrument, they don't have teachers with the training or knowledge to understand the results and provide appropriate intervention, or with staff turnover they end up with different priorities.

Re: b) I find that many teachers charged with teaching the children with poor reading skills do not have a background in phonology or linguistics and are unable to explain many of the rules and idiosyncrasies of the English language. I can't count the number of times a teacher, sitting in on a clinic with their student has remarked, "I didn't know that!" about a particular spelling expectation or concept. Granted, I didn't know some of these things either until I took more training, and luckily my background in linguistics certainly made my training go more smoothly than it might have. But now, in 2007, this information has been circulating for at least 10 years and there is a sound and growing body of evidence to support these methods. So, why isn't this knowledge reaching the teachers more universally?

I was curious- so I made some calls. I met with the Dean of Education at a BC university to inquire about the training teachers were getting. Her response was disappointing and difficult for her to explain. She admitted that teachers don't learn how to teach reading in her university. She said that because there are so many products and methods "out there", and that trends seem to come and go, that the university assumes that teachers will learn the programs and methods of the day, on their own.When I asked about learning disabilities, she referred me to another department head.

I talked to this person by phone, and asked how his program worked.
He told me that it is an 8 month certificate that teachers in the field come back to get while still working. I asked him if he focused on learning disabilities and he replied that it depended on what the teachers wanted. When I asked for clarification he explained that the teachers dictate what courses are taught according to what skill set they want to develop. I couldn't help it- I blurted out a question, "Do you think it's a good idea for teachers who don't know alot about something,(why else are they wanting more training?) to be deciding what they will learn?" He replied rather defensively (understandably; I should have worded that differently) that it seemed to be working so far. So when I asked if the courses that year would include something about teaching students with learning disabilities, he replied, "No. The teachers are more concerned with classroom management issues so we are going to have two classes on behaviour management."
I then arranged for a phone conference with people in the Ministry of Education. I was passed on to the head of Assessment in Education and another woman, the head of the Department for Special Education. When I asked if they were aware that some universities were not preparing teachers to teach reading, they both acknowledged that they were indeed aware and that this was a problem. They were both sympathetic. (tsk tsk) When I asked what they were planning to do about it, they lamented that it wasn't up to the Ministry to dictate what is covered at the university level, rather, it was the professional body, the College of Teachers. They were sorry they couldn't help more, but they were very happy to tell me about a website that the Ministry was constructing, where people could log on and have meaningful discourse about the issues facing teachers today. They fervently hoped I would be a key player in discussions, and they vowed to contact me when it was up and running.
Four years later, I still haven't from either of them.
In case you're thinking, "well you only checked with one university", I completed my Masters degree with 22 very dedicated teachers, and half of them graduated in the last 10-15 years. They all said they did not feel their training (involving at least 3 different universities) prepared them to teach reading, and certainly not to children with learning disabilities.
To sum up this post- many teachers do not know what to do to help these vulnerable students because they are not receiving the training they need.

According to a report entitled "The Proficiency Illusion" from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit that is based in Washington (DC) and focuses on K-12 education policy, the tests that are being used in some US states to assess educational outcomes reflect lower (and varied) standards for success. The ...

It appears that some governments in the Philippines might be a bit ahead of efforts to help children with Learning Disabilities tha governments elsewhere in the world, including the US. Celso Lobregat, mayor of the city of Zamboanga, is reported to support of early identification, as reported in an article entitled “Zambo City mayor vows [...]

Pros, Please see the below assistant professor opening at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. There are many exciting teaching and research opportunities at UI including project REACH (http://www.education.uiowa.edu/reach/), a two-year, comprehensive, campus-based, certificate program for students with multiple learning and cognitive disabilities. Iowa City is a great place to live and has received ...

Dyslexia, learning disability, learning challenge, whatever you want to call it... should not be the death nell of person's potential! Yet, today more than ever the failure of schools to provide appropriate instruction for kids with LD has devastating results. Literacy skills are critical for success today. We need to stop thinking of this as a problem with the learner, and realize that the problem exists because we are not delivering instruction at the intensity and duration that is needed. Teachers need better training to be able to effectively help these students. The key word is effectively. Today, teachers of at least elementary grades need a background in phonology and linguistics, and they need to be experts in their own language.

Over on Parents Grove, a blog associated with the Forest City Behavior & Development site, Pam Vivian has an entry about drivers' education for individuals who have Autism. When one knows that Ms. Vivian is the parent and the individual in question is her son and when one throws in ...

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It’s nothing too polished yet, just a grid-based concept illustrating the main content components we’ll need to tease out of Wordpress: “Lead Story”, “Last Three Features”, “News”, “Contributors” and so on. How do we tie all this together on one page? Let’s start at the top and explore each module step by step:

Sphere: Related Content

The University of Washington group studying dyslexia reported results from yet another study indicating that instruction reprograms neural activity. Using new software developed to investigate how the brains of dyslexic children are organized, University of Washington researchers have found that key areas for language and working memory involved in reading are connected differently in dyslexics [...]

Altough I've only recently skimmed it, Erica Westly has a blog that appears to have some relevant content. Readers might wish to take a peek at Adolescent Psych. I saw content on many topics that overlap with those we cover here at EBD Blog.

Over on Spedpro, Margo Mastropieri announced the annual competition for an award recognizing research on Learning Disabilities conducted by a doctoral student. Here’s a snippet: The Division for Learning Disabilities (DLD) within the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) announces its annual competition for outstanding doctoral-level research in the field of learning disabilities. The purposes of [...]

According to a story in the Richmond (VA, US) Times-Dispatch, the Richmond Public Schools have collaborated with a statewide legal-aid group called JustChildren to address problems arising when discipline rules conflict with the right to an education under US and VA laws that is due to students with disabilities. In ...

Some of my colleagues are conducting a workshop on Response to Intervention (RTI). Here's the announcement. Response to Intervention (RTI), Learning Disabilities, and You: How Changes in Special Education Law Impact Diagnosis and Treatment of Students How the Albemarle County Schools are Approaching These Issues Friday, November 9, 2007 1:00-3:30 p.m. Curry School of Education Ruffner ...

Time graphic To what extent does a US state's high-stakes test correspond with a consistent standard assessment? Using data from the Education Trust and the Colorado (US) Department of Education Time magazine's Feilding Cage (with help from Jackson Dykman) created one of those nifty Flashy things that provides an interactive means ...

Bridging the Gap between Research and Practice 2007, the annual conference of the Division for Learning Disabilities (DLD), is scheduled for next week in San Antonio (TX, US). There are many sessions about important topics (assessment, reading, written expression, etc.), all of which are presented in workshop format led by people widely respected as [...]

An article from the Colorado Springs (CO, US) Gazette describes an award given to a teacher for helping students with Learning Disabilities develop self-advocacy skills. Under the headline “D-12 teacher an ‘American Star’: Award honors creation of program for learning-disabled teens,” Shari Chaney Griffen reported that Alan Pocock, a teacher in a Colorado Springs high [...]

Over on Parents Grove, a blog associated with the Forest City Behavior & Development site, Pam Vivian has an entry about drivers' education for individuals who have Autism. When one knows that Ms. Vivian is the parent and the individual in question is her son and when one throws in ...

In the September-October issue, Psychology Today magazine carried coverage of the father's-age issue. Under the headline of "A Man's Shelf Life," Mark Teich interprets recent developments for a general audience. "Everybody was familiar with the concept of women's biological clock, but when we introduced 'male' to the equation, the reaction was ...