Educate: Pedagogy and Strategies

Reading Gave Me Language

I am so grateful for idioms, similes, metaphors, adverbs, adjectives, and all the other beautiful ways our language allows us to personalize our messages.

Time outdoors fills my soul, giving me strength while also making me grateful. I am constantly amazed by nature and want to share the experience with people. But how do you describe the infinite depths of the sky? How do you tell someone the taste of the perfect peach? How do you describe the hug from the smells in your grandmother’s kitchen? How do you explain the ache in your heart after loss?

When I try to describe my experiences, I find myself drawing on the words of others, most often read in a book, magazine, blog, or newspaper.

The other night, I was walking my dogs and the sun was setting, changing the sky to the pinks, blues, and grays of an oyster shell. It was magnificent. It was also the moment I realized that reading gave me the words and phrases to explain my experiences.

Reading isn’t simply a task for elementary children to accomplish. It is a portal that transports us. We can visit the past, riding across the prairie in a buckboard, seeking a new start. We can live in a rocket floating through space. We can be a rabbit in a meadow with our family and woodland friends. We can do anything, anywhere, at any time by simply opening a book. But reading is also the key to unlocking our hearts, minds, and souls. We can read about politics, other cultures, agriculture, rocks and gems, fossils, seaweed, celestial bodies, movie stars, horses, recipes, and, well, almost anything. And the most wonderful result of this reading is that we can agree, disagree, wonder, ponder, refute, question, or adopt the ideas. In short, reading helps us become our unique selves.

Reading Comprehension

I frequently travel for work, and typically this involves driving. There are times when I drive 4-6 hours a day. To keep me company on the drive, I listen to podcasts. I select the first podcast, but once that episode ends, the app I use chooses the next podcast based on my favorites and listening history. I have listened to interviews, stories, serials, and comedy sketches. As a result, I have learned a lot. But was it “reading comprehension?”

Some would argue no, because I was listening, not reading print. Some would say yes, because this is how they access print—using text-to-speech software, apps, or AI.

Regardless of which you believe, we can all agree that understanding the podcast is comprehension.

Listening for meaning is an important piece of reading comprehension because you have to listen to the words you decode and interpret what they are telling you.

As we read to an infant to lull them to sleep, or read with a toddler snuggling under a blanket, they are listening. Pictures or photos can help them focus and hint at the meaning of the words, but even if there are no visuals or the visuals are not accessible, the child will still be able to comprehend. One of my favorite children’s books, The Book with No Pictures, is evidence of all that a child can understand.

Reading comprehension begins early, starting with symbols. Young children can find their favorite movie, character, or restaurant using the symbols, brand logo, or words. They realize that the symbol is connected to the experience. This then extends to understanding stories and the emotions, experiences, and events that impact the characters. The young children don’t “retell the story using two details.” Instead, they demonstrate understanding through facial expressions, comments, and reflecting on the experience as it relates to their own lives.

Comprehension skills evolve as the child’s decoding skills grow. The child learns to decode and comprehend text simultaneously. Think about how amazing that is. Their brain is taking visual information, recognizing the visuals as letters, decoding the sounds into words, AND thinking about the phrases and messages conveyed by the words. Again, the brain does this all at once. Isn’t that miraculous!

When reading is broken down into its smaller elements, it is mind-blowing that anyone learns to do something so complex. So, it is not surprising that this is a challenge for many people. Yet, even though we don’t see them “reading,” they are comprehending a variety of printed symbols all day. We need to leverage the same strategies that have helped the child in the past. This can include direct practice in small, authentic moments, using visuals to support remembering details, adding color coding, creating a story map, or a variety of other strategies until we find the one that works for the child. All of us are different, and a classroom full of students may need a variety of instructional strategies. By presenting and teaching multiple strategies, we are more likely to find what works than by using only one method.

Students with significant cognitive disabilities will need more practice with a strategy to learn the process before it can be determined if it is a helpful strategy or not. Therefore, they must get more opportunities to try the strategy than their peers. Think about how to increase opportunities, and you will have found the key to accelerating their progress.

A few easy ways to increase opportunities for reading comprehension practice include: closed captioning on the television, handing the child a menu, magazine, or book every time you are reading, read the signs as you drive, listen to podcasts or movies in the car instead of music, pair the student with peers to read aloud together, use test-to-speech software, sing karaoke following the words on the screen, use AI to captioning while teaching.

In short, the more we expand our definition of reading comprehension, the more opportunities there are to include all students in the learning.

Literacy Is Messy

A, B, C, …

Did you start to sing the Jackson Five Song, or the Alphabet Song that is sung to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star?

Thinking about the alphabet probably invoked a variety of memories, because all of us, regardless of language, have an experience with learning the written or visual representations of oral or signed language.

The relationship between reading, writing, and communication is complex and interwoven. Reading only has value when you understand the written messages being communicated. If you don’t, then reading is a phonics exercise, and lacks purpose; kind of like the song John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.

When we think about learning to read, we often begin with the alphabet, yet for most of us, we interacted with literature long before we focused on the letters. We heard stories, looked at books, and saw shows or videos with words highlighted for songs and stories. Children with verbal speech also played with sounds, typically called babbling. This verbal play grew into songs like (I Like to Eat) Apples and Bananas and the Name Game, both songs that encourage the singer to exchange sounds and create new, nonsense words.

All of these activities support literacy.

Literacy is complex and involves the integration of a variety of skills at the same time. Many students progress in class, becoming fluent readers as they learn new skills and about the English language. But for some students, we need to provide focused, targeted skills instruction.

Scarborough’s Literacy Rope is a useful analogy for reading. It visually shows how the skills develop simultaneously while also demonstrating that students can develop a “rope” even if a strand is slower to develop and weave into their skills. This is important for planning instruction, but also for IEP development and planning a student’s day.

Students who have not become independent readers can benefit from instruction that provides them access to literature or text and conversations with peers. Maybe they listen to the text instead or read it. Or maybe they read the graphic novel version of the text instead. Simultaneously, they may have a time in the day when a special education teacher or literacy coach works with them on phonics and decoding. The combination helps the student develop a rope that is strong and will carry them into their chosen career.

When we look at literacy as a messy process with multiple pathways and ways to weave together a rope, we open the possibilities for students with disabilities. They might not be proficient according to grade level standards, but they are weaving together the skills and becoming increasingly literate. The timeline may be different, but it doesn’t make their learning any less important.

As we enter October, we will look at the various threads on Scarborough’s Literacy Rope and what that could look like for a student with a significant cognitive disability.

Welcome September

September is the beginning of fall. With the arrival of September, students go back to school, nightfall comes earlier, and the temperature cools.

September is also a great time to adventure outdoors. Apple picking, corn mazes, and fireside s’mores create memories and give us a chance to enjoy the cool weather.

September is also the perfect time to start a new routine.

Routines are important, and almost everyone has several routines they have followed for years. I have a routine for when I wake up, another for getting showered and dressed, another for planning and organizing my work day, and yet another as I wind down for the evening.

When we have houseguests or go on vacation, routines are disrupted, and often, the change adds to the experience. But for some people, altering a routine is stressful, frustrating, and invokes fear.

This September, consider adding a routine “disruption.” Use a jar of fun autumn activities, an app with suggestions, a bucket list, or a bingo card to help randomize activities or disruptions to your family’s routines. Maybe you plan to disrupt the routine on Saturday. On Friday night, you draw a slip of paper out of your autumn jar, full of fun ideas. You then have the evening to plan for the disruption to routine.

Making trying new things a routine creates predictability, planning, and a sense of control while also teaching the importance of flexibility, spontaneity, and adventure.

If an adventure every week feels like too much, you can add blank paper slips to your jar to signify, “no adventure this week.”

Or maybe you select a number between 1-31 using a spinner or app and that is the day you disrupt the routine.

It is not about quantity, but about having a systemic plan for the unexpected.

And who knows, you may discover an activity that you enjoy so much it becomes a tradition to look forward to every time you welcome September.

Ice Cream

I love ice cream. It is one of my favorite treats. I love it in a bowl, cup, or cone. I am a purist at heart. My husband loves it best as a sundae with hot fudge, whipped cream, and a cherry on top.

Whether you like sundaes, ice cream with mix-ins, or plain vanilla, one thing remains constant: it is served in something. Walking up to the freezer full of flavors, the clerk asks, “cup or cone?” Why? Because they don’t serve ice cream by placing a scoop in your hand.

I share this because the National Center for Educational Outcomes’ former director, Martha Thurlow, once used ice cream as a metaphor for education. In this metaphor, ice cream is standards-based instruction. Any additional scoops or flavors are extra support provided through response-to-intervention (RTI) or multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS). But these are still ice cream, so they are aligned to standards. The cup or cone is Tier I or general education. Whipped cream, sprinkles, and a cherry are special education services, providing a unique blend of additional treats to add to the ice cream.

Using this metaphor, it is clear that special education is the extra, on top of standards-based instruction, not a replacement. And everyone gets standards-based instruction with access to Tier I. We aren’t going to serve students with whipped cream and a cherry with no ice cream in a cup or a cone while everyone else has an ice cream. That would be blatant discrimination. Yet, when we deny students access to standards-based instruction because they have a disability, we have served them an empty ice cream cone.

Point of View

Ability, disability, accessibility, and barriers are key talking points when creating an IEP. Yet, these are also highly subjective and personal.

I really struggle with spelling. Vowels confuse me. Letters change the sound they make depending on what is before and after them in the word. Then we have the various language influences, resulting in words that are spelled similarly but pronounced entirely differently. My teachers and parents tried to help, teaching me rules like “-i before -e except after -c.” Did you know that is only a part of that rule? I didn’t, until I was in my teacher prep program in college. The whole rule is “-I before -e except after -c or when it sounds like A as in neighbors and weigh.” How can I be expected to think through all of the nuances of the rule, apply it, and still get the consonant correct? In general, it doesn’t matter because the computer helps me. It underlines every misspelled word, gives me suggested spellings, and has a thesaurus when my spelling is so wrong that I need to find it using a similar word that I can spell. However, there is one area where my spelling really is a disability: crossword puzzles. I have the wrong vowel on 1 across, which means I now have the wrong starting letter for 3 down, and I know the answer to the clue for 12 across, but there are more boxes than I think there are letters, so I don’t enter any letters.

Crossword puzzles aren’t required for my job or life, but it does illustrate how a skill deficit can be a problem in some situations and not an issue at all for others. The same is true if we use a medical model point of view or a social model.

In the medical model, a disability is something about the person that can be diagnosed, and it is a problem or something to “fix.” Whereas, in the social model, disability is a reflection of architecture, culture, norms, or expectations of others.

In the medical model, disability is a fixed status, meaning it is not likely to change. In the social model, disability is dynamic, increasing or decreasing based on the environmental surroundings.

Both models are more complex than these simple definitions. Examining the difference helps to illustrate the importance of the point of view when making decisions and planning for students with disabilities. The most important viewpoint is that of the person with the disability.

For example, for many students, we have goals related to social skills to increase the amount of time they talk with and engage with their peers. But what if the student is introverted and shy? Maybe their lack of engagement is not a disability deficit but a choice.

As we start planning for transition as a required part of the IEP, when the team decides that the student will live independently, did we ask if that was the student’s goal? I am a successful, employed woman whose salary is a very livable wage, yet I don’t live alone. I have had the same roommate for decades, and I call him “husband”. If the goal someone decided for me was that I live alone, I still would not have met that goal all these decades later.

Point of view also helps us understand each of the IEP team members suggestions and concerns during the meeting. The parent is “parenting,” meaning protecting, guiding, coaching, advocating, and worrying about their child. The special education teacher is focused on the disability and how to reduce barriers. The general education teacher is focused on how to include the learner in their instruction and what to expect from the student. The district representative is focused on ensuring legal compliance, staffing allocations, and data. It is no wonder that people leave the meeting feeling differently about the result, because they were each looking through their own lens.

Given the complexity of the work, it is amazing how often IEP teams agree. When the team is struggling to come to consensus, perhaps they first need to back up and understand the point of view of each member. Then, with this richer understanding, try to develop a plan together.

I say this knowing how hard it is when you are certain that your suggestions are the best ones for the student. But I have also had the opportunity to look at my own practice from a different point of view, and learned a lot about mistakes made and missed opportunities. I wish I had made more time to listen and more time to look through someone else’s point of view.

Choices, Expectations, and Discipline

Discipline.

What came to mind when you read that word?

Some of you may have thought of a moment when you were disciplined by a parent, teacher, or other adult.

Some of you may have thought of a moment when you were the disciplinarian.

And some of you thought about being punished.

Punishment is not the same as discipline.

Discipline is the coaching and teaching of expectations. This makes sense if we think about a root in the word:

Discipline—>Disciple—>Student

Punishment, on the other hand, is about power. The person with power demands submission or administers physical, mental, or emotional pain on another. (Note, this is not a post about the value or ethics of spanking—that is a different discussion.)

When we want to truly understand bigger concepts like expectations, we must also understand the difference between discipline and punishment. If we have high expectations for someone, then there will likely be times you need to discipline them. Most of the time, you are coaching, teaching, mentoring, and cheering the person on. But people are imperfect, and there may be times when the person you are caring for makes a choice that is unsafe, undesirable, or otherwise not acceptable. At that moment, discipline is important.

Unfortunately, too many students with complex disabilities are either over-punished or under-disciplined.

Let’s first consider when students are over-punished. This often occurs if the student has significant behavior challenges and the team is not adequately trained on how to understand the motivation of the behavior and how to encourage desired behavior. In these situations, the team tends to punish. Privileges are removed, words are said, and, very sadly and inappropriately, sometimes illegal or unethical physical punishment occurs.

Now let’s examine situations that lead to being under-disciplined. One common example is when a student has a significant cognitive disability. Too often, there is a quick “forgiving” of the student’s poor choices. Excuses like ”they don’t really know better” or “ they are cognitively like a two-year-old” are said. But these are lies we tell ourselves to justify lowering expectations. If we don’t discipline a student with a cognitive disability, we are, through our action, saying that we don’t think they can or will learn the expectation, we don’t want more for them, and we don’t need to take the time to understand their choice. In short, we don’t think they have a right to be heard, and we don’t value them.

But the thing is, I don’t believe people feel that way; they just don’t know that discipline is holding high expectations. And if you don’t understand that, it feels unfair to discipline. But when we do understand the difference between discipline and punishment, we are able to emotionally engage in tough discipline conversations with the student from a place of love and kindness.

When we are committed to a student’s learning and, ultimately, thriving, we coach them, teach them, mentor them, cheer them on, and

Discipline them.

Looking Forward

Last week I felt anxious and my heart kept racing. I realized it was because of the feeling and reports of uncertainty in the news and on social media. So, I turned it off and focused on planning my day. Within two days I felt more in control and ready to make plans for a whole week.

I am lucky, this feeling only lasted a few days for me. Uncertainty is common for parents, sneaking up at unexpected moments. For parents of students with disabilities, uncertainty can become overwhelming. The IEP process asks parents what their long- and short-term goals are for their child. They are asked about the best strategies, reinforcers, and goal ideas.

How can a parent be expected to see into the future? The future is the only thing a person can change. We can not change the past.

Looking forward one can see possibilities rather than regrets, doubts, or ghosts of the past. Taking a step forward is scary, but a start. Sometimes we do not see the destination, but we can see the path we are on.

In the moments of uncertainty, I hope you can lift your head, look forward, and take a step. And for those on a path that is not serving them, choose a new track.

Modifications

Modifications are critical and essential for some students.

A modification reduces the depth, breadth, and/or complexity of a task or lesson.

Modifications are determined by the IEP team to ensure the student has access to the instruction.

Modifications are only used as a last resort.

But what are they???

Defining modifications is challenging because they are not a “thing” that can be held, but rather, a process for evaluating a lesson, determining essential learning objectives, providing targeted activities, and assessing for learning.

Still confused?

Let’s talk about what they aren’t. Modifications are not prepackaged products, worksheets, a set of curricular materials, or different tests. Modifications cannot be bundled up and put in a box.

Modifications are systematic decisions. Decisions about what to teach, what vocabulary to use, the amount of guided or modeled instruction versus independent practice, determining what the objective is for the moment, the day, the week or the unit, and analyzing the student’s interaction and engagement with the learning to determine if they met the modified expectation.

So, let’s try defining it again.

Modifications are systematic, individualized, instructional targets specifically designed for students who cannot access, participate, and/or demonstrate their learning without them.

Teach the Future

It feels like every day I am hearing or reading a new story about the use of AI (artificial intelligence) in everyday life. For example, as I write this blog, a series of gray words show up as Word predicts my next word, phrase, or sentence. I can understand the hesitation to embrace new technology, but I also appreciate the benefits. I have never been a strong speller and auto-correct has created more problems than it has helped. However, as technology gets “smarter” it is better able to support my weaknesses and increase the strength of my writing.

Our youth have had the benefit of the squiggly lines that appear when a word is misspelled or the grammar is incorrect and with a few clicks, they receive options to correct their writing. I can hear the arguments, that they need to learn to spell rather than relying on technology. But do they? What will their life look like as an adult?

My school was progressive and we had a computer lab that was built when I was in 4^th grade. If the teacher had told me that one day I would carry a better, faster, more powerful computer in my purse, I would have thought he was crazy. Yet, that is something the majority of us do daily. I actually have two small computers, referred to as cell phones, in my bag on work days; a personal one and a work one.

The speed with which the world is changing is very apparent in technology, but change is happening in a million small ways all the time. The challenge for our teachers is to teach a student for the tomorrow that we can’t envision today.

Students with disabilities need us to teach them to use the most advanced technology and tools. While the specific tool may be extinct by the time they graduate, there are similarities across next-generation technology that help us all learn the new system. However, if we relegate students with disabilities to the older, “tired and true” technology or to technology that doesn’t have internet access because it reduces distraction, then we depriving them of the skills and exposure to tools necessary to thrive as an adult.

How do I know they won’t learn the skills later? Reflect on the skills of your grandparents and their understanding of the internet, online calls, and social media. My grandmother couldn’t understand how to use the cell phone. A wireless phone was the modern technology of her time. And, learning to use a computer was too complicated because she didn’t have any prior experience to lean into.

Students have started a new school year and there are a lot of projects, units of study, and group projects ahead. I encourage teachers and parents to think about how to engage their students in the content using current technology including AI. For instance, can the student ask AI to change the reading level of an online book? Or create a summary of a book written at a reading level that matches the student’s skill? Can they ask AI about a topic and then verify the accuracy using internet searches and online resources? Can a student draw a complicated picture to represent a scientific concept by describing what they want to AI? These ideas and more will support inclusionary learning while preparing the student for a rich and successful adulthood.