Activity 1.4

Discuss the contents and podcast in Catholic Schools in your dioceses.

In the Diocese of Ft. Worth there are no special education programs offered separately from the public school system.  Each school meets their own needs as far as cultural and diversity programs and many of the school offices have assistants who are fluent in English and Spanish.  At my school we have several parents who speak mainly Vietnamese and the school and parish staff has a resource list of doctors and trades people who they call on to help the Vietnamese families.  In school, the children are fairly fluent in English but some do have difficulty.  These children are eligible for help from a Title One tutor if they qualify with low test scores.

Children with learning disabilities are identified using standardized tests as well as previous observation from their earlier teachers.  Strategies that the former teacher used are documented and kept in a private folder located in the principal’s office.  The Title One tutor works with some of the children once or twice a week in the areas of math and reading.  Other subjects are not part of the program, however the tutor will work on social studies or religion if there is a major project that needs to be done.  Most after school tutoring is done as requested by a parent and a fee is charged by the teacher.  It is school policy that a teacher cannot charge a fee when tutoring their own student. 

I watched the podcast entitled, “Accommodations vs. Modifications: What’s the Difference?”  Schools throughout the Ft. Worth Diocese provide many accommodations for students.  The classroom teacher knows which students need extra time for tests and plans accordingly.  It can become difficult to find space and time to give these students the quiet areas they need in order to finish the test.  At my school we have no quiet area other than the office of the vice-principal.  When her office is not available we then have the child wait until recess and they finish in the classroom while others go to recess outdoors. 

I do not know of many modifications (as defined by Lindy Crawford as those things that change a target skill or the construct of interest) made at our school.  We generally do not accept students who would need modifications to the curriculum.  Most of what we teachers think of modification would be considered” accommodated presentation of material” as defined by Crawford.

Activity 1.3

In Chapter 3 the discussion centers around how to be an effective teacher and how to meet the needs of each individual student.  Lerner and Johns explain that clinical teaching can be viewed as a cycle where the student is evaluated, the teacher teaches based on that evaluation, and then the student is re-evaluated.  Based on what the second evaluation shows, then the teacher changes the approach to teaching that child and/or moves on with new material.  One of the strategies teachers use on an everyday basis is differentiated instruction, providing different ways to present material and giving students choices.  Some examples would be to do partner reading, use rhymes or music to chant definitions or use power points or videos to increase interest in learning. 

The authors address the zone of proximal development (Lev Vygotsky) which is described as the level of maturity a student must have before a student can learn a certain skill.  If you as a teacher expect too much from a student before the student is at a certain maturation level, then you set up a system of failure.  A good deal of trust must be established between a student and teacher before learning can easily take place.   Many students will try very hard to learn material if they feel that the teacher believes that they can do it and have been shown that they have been given the basic structure to learn the material. 

During the podcast I learned that Section 504 covers many different aspects of the ADA and that some people have difficulty getting acccomodations later in their educational careers because they have successfully completed course work and no longer meet the criteria for a learning disability.  The new changes speed up the process for receiving accomodations in testing and the person applying no longer has to submit new evidence.  Many people have earlier records that are still applicable to their situations and the hope is by March of this year that agencies will stop arguing that a disability is in place and will give them the accommodation they need.  (Americans with Disabilities Act:  Impact of the New Regulations on those with LD)

1.2 Chart comparing RTI with discrepancy model

Response to Intervention	Discrepancy Model
Not a formal evaluation of cognitive ability or academic achievement	Determined by comparing intellectual testing numbers and academic testing
Interventions are tried within classroom setting and if student does well with intervention then no other action is taken	Testing mode not very accurate for young students or for students with test anxiety
Does not require a student to fail for a significant period of time before being identified	Takes a lot of time for both the teacher and the student
Some learning disabled students may not be identified through RTI because teachers provide interventions to help them succeed	Lot of variation between states as to what score equals intervention and label of learning disability
Teachers and parents can influence results because they want some type of identification	Formal exams help determine correct learning style during testing
Some of the information on this chart was obtained through LDinfo.com/rti.htm

Activity 1.2

Question for Discussion....Describe several accomodations that can be made for testing students with disabilities.

One accomodation for a student with a learning disability is to allow more time to be given before an assignment is due to be turned in for credit.  Some students need more time to process the infomation and then actual put it in writing. They also need more time if they are working with an after school tutor or their parents are helping [.   Another accomodation is to provide the student materials that they can listen to through headphones and watch through captions on a tv monitor.  Teacher created materials can be made using bigger font and space left for writing answers.  When the test is standardized, a scribe can fill in the circles for a student who has difficulty keeping his place   A student could be orally tested with someone reading the questions and choices to them and then marking the answers that the student selects.

Activity 1.1

As I watched the videos, I kept having the same nagging thought; how do I strike the balance between what the student needs to know to pass the test and what the student needs to know in order to live a full rich life?  Guessing which bubble to fill in is a skill that all students can accomplish.  But following directions and placing ingredients in the proper order is a challenge for some people but necessary if they want to make a healthy meal. No child left behind is a wonderful concept in theory but it makes little sense when trying to fit kids who think in terms of apples to programs that are made to help kids who think in terms of oranges.
Sometimes I think that the powers that be forget that children are people who think for themselves.  A child who doesn't want to learn or who is unable to process information the way you think they should learn is not going to process the knowledge in the long term memory portion of their brain.  It simply won't happen.  The outcome of this non-learning is that the rating of a school or teacher is lowered when based on the results of testing students who have not learned the material being tested.  Some children need more time to process information.  Many may not be able to reach a full understanding of a concept for another year. 
I do think that some testing is necessary to help teachers get a basis on what their students know and to find out where there are areas of weakness.  At my school we are giving the ITBS tests early in the Fall so that the results can help us focus on areas where children may not have as yet reached full understanding.  It has been helpful for me to concentrate my attention on those areas but at the same time introduce new content that is built on the prior knowledge. 
I found it interesting but sad that schools who were targeted as a "failing school" lost many of their higher achieving students.  The balance between giving those students an education that is challenging and those who struggle with the curriculum makes the jobs of the teachers in those schools much more difficult.  It was stated that those schools have a low rate of returning teachers.  It would be very difficult to teach in such a stress filled environment.

A New Experience

This blog will be a new experience for me.  Hopefully I will be able to navigate it as well as I have facebook.