Professional Development Session

1. Professional Development Session Dr. Crawford Meritor Academy December 16, 2010

2. Agenda • Construction • Prior learning Recognition • Pedagogy: A Semantic map of teachers’ considerations • Deconstruction • What do teachers bring to the work of learning • What makes for an enriching learning environment • Reconstruction • Identifying a variety of approaches, but focusing in on two (Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, Universal Design for Learning).

3. Quote • “Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental…” • W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Freedom to Learn” [1949] 1970b, pp. 230 -251.

4. Goal • To Introduce teachers to a process for thinking about and planning for teaching all children, including students who display habits of mind that are consistent with students with mild-moderate disabilities

5. Objectives • Describe verbally and or in-writing, a snapshot of key considerations as you plan, teach, assess • Analyze, or take apart, through discussions an approach to planning (utilizes the critical thinking framework – rich descriptions, illustrations & questioning etc.). • Briefly introduce and provide a wealth of resources for addressing the barriers students face • Discuss, describe and incorporate UDL • Recommendations

6. Construction • Prior Learning Recognition • Review of teachers’ responses • Map it!

7. Snapshot of Teachers’ Considerations:Vision:

8. Conceptual Knowledge Base for Teaching Source: Darling-Hammond, and Bransford, 2005, p.11 Learners and Learning in social contexts -human development -learning -language Curriculum and Subject Matter: Educational goals and purposes for subject matter content and skills Vision/ Professional Practice Teaching: -Teaching subject matter -Teaching diverse skills -Assessment - Classroom Management

9. A snapshot of learners and learning Social Context

10. Snapshot of what they, we, bring...

11. Mindset (Belief): Dweck, 2006 • Fixed • You either have it or you don’t • Urgency to prove oneself time and again • Failure is not growing, not reaching, not fulfilling your potential • Concerned with being judged • Prevents one from taking risks • Growth • Qualities can be developed through one’s efforts • Concerned with improving • Failure is about growing • True potential unknowable • Stretching oneself and sticking to it is key

12. Beliefs • Shape who we are and what we do as a result • An example: Gerome Groopman, Harvard Medical Doctor

13. Social Context of Special Education • Unsound practice to link a child’s disability with access to knowledge • Even those who do not yet have a reliable mode of communication • Even those whose behaviors challenge us on a daily basis (Shapiro-Barnard, 1998, p.8).

14. Dewey: Teachers’ Disposition • Openmindedness – Multiple perspectives, Alternative possibilities, recognize errors in our own thinking • Responsibility – personal, academic, social, and political consequences of our actions • Wholeheartedness – reflect on in order to understand one’s own teaching as well as its impact on students

15. Why Teach? • Self Empowerment • Must know who they are (preferences, learning styles, understanding of barriers they face) • Love themselves • Be able to expend effort to achieve their goals (ways of thinking about and navigating through and around barriers) • Ideally involves collaborating with parents and families

16. Communicating and Collaborating with Families • Within a team context • Face to face interactions are most effective • Notify parents, set agenda, prepare the environment • View them as equals, experts in their children • Build trust • Describe what students demonstrate/ yet to demonstrate • Avoid evaluative language • Use positive interpersonal skills • Identifying and respecting family preferences • Use written, spoken and technology-based communication

17. Culturally Responsive Pedagogy One Approach for Working Effectively with Families

18. To build Culturally Responsive Practice, educators need… • To acknowledge and understand multiple realities: • To assess their own cultural assumptions to understand how these shape their starting points for practice • Demonstrate sociocultural consciousness • to recognize that their worldview is not universal

19. To build Culturally Responsive Practice, educators need… • To be cultural brokers • Help students mediate between school and home cultures • To build on students’ strengths • Uses texts and materials that are oriented towards students

20. To build Culturally Responsive Practice, educators need… • To know how to develop curriculum or agenda that takes into account the understandings and perspectives of students • For example, listening to and learning from students, using texts that address students’ concerns; This approach is more apt to engage students emotionally

21. To build Culturally Responsive Practice, educators need… • A broad set of teaching strategies for working with diverse children • Guided by a vision of justice • Critical literacy • Problem posing stance: • Create multiple opportunities for students to create new knowledge and direction • Explicit strategic teaching in meaningful contexts

22. To build Culturally Responsive Practice, educators need… To situate themselves as teachers and learners simultaneously • Collaborative interactive model • Collaborative dialogue

23. To build Culturally Responsive Practice, educators need… • Educators who understands how culture influences both teaching and learning: • All students have culture • “Language and culture are inextricably intertwined” (Padron & Knight, p. 177) • What is said, not said, patterns in our speech, whether we interrupt or not, ask direct or indirect questions – these are all shaped by who we are as cultural beings (Erikson, 1986)

24. Building Culturally Responsive Practice… • Diverse learners tend to be more field-dependent (i.e. relational or global learners) as opposed to field independent and therefore tend to: • Respond to things in terms of the whole instead of isolated parts • Prefer group learning situations • Prefer inferential reasoning • Approximate space and numbers rather than adhere to exactness or accuracy • Prefer learning by doing • Be more proficient at nonverbal than verbal communication • Prefer learning characterized by variation in activities • Prefer kinesthetic, active, hands-on instructional activities (as cited by Irvine & Armento, 2001, p. 9)

25. Culturally Responsiveness must show up in…

26. How CRP Translates for Children with Disabilities

27. An absolute Requirement: Knowing how to provide access to Standards which also means link between

28. What gives? Teaching

29. Learners and learning • How does one begin with a student who demonstrates many barriers to social and or academic learning • Documenting learning (using a variety of observational tools and or a continuum of assessments) • Thick descriptions (what students demonstrate and or are yet to demonstrate) • Credible literature to find out how particular barriers impact learning and development • Creatively apply a combination of approaches

30. Learning … • Is a change • In what learner knows • Caused by the learner’s experience

31. Teaching

32. Another layer of details to consider…

33. Lessons from Brain Research Equally important

34. Educators need to an expanded interdisciplinary knowledge base that includes… • Psychology • Biology • Neuroscience • Pedagogy

35. Enriched Learning Environments are rich in…

36. Key Requirement for Dendritic growth in the brain… • Stimulation • Creative insights • Multifaceted answers • Alternative thinking Too much predictability and repetitive stimuli fosters boredom

37. Processes that facilitate learning

38. Enriched Learning Environment

39. Other Elements of an Enriched Learning Environment include… • Hands on; minds-on • Multiple intelligences • Non-threatening • Collaborative • Problem-solving • Real-life relevant activities • High expectations • Reasonable behavioral expectations Neural growth occurs because of the process not the solution or product

40. When someone has “learned” something they can… • Identify or predict relevant associations among variables in the learning situation • Predict and express accurately the appropriate concepts or actions • Store, retrieve and apply that prediction in context next time (Jensen, 2005 p.34) Source: Jensen, E. (2005). Teaching with the brain in mind. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development

41. Critical factors in the learning process • Engagement (goal oriented attention and action) • Repetition (priming, reviewing and revising) • Input quantity (capacity, flow and chunk size) • Coherence (models, relevance, prior knowledge) • Timing (time of day) • Error Correction (mistakes, feedback, support) • Emotional states (safety, state and dependency)

42. Critical Thinking

43. Cognition built on…

44. Students with mild moderate disabilities Learning Disabilities

45. Definition Learning disability is a generic term that refers to a heterogeneous group of disorders manifested by significant difficulties in the acquisition and use of listening, speaking, reading, writing, reasoning, or mathematical abilities. These disorders are intrinsic to the individual and are presumed to be due to central nervous system dysfunction. Even though a learning disability may occur concomitantly with other handicapping conditions or environmental influences, it is not the direct result of those conditions or influences (Hammill, Leiger, McNutt & Larsen 1981, p. 336)

46. Recap of Learning • Senses • Processing • Memory • Expression • Breakdowns occur most often with processing and memory

47. Characteristics of Children with Learning Disabilities Hyperactivity: inappropriate excessive motor activity such as tapping of finger or foot, jumping out of seat, or skipping from task to task Attention deficits: distracted by irrelevant stimuli or perseveration, or attention becomes fixed upon a single task or behavior that is repeated over and over Motor deficits: general coordination problems resulting in awkward or clumsy movements Perceptual Motor deficits: Difficulty in integrating a visual or auditory stimulus with a motor response Language deficits: Delays in speech and difficulty in understanding and/or formulating spoken language Impulsivity: Lack of reflective behavior Cognitive deficits: Deficits in memory and concept formation Orientation deficits: poorly developed spatial or temporal concepts Specific learning deficits: problems in acquiring reading, writing, or arithmetic skills

48. Major Areas of Learning Disabilities • Deficits in oral language • Failure to develop verbal language skills results in subsequent failure to in other areas of learning. There is an interdependence of learning disabilities and language disorders • Preschool language deficits: Children at this age who exhibit disorders are at risk for failure in later years. They… • Show no interest in verbal activities • Are unable to follow a storyline • Do not enjoy being read to • May have word retrieval difficulties (even when they appear to understand nouns, verbs and most prepositions). • May have a sustained delay in speech and language • Syntax may be rudimentary with inadequate morphological pattern acquisition • Overall verbal concept may be slow: unable to name colors, letters or days of the week when they enter school

49. Language Deficits of School Age Children Difficulty with wh questions and processing and using pronouns and possessives. Passive construction, relative clauses, negations, contractions, and adjective transformations are also difficult for children with LD (Vogel,1975; Wiig and Semel 1973, 1974, 1975)

50. Language Deficits of School Age Children Linguistic concepts expressing comparative, spatial, and temporal relationships are also problems for children with learning disabilities Extensive difficulty with form: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions (Wiig & Semel, 1984) Extensive word-finding difficulties (semantic system) )Kail & Leonard, 1986)