Making Special Education Special: A Review of Highly Effective Educational Practices

1. Making Special Education Special: A Review of Highly Effective Educational Practices Dr. Kim Gibbons and Dr. Sarah Brown St. Croix River Education District May 3, 2012

2. First Things First… • m.socrative.com • Room number: 80688

3. Special Education Close the gap between a student and nondisabled peers

4. What Works in Education?

5. What works? • A galaxy of faded names and optimistic claims: • Focus schools, Blue Ribbons Schools, Magnet Schools, Cluster Schools, Pilot Schools, Exemplary Schools, etc. • All claim they are better or different but little evidence of either. • One of the most critical problems our schools face is not resistance to innovation, but the fragmentation, overload, and incoherence resulting from uncoordinated acceptance of too many different innovations (Fullen, 1991)

6. What Works BEST? • Visible Learning: John Hattie • Meta-Analysis: Compares results of many different research studies and outcomes • Effect sizes: Converts outcomes of studies to a single scale we can compare outcomes across studies. • Effect size of 1 indicates an increase of one standard deviation on the outcome (achievement). • Advanced achievement by 2-3 years • Student who got “xyz” exceeded 84% of kids who didn’t get “xyz.”

8. Variables Impacting Achievement • Please complete the variables impacting student achievement handout. • Work with a partner to rate the influence each variable has on achievement.

10. What Surprised You? • m.socrative.com • 80688

11. 10 Strategies for Special Education • Teaching Strategies • Formative Evaluation • Comprehensive Interventions for Learning Disabled Students • Feedback • Spaced vs. Mass Practice • Meta-Cognitive Strategies • Self-Verbalization/Self-Questioning • Teacher Strategies • Teacher Clarity • Teacher-Student Relationships • Curricula • Vocabulary Programs • Repeated Reading Programs

12. Teaching

13. Formative Evaluation (.90)

14. Comprehensive Interventions for LD Students Direct Instruction + Teaching Strategies Scaffolding Directed response and questioning Sequencing Drill-repetition-practice-review Segmentation Strategy cueing 7 steps • Learning intentions • Success criteria • Build engagement • How to present the lesson • Guided practice • Closure • Independent practice

15. Feedback (.73) • Feedback is most powerful when it is from student to teacher! • Teachers need to seek and be open to feedback about: • What students know • What they understand • Where they make errors • When they have misconceptions • When they are not engaged Feedback is the breakfast of champions! - Ken Blanchard

16. Spaced vs. Mass Practice (.71) • Frequency of opportunities to respond is critical versus spending more time on a task in one sitting • Students need deliberate practice in order to become fluent • Students often need exposure to learning over several days before they will learn new content • Both acquisition and retention are improved when practice is spaced

17. Metacognitive Strategies • Applying a strategy to solve a problem and selecting and monitoring the strategy. • Thinking about thinking. • Activities can include planning how to approach a given learning task, evaluating progress, and monitoring comprehension. • The more varied the strategies used throughout a lesson, the more students are influenced!

18. Examples of Metacognitive Strategies • Making an outline before writing a paper • Delaying fun things until work is completed • Verbalizing steps to solve problems • Checking work before handing into teacher • Using a study partner • Taking class notes • Rehearsing and memorizing • Making lists to accomplish during studying • Keeping records of study output • Creating mnemonics to remember facts • Scheduling daily study and homework time • Studying in a secluded spot.

19. Self-Verbalization/Self-Questioning • Likely more useful for those students with lower to middle ability • Provides assistance in searching for information, resulting in increased comprehension • Effects highest for pre-lesson questioning and post-lesson questioning

20. Teacher

21. Your Turn: Favorite Teacher • Think of your favorite teacher. • Make a list of the top three things you liked about them. • How much did you learn in these classes? • Now, think about a teacher you liked the least. • Why didn’t you like this teacher? • How much did you learn?

22. Teacher Clarity (.75) • Organization • Explanations • Examples and non-examples • Guided Practice • Assessment of Student Learning How do you communicate the intention of each lesson? How do you know when students are successful?

23. Teacher Student Relationships (.72) Factors that are important: • Demonstrate that you care for the learning of each student as a person • High levels of empathy (see their perspective and communicate back) • Warmth • Encouragement of higher-order thinking • Adapting to differences • Genuineness • Respect of self and others

24. Curricula

25. Vocabulary Programs • Students who experience vocabulary instruction have improvements in reading comprehension • Most effective vocabulary teaching methods included: • Providing both definitional and contextual information • Involved students in deeper processing • Gave students more than one or two exposures

26. Repeated Reading Programs • Re-reading a short and meaningful passage until a satisfactory level of fluency is reached • Timed tests had larger effects than untimed tests • Effects found on both reading comprehension as well as reading fluency, although comprehension effects didn’t transfer to new passages

27. What About Your Curricular Materials?

28. References • Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge: New York. • Hattie, J. (2011). Visible learning for teachers. Routledge: New York.

29. kgibbons@scred.k12.mn.us sbrown@scred.k12.mn.us