There is such a thing as exit from sped!!!!

Happy for you, Shay. Do you teach special day class or resource?

Shay,

I think it is wonderful that you can do this. It is truely amazing.I agree that sped can take a toll on these kids. Sped should be more about moving kids out.

I teach self-contained and inclusion for 11th grade academic English as well as reading. My reading class has 13 kids in it and I have removed all of their ‘read to ’ accommodations except for two kids. The girl that was moved out was in mostly self-contained classes. We are going to put her in all teamed classes but she will be on the reg. ed teachers roll. This is how we transistion kids but I still will be counseling her. I also will be tutoring she and her sister this summer in fluency. She reads too slow; I think that she thinks that it helps her comprehension. She also has to pass her SOLs to graduate.

It is amazing, Shay. What will it take for special ed. teacher training to change so that new teachers are using thse methods from the start? Why can’t those of us already teaching receive training that is worthwhile? That girl should have had her reading remediated in elementary school. Lucky for her that she got you…most high school special teachers are too busy trying to get the kids to pass the subject area state tests to even consider remediating reading. Not that most of them even know how.

By the way, I have invited about 10 resource and reading teachers from 4 different schools to go to our state IDA conference in mid-March. Susan Hall and Louisa Moats are two of the main speakers. Somehow I need to create an awareness that there IS something better than we are already doing. I already tried convincing my special ed. director with no success. So now I’ll try the bottom up approach.

Those kids are blessed incredibly to have you as a teacher, Shay.

Janis

Hi Janis,
I am going to be going to our (VA) IDA conference March 14-15 as well. Is anybody else going? I would love to share expensives with someone. Our main speakers are Lousia Moats and Maryanne Wolf.

There is still too much accommodating in elementary resource programs. These are the nice resource teachers who help the kids with their classroom assignments. While this is a lovely practice and the kids do hand in work and earn grades, they don’t learn to read and write. I have gradually moved to spending ALL my time in resource teaching language arts and math at the level the child functions to improve independent functioning overall eventually. The teachers I teach with don’t want me doing reports in resource. They modify these assignments in their classrooms so the resource kids can do them at home with parental help (just like most nonLD kids do).

It boils down to that adage I love so well…….feed a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime. Resource programs should be teaching fishing in elementary grades. Perhaps then in secondary grades they can be more about supporting success.

Shay,

Something is amiss about our dates apparently! Louisa Moats is scheduled at our IDA in NC on March 14-15! I haven’t looked at the site yet to see, but I’m sure those are our dates. Hope she isn’t scheduled at two places at the same time!

Janis

I 100% agree, Anitya. There is a child that my assistant works with in the morning (I work with her in the pm) and the teacher always sends things for her to work on. The other day, the assistant was out and I pulled the child at that time myself. She sent a science book and science test for me to go over. The teacher loses sight of the fact that science and social studies just do not matter for a second grader who has zero reading comprehension and very low math skills.

What is the best way to handle this? Should I suggest to the mother that we have grading modifications on science and social studies until we get the reading and math skills higher? If my asst. does not help her on the science and social studies, she fails every test. But when she does help her, the teacher complains that the child has artificially high scores (as in, the asst. teaches the test as she administers it individually).

Janis

Shay, what do you mean when you say you still will be “counseling her”? I know you said self-esteem was an issue. Will you have goals related to self-esteem? How much time will you spend working with her now?

I mean just that, trying to keep her self-esteem high; it is very fragile now. She will be in regular education and so no objectives, just a teacher who cares what happens to her. We are going to put her in all teamed classes with her name on the regular education teacher’s list. This is a good way to transition her instead of ‘cold turkey’. I tutor kids after school and most don’t need me any more, they are doing well in all academics, but I am there for moral support. It is very scary out there for a student just getting out of sped ‘protection’. These kids could lose their new high self-esteem if they fail a test; the hole could be very deep. I have a vested interest in my students, I want them to succeed. This is not what I have to do, but what I want to do.

Janis,
She is there on 3/14, not on the 15th.

You say “She never should have been in sped to begin with,…whole language messup” That doesn’t seem the same as “graduating” from sped, if you never were ld to begin with. I am amazed and applaud the time you take and , more importantly, the relationship you obvious have, with your students - wish we had a few of you at our school. But, I’d really like to hear from teachers who have taken kids with are ld and truly mainstreamed them back with little or no accomodations.

Also, what do you mean by “teaming?” I know our high school has no concept of this.

Unreal. Our IDA starts the afternoon of the 14th and goes all day the 15th. Louisa Moats does our opening speech on the 15th and one other session on vocabulary. So she is in VA Friday and NC Saturday. Susan Hall has the opening here on Friday and one other session.

Janis

It is estimated that 95% of the students are in special education only because they haven’t been taught how to read, write and spell properly, let alone do basic math because of the whole language philosophy way of ‘teaching’ over the past 15 years. She was LD all right accordingly to our methods of evaluations. If she would have been taught, like many other sped kids, to read using a systematic phonics program from the beginning, she wouldn’t have qualified for services. This is the basis for the legislation, ‘Leave No Child Behind”. If we teach using methods that work in elementary school, we could cut out most of those children that are qualified for sped starting in the second or third grade that lack phonemic awareness, the ability to relate the proper sound to the syllable. Surely you know that most of the 20%+ kids that are in special education shouldn’t be there. I shouldn’t be able to remediate reading and writing skills as easily as I have if the child truely has a ‘disability’? Webster defines a disability as something that disables or disqualifies, disable means to make unable, unfit or disqualifies. If a child has never been taught to read using methods that are available, is he or she disabled? I think not. If a child has never been taught how to write a proper paragraph structure or grammar, do they have a disability? How about spelling, if a child hasn’t been taught basic spelling strategies, do they have a spelling disability? All of these questions are rhetorical but I truly believe that a disabiling condition is one in which you have tried many different ways to teach a child but to no avail, then accommodations may be the only way that he can learn. How many children or adults for matter does this apply to? Not many. Yes, my student is LD and who made her that way? She had to be taught using methods that worked. Would she have been LD if we would have used the methods from the beginning? No The sad thing is that we continue making kids LD even now with all of the research.

Sorry, I forgot , teaming means inclusion classes. Another thing, my student has mostly been in self-contained classes all of her life from second grade. Before she was remediated in reading, she was reading at a fourth grade level.

I think you can still read tests to her, however it is not your job to teach her the content. The classroom teacher needs to make the presentation modifications to make certain the child IS GETTING exposed to the content and the parents should be the ones studying with her for the test, practicing the vocabulary. I’d start by speaking with the classroom teacher and involve the parents as appropriate.

You’ve heard me say it time and again. We have been using systematic phonics for 6-8 years. Referrals to sped. have dropped, however I still get students and they are VERY learning disabled and most won’t be getting out of special ed. any time soon, if ever.

Shay,

Do you think this is why the PG folks report so much success in 12 hours? A lot of these kids are not truly LD but rather children who need to be taught much more systematically than the schools typically do. In other words, their success reflects the failure of the schools as much as how good their program is. se. I know my LD son was never caught up in that 12 hours.

I wonder what would happen to these success rates if the nation adopts programs likes Anitya’s school has. In other words, it is much more difficult to remediate a truly LD child.

On the other hand, I see nothing sadder than a child who has had to endure being LD who could have been spared that pain by correct teaching. I think that any program which can catch such a child up is a godsend.

Beth

Beth,

I am going to insert an opinion in here if that’s okay. I think there is a major difference in a child who has an auditory discrimination deficit (decoding) and a child that has multiple deficit areas. It’s not that the one with auditory discrim. problems is not LD, they certainly may be. But they may be more easily remediated than a child with memory, attention, visual, and/or other issues in combination.

Janis

Thanks, Anitya. I just needed to hear another opinion. We have way to much to do with this child in the areas of reading, written language, and math to be tutoring science, too.

Janis

Janis,

I agree. Anitya was the one who made me realize I had to take charge of my child’s remediation—that the prognosis for his combination of deficits is not good, even with the best of classroom teachers. Still, I just also wonder, reading some of Shay’s posts, if some of the fast results with PG are due to kids being taught incorrectly to start with rather than truly being LD. Some have called this “dysteachia”.

I read somewhere that some where like 70% of kids will learn to read no matter how badly they are taught (my daughter—whole language taught but wonderful reader). Another 20% will need to be taught explicit phonics. It is this 20% (or whatever number it is) that good teaching would prevent being placed in special ed. programs and for whom you would expect rapid remediation. The remaining 10% (or whatever it is) are LD. Some of these have a single deficit and will be much easier to remediate than others (like my son).

Beth

Anitya,

you are so right…

At some point I wanted to tell my son’s resource teacher- I would prefer you teach him not comfort him… Although, the comforting is also needed- if she does not do the teaching who will?

It would be great if more teachers had your point of view…

Ewa