Before You Assume a Learning Disability . . .

I work in a small, alternative high school in rural North Carolina where all of our students have struggled to succeed in traditional educational settings.  Some have anxiety disorders, some have learning disabilities, some have experienced such severe trauma that school has been rendered irrelevant.  

It is often difficult to tease out what particular obstacle is preventing any given student from succeeding on any particular day.  More often than not, it’s something temporary—lack of sleep, an interpersonal dispute, some chaos at home.  My solution is usually patience, understanding, maybe a hug, and an extension of the deadline.

Still, when the same type of failure continues to occur, I am apt to worry that something more intractable or nefarious is at work. 

Frank[1] kept failing my vocabulary tests.  Where nearly all my other students were getting As and Bs on them, Frank was averaging about 45%.  And I wasn’t even asking them to use the words in a sentence.  We’re talking matching and multiple choice.

I was beginning to wonder if Frank had a learning disability or some type of processing disorder.  But then I watched him while he “studied” the words on Quizlet (www.quizlet.com).  He would stare at a flash card for a while, then flip to the next word.  This went on for as long as I allowed the students to study.  

                I crouched by his desk and said, “Frank, show me how you study vocabulary.”

                He pulled up the list and began looking at it.

                I asked, “Are you quizzing yourself in your head?”

                “Huh?”

                “Like, do you look at the word and then think in your head, ‘That word means . . . whatever stuit means,’ and then flip over the flash card to see if you’re right?”

                The look on his face was not unlike the one my dog makes when she hears my mom’s voice coming from my phone. 

                “Try this.  Flip that card over and look at the definition.”

                He did.  “Okay.”

                “Now flip the card back over so you can only see the word.”

                “Okay.”

                “What’s the definition?”

                He started to turn the card back over.

                “Nope!  Without looking, can you remember what the definition is?”

                “I wasn’t paying that much attention.”

                “Okay, flip it back over and this time pay attention to the definition. Say it out loud if you have to.  Say it a couple of times.”

                He did.

                “Now flip it back over to the word.  Can you remember the definition?”

                “Yeah.”

                I was skeptical.  “What is it?”

                “You want me to say it out loud?”

                “Yes!”

                He struggled to say the entire definition with accuracy, but he was close.

                “I want you to do that for each of those words until you can say the definition and know it’s right before you flip over the card.”

                “Okay.”

On his next vocabulary quiz, he passed. Not by the highest of margins, but he passed. His performance on vocabulary quizzes continued to be erratic, depending on how much and how earnestly he studied.  Still I knew he had the capacity to do the work.  

What I had been tempted to attribute to a cognitive deficit was so much simpler.  In 16 years of school, he had never learned how to study for mastery.

A few weeks ago, I decided to see if a similarly simple intervention might help with a different problem.  Mark is a dreadful speller.  And I don’t mean he leaves out or uses the wrong letters; he leaves out entire syllables.  His writing is unrecognizable as English.

I had been operating under the assumption that he had poor phonemic awareness and was fundamentally unable to spell proficiently.  While students were working individually, I sat next to him and asked, “When you were younger did anyone ever teach you about segmentation?”

            “About what?”

            "When you break a word apart into syllables and you spell the syllables.”

Blank stare.

“Like, take the word ‘condescending.’  Spell ‘con’.”

Eye roll.  “C-O-N.”

“De?”

“D-A?”

“We’ll come back to that.  Spell ‘Scen’.”

“S-E-N”

“And ‘ding’?”

“D-I-N-G.”

Granted, he had still spelled it incorrectly but not so incorrectly that a reader wouldn’t be able to discern what word he was aiming for.

Last week, I administered a midterm exam with 21 vocabulary words.  Mark spelled 8 correctly.  Of those that remained, 9 were off by 1 letter, a tenth by 2. 

Three were still unrecognizable.  Baby steps, people!  Baby steps.

I’m now in a pitched battle with a colleague over a shared student who consistently underperforms.  She wants to lay the bulk of the blame on his ADHD.  Does the kid have ADHD?  Yes.  Is that a catch-all excuse for every problem he is facing in the classroom.  Absolutely not.  I need to work with him on studying more effectively, asking questions when he doesn’t understand something, and using all the resources available to him.

I am not suggesting that learning disabilities and disorders do not exist.  I am asserting that we are often too quick to assume that a student can’t do something when the truth is that no one has yet taught them how. 

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[1] All student names have been changed.

Great Teachers are Choreographers, not Dancers

My dogs know quite a few words: out, walk, cookie, ball, and grandma are particular favorites.  They acquired this vocabulary through association.  I held up a biscuit and asked, “Who wants a cookie?” and, because everyone wants a cookie, they quickly learned to associate that word with the snack they enjoyed so much.  It is important to note that the concept of a cookie preceded their acquisition of the word “cookie.”

In much the same way, very young children acquire vocabulary by pointing at things and making some sort of questioning vocalization.  Parents then give them a label for the thing.  “That’s a doggie!  Can you say ‘doggie’?”

At age three, my nephew scored off the charts verbally in large part because my sister and brother-in-law brought him to museums and aquariums and gave him picture books, exposing him to myriad items for which he desired names.  He could discern a backhoe from a bulldozer and a stegosaurus from . . . some other dinosaur.  Ask him.  I’ve forgotten most of that stuff.

In school, we tend to approach vocabulary in reverse.  We first offer students a new term—adjective, velocity, transpiration—and afterwards show them examples.  Without a mental model to anchor the terminology, vocabulary has nothing to hold it in working memory.  Students forget the words and what they mean. 

Sometimes we give them several related terms at the same time: conduction, convection, and radiation; comparison and contrast; associative, distributive, and commutative.  Again, without some mental model that allows them to keep each term separate, they conflate them.  If you’d like to see the truth of this, ask a random third grader to tell you the difference between narrative, persuasive, and expository writing.

I have become convinced that a better way to introduce content-specific vocabulary is to provide the examples first.  Let students figure out what the distinguishing characteristic is and only then give them the academic language.

In a recent seminar, a young teacher mentioned that her students struggled to correctly identify common written organizational strategies: chronological, process/sequence, etc.  I pulled together several bundles of paragraphs, each on a variety of topics but organized the same way.  Without any preliminary instruction, I gave groups of teachers a single bundle and asked them to figure out their commonality. 

When I checked in with the teacher whose classroom struggle had prompted the activity, her group had correctly identified their paragraphs’ structure as problem-solution.  She said, “I like this so much!  Instead of me telling them what it is, it’s like I’m drawing it out of them!”

I grinned for two reasons.  First, I love it when teachers see value in an activity I have offered them.   Second, she had unwittingly excavated the etymology of the word “education,” which comes from the Latin educere, meaning “to draw out.” 

I often hear teachers lament, “Our kids don’t have any background knowledge!” when they merely lack content-specific background knowledge. 

Knowing this, we are probably best served by determining what general knowledge can be brought to bear on our content.  Students may not think they know anything about thermodynamics, but they can tell the difference between a large container of water that won’t scald them and a small container that will. 

Instead of giving them the scientific terms heat and temperature and then letting them perform the lab, why not let them perform the lab first?  Let them explain what happened in their own words: “That big pot of water changed the temperature more than that little one with the boiling water, ‘cuz there was more of it, you know, so it, like, had more, I don’t know, like, power.”

“Power, nice!  In science, we call that ‘power’ heat.  Why does the big pot have more heat?”

“Because there’s more water in it!”

“Specifically, there are more water molecules in it.  So, heat is the sum of all the molecules together.”

The teacher I mentioned earlier put together a series of activities to engage students in recognizing text structure.  In addition to having them identify the common organization of several different paragraphs, she created puzzles with each sentence of a paragraph on separate pieces.  Students who placed the sentences in the correct order could more quickly assemble their puzzles.

I checked in with her recently to see how her students were handling the concept of text structure and organization.  She shared, “I had one student in particular say that he finally gets relationships between sentences.”

Over the course of my career, there were many days when I worked so hard in class I felt I should be wearing tap shoes and a sparkly outfit.  When the bell rang, I was bathed in sweat and physically exhausted. 

Great teachers are choreographers, not dancers.  You plan the moves that will bring the results you desire, but it should be your students who execute them.  It’s a more sustainable tack for you, and it is likely to lead to more learning for them.

Why Won't My Students Talk to Each Other?

Earlier this week, I observed two classes, both taught by the same teacher, both sophomore English, both academic track.  The teacher was a recent attendee at a seminar where I had introduced a variation on the Socratic seminar called Socratic Smackdown (MONDAY! MONDAY! MONDAY!)

The first block, which ran from 7:15. until almost 9:00 a.m., was highly engaged, the second block not so much.  Given everything we’ve seen lately about how teenagers need more sleep, these results seem counterintuitive.  If any class should be disengaged, it’s the one that is still asleep.

As a closure activity, their teacher asked for feedback on their discussion, and several students mentioned how awkward the whole ritual felt.  When the teacher asked them to dig deeper into the cause of this awkwardness, one young lady claimed, “We don’t know each other!”

The teacher countered that they had been together for eight weeks, the implication being that they should know each other by now, and the student responded, “Just because we’re in class together doesn’t mean we talk to each other!”

I was immediately transported back to May 1996, the spring of my first year of teaching.  We were discussing Of Mice & Men, and one student made an excellent point to which another student said, “I agree with the boy by the window…”

I was horrified.

“The boy by the window?!  That’s Justin!  You’ve been in class together for eight months!  How do you not know his name?”

The problem is real and, while we didn't create it, it is in our best interests to solve it.   

The Difference Between Regular and Honors

I’ve heard more than a few teachers claim, “I could probably do that with my honors kids, but my regular kids just can’t handle it.”  The implicit assumption here is that honors students, by virtue of their superior intellects or work ethics, are more fitted to academic discourse than their less academically gifted peers.

I’d like to propose an alternative explanation.  Honors students take honors classes, which are fewer in number than the—call it academic, call it regular, call it what you will—middle track.  As a result, honors students tend to be in many more classes with the same people over the course of several years.  They may not like all of their peers, but they know what to expect from them.

By contrast, average students may have a completely new set of peers every period of every day every year, giving them limited opportunity to build relationships.  Consequently, they lack the trust in each other that allows them to share ideas.

In addition, there are very real social barriers that teachers ignore at their own peril. As they get older, student bodies separate according to a series of unwritten and unforgiving laws that dictate where they can and cannot eat lunch, who they can date, whose parties they can be invited to, what extracurricular groups they can join, and how enthusiastically they are allowed to contribute in class.

Unless a teacher has only students from a single social caste in his classroom, he will have to spend some time breaking down the barriers between students before they will collaborate successfully. 

Building Classroom Relationships

For several years, I taught a class for at-risk seniors.  One year, two young men--one was a very Caucasian athlete, the other a very Latino gang member—nearly came to blows a few times during class, convinced that they were mortal enemies.  I initiated a regimen of team building and class building exercises that would enable them to learn a little low-risk information about each other and discover some common ground.  Eventually, they stumbled upon the fact that they both liked girls and getting high.  I’ll grant you, I may have created problems for authority figures elsewhere in the community, but, as far as my class concerned, those two were no longer the source of any behavioral issues (and promised not to get high before or during my class).

If you want students who don’t know each other to work collaboratively, you must first help them break down those social barricades.  Assign them an activity that requires them to find out something about each other.  For example, while you take attendance, ask each student in a small group to speak for 30 seconds on any of the following topics: 

• What did you do last weekend/what are your plans for this weekend?
•  What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done?
• If you had $1,000,000 but only one day to spend it, what would you do?
•  If you could talk to one of your relatives who is no longer here, who would it be and what would you talk about?

There are a number of books with discussion prompts like this.  Ones that leap immediately to mind are The Complete Book of Questions and If  . . . (Questions for the Game of Life),Volumes 1-3 .  There are also quite a few websites that ask people to choose between two unpleasant options, e.g. “Would you rather change your last name to Hitler or give up chocolate for the rest of your life?” 

Realize that not all the material in these resources is necessarily safe for school, so use some judgment.

Other Activities

A Google search using the generic term “class building activities” yielded half a billion hits; there is no shortage of material out there.  I prefer tasks that enable the sharing of personal information over those that merely ask students to complete a physical challenge.  Any activity that requires a significant amount of physical contact or closeness should be viewed with extreme skepticism, but use your own comfort level as a guide.  If you wouldn’t want to participate in the activity, don’t foist it onto your students.

Bottom Line

Do some type of team building or class building activity three times a week—more if your students need it—and you will be amazed at the change that occurs in their willingness to participate and to support each other.  Students may resist initially, so I recommend that you participate in these activities and share information about yourself.  You are part of the team, and they need to know they can trust you as much as they trust each other.

You may have rigorous expectations, but do your students?

I’ve been sweating over the agenda for a workshop on teaching English II—sophomore English for you civilians. 

I’ve read Fisher & Frey’s Rigorous Reading.  Twice.  I’m going to have the teachers practice creating all six levels of text-dependent questions.  I’ve got a great heuristic device for analyzing poetry.  I’ve got another for analyzing character[1]. 

For our opening activity, I’m going to ask them to deconstruct the end-of-course test using an activity called List-Group-Label, once again tapping my current favorite professional book, Making Thinking Visible.  I want the teachers to see that higher order thinking skills are not antithetical to the test.

To drive this point home, I even selected the wood floor background for my PowerPoint slides.  It’s visual metaphor: the EOC represents the floor, the least our students should be able to do.  If we teach to the ceiling, the floor will take care of itself.  Clever.  I know, right? 

So why am I sweating?

They say that nothing is idiot-proof to a sufficiently motivated idiot.

I taught high school English for eleven years, and I was clever even then.  I had nifty heuristic devices and graphic organizers and catchy expressions.  And they were all very effective…for the students who gave a damn.  Nothing is student-proof to a sufficiently apathetic student.

When I was a student, I didn’t care about math.  Despite that fact, I did fairly well in it because I could plug-and-chug.  Teach me the algorithm, and I’ll know when I have the right answer.  I was far less successful in any math class where I had to figure out which algorithm to use or—God forbid—create my own. 

Close reading, like theoretical mathematics, is not merely an intellectual act.  It is a manifestation of the desire to understand.  Before students can successfully read between the lines, they must believe that there’s something worth finding there. 

I am an ethical person.  I no longer provide after-school professional development because it doesn’t work and, frankly, it’s inhumane.  I need a minimum of three hours and teachers who are not already exhausted.  It is not enough for me to present the material; I want teachers to use it.

For the first time since arriving at my current employer, I’m concerned that teachers may not be able to implement what I give them.  I can’t in good conscience craft a presentation on how to effectively teach English II without including some instruction on how to build the will of the students to engage with the material. 

 And, to be quite honest, I'm not sure I know how to do that.  I'm not sure I ever did.

I'll keep you posted.

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[1] Big ups to Denise Sawyer of Lee Early College in Lee County, NC, by the way, for her assistance in pulling these materials together.

I Don't Need a Buddy--I Need You to Do Your Job Better!

A friend once asked me whether New Yorkers were as rude as everyone said.  I explained that in my experience New Yorkers were not necessarily rude.  They just didn't go to any great lengths to make you feel good about yourself.  To illustrate the point, I described wandering around Greenwich Village with a UNC classmate one spring break, looking for a place to have dinner.  I ducked my head into a shop and asked the woman running the place, “Could you point me to Little Italy?”

Without breaking eye contact or uttering a word, she extended her left arm and pointed. 

“No, seriously,” I prodded.

“Seriously,” she insisted.  “Keep walking in that direction and you’ll run right into it.”

She was right.  She was tremendously helpful, just not very friendly.  But here’s the thing.  At that moment, I didn’t need a friend.  I was already with a friend.  And my friend and I were really hungry. 

As a woman who works in education and lives in the south, more and more, I find myself wishing for a little more of that businesslike efficiency and a little less flaccid friendliness.

Efficient: Calling one teacher into your office and saying, “The last time we met, I asked you to get your lesson plans to me by 3:00 pm on Fridays, and you haven’t been doing that.  If you miss another deadline, I will have to reprimand you formally. ”

Flaccid:  Calling the entire faculty into a meeting and explaining, “Some of you haven’t been getting your lesson plans in on time.  We really need you to do that.  Okay?”

Efficient: Encouraging—nay, demanding—that employees interact with each other as adults, that they stop gossiping and take their complaints to the source of the complaint, not to you.  When Employee X comes to your office and says, “Employee Y hurt my feelings yesterday,” your response is, “I think you should talk to Employee Y about that.”

Flaccid: Enabling behavior from adults that you would not tolerate in children.  When Employee X comes to your office and says, “Employee Y hurt my feelings yesterday,” your default is, “I’ll talk to her. Okay?”

That word—okay?—like you’re asking permission to lead!

I wonder sometimes if part of the reason little ever changes in education is that we’re all so damn busy trying not to hurt anyone’s feelings.  So we allow incompetent people to serve on essential committees because we don’t want them to feel left out.  And we neglect to document behaviors because it would make everyone uncomfortable.  And we pretend we don’t see bad teaching or abusive administrators. 

Why?!

Because someone might get mad?  Or get their feelings hurt?  Or not feel affirmed and fuzzy?

Perhaps my upbringing was too no-nonsense but it seems to me that people’s self-esteem should result from their having done something worthwhile, not because everyone else is in a conspiracy to protect them.

In the pilot episode of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Matt Lauer asks one of the rescued girls how she ended up a victim of kidnapping and, presumably, rape.  She explains, “I didn’t want to be rude so… here we are.”

I’m not suggesting we stop being kind to each other or that we take no notice of our colleagues’ feelings.  On the other hand, the behaviors I’m describing are not kindnesses. They are duplicitous, cowardly, and, frankly, an abdication of our responsibility to the children we’re supposed to be teaching.  It’s certainly not kind to them.

Some Possibly Uncomfortable Truths About Cooperative Learning

Last week, I conferred with a new teacher who was struggling to manage the behavior of her class of fourth graders.  For a variety of reasons, these children have not yet developed the ability to self-regulate, so, when released from direct instruction, their immediate impulse is to flee from the assigned task to anything else.  This impulse was aided by the fact that the teacher had placed their desks in clusters of five.

When I suggested that cooperative groups might not be the most productive arrangement for her students, she looked shocked—for about a second—then audibly exhaled and said, “Thank you!”

For some time now, teachers have been served a pretty steady diet of cooperative learning Kool-aid, and I feel it necessary to clear up some misconceptions.  Lest anyone think I’m simply a curmudgeon with a fetish for desks in rows, let the record state that, for five years, I served as a trainer in Kagan-style cooperative learning for my school district.  I believe in the value of effective cooperative grouping.  The operative word being “effective.”

Truth #1: Sitting together does not necessarily lead to working together.   In my observations, the most common scenario I witness is the teacher’s request that students “work together to finish this problem/ worksheet/ paragraph/ etc.  In most classrooms, what happens next is that a high-achieving, grades-oriented student in each group takes over the task.  I was this child (I am this adult).  This student will not risk allowing others to contribute, and those others are more than happy to surrender to the grade-grubber’s superior will.  In the absence of a high-achieving, grades-oriented group member, students will engage in a dizzying number of stall tactics that may include but are not limited to sharpening pencils, flipping pages randomly and/or accidentally dropping the book several times, asking to go the bathroom, requesting clarification of the task (this after 10 or 15 minutes have elapsed), and conversing on topics of greater personal relevance, interest, and facility.

Truth #2: Just because students are engaged does not mean they are learning.  That said, it is important to recognize that when students are not engaged, they’re definitely not learning.  However, teachers must consider whether and how collaboration contributes to learning goals.  Often the answer is “not at all.”  Students may enjoy the opportunity to talk to each other while working, but unless this talk is focused on building content knowledge or skill it is not helping them academically.  Yes, yes! Some students need to build social skills, but simply placing four kids in a group will not make that happen any more than placing four cats in a bag will.  My experience is that the students who most need help with social skills either shut down or become hostile when forced to work together.  Most groups—whether children or adults—require a protocol of some kind to enable them to distribute responsibilities equally.

Truth #3: The “real world” analogy we keep using to justify group projects is completely specious.  My significant other is the director of a team of software engineers. 

•  His team is made up of individuals hired specifically for their skill in writing code. 
• The team knows he is in charge.  He has more experience and holds institutional authority over them.  As their director, he can request status reports to keep track of how the work is progressing, reprimand any team member whose work is lackluster, and recommend the firing of team members who consistently fail to perform. 
•  Tasks are assigned to take advantage of team members’ strengths.  If they want to shore up their weaknesses, they do so on their own time.
•  In the end, the only thing that matters is that the product is completed on time and according to client specifications.   

Contrast those givens with the typical school project group.

·         Because the material is new, by definition, no one is an expert. 

·         Likewise, no one in in charge.  Even groups that are assigned a team captain succumb to the realities of adolescent social dynamics.

·         The goal of school activities is to help students get better at what they do not already know how to do.  If the activities tap only students’ strengths, they will not lead to learning. 

·         The learning process should be more important than the product. 

Now, I realize it is a poor leader who tears ideas down without providing alternatives.  But it's Friday, and I'm tired.  I’ll get to that in my next post.

Remember to breathe in and out (repeat as necessary),

Dr. Deb