Volume 47 Number 3 Summer 2014 Presidents Message Ahh Summer, that great time to take satisfaction in all that was accomplished in the past school year and the wonderful opportunity to plan and prepare for the fresh start and abundant potential that the coming school year has to offer. Here at the Learning Disabilities Association of Michigan we have been working to meet the needs of our membership. Our membership is made up of parents of children with learning disabilities, professionals who work with children and adults with disabilities, and college students who intend to work in the area of learning disabilities. A driving question that has come to the forefront is, "How can the LDAMI support people who educate our population?" We have come up with a two-way approach: First, in April our board met with the Dean of Education at Aquinas College, Nanette Clatterbuck, and her students in Grand Rapids to learn more about their STAY pilot program. The STAY pilot program is designed to offer ongoing mentor support to young educators to guide them as they become established in the teaching profession. From classroom strategies that work as positive behavior supports to how to navigate the increasingly important assessment system for students and evaluation process for teachers, the STAY program aims to equip teachers with the tools they need to stay in education. The Aquinas students plan to act as a model in their collaborative approach of mentorship for other Michigan colleges. This is an exciting project and LDAMI is pleased to be involved with their initiative. Another challenge that faces young educators and even those of us who have been working for years, is the Individual Professional Development Plan (IPDP) which is required for Salary Step Movement (SSM) and Continuing Salary Increases (CSI). Every five years teachers use these PD hours toward their certificate renewal. The Michigan Department of Education allows teachers to use 30 hours per school year for the use of recertification. Check with your own school district, but in some districts, you may count the hours you work on a professional board of directors or attend professional meetings. The recertification hours are called SCECHES. You need 150 PD hours in five years to be able to be recertified. If you choose to combine PD hours and college or university coursework, you need 180 hours. The bottom line here is that it is to your advantage to become an active part of a professional board. Get involved with LDAMI Serve on our board. Attend our meetings. Earn the credits you need for your certification while you work towards common goals with a like-minded cohort. On the horizon......make plans to attend a one day, Learning Disabilities Association of Michigan Conference to be held on a Saturday in early November at Aquinas College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. We are looking forward to an exciting and professionally rewarding year ahead! Annette Lalley, Co-President Annette Puleo, Co-President Inside this issue: UnVeg with Reg 2 Accelerating Expository Literacy 3-8 Healthy Children Project 8-9 Improving Transition Through Mentorship 9 Page 2 UnVeg with Reg Summer Simplicity Tina Turner is a powerhouse – it’s hard to believe anything ever brought her down, but her advice is thought provoking: get rid of Regina Carey, Co-Pres. Elect ANYTHING that is bringing you down. Whether it’s the clothes that don’t fit, the weeds that have become an eye sore, the stack of magazines you will eventually read, or the furniture that needs refurbishing…get rid of it. Trust that “Sometimes you've got there is someone that will really breath, a cleansing of sorts that helps us open to new possibilities, a sense of clarity, and one less thing to think about, fret about or obsess over. You can do it! to let everything go - benefit from your release. There is * It is also important for our children to purge yourself. If you something as powerful as Tina see that simplicity is healthier for every- Turner’s songs when you pack up one. As you begin your summer fun, that clothing and drop it off at clear out that “stuff” that is in your way Goodwill or give yourself 30 min- and bringing you down! You will regain are unhappy with anything . . . whatever is bringing you down, get rid of it. Because you'll find that when you're free, your true creativity, your true self comes out.” ~ Tina Turner utes to pull those weeds and watch them shrivel. This week, we encourage you to get rid of something. The ridding of things (and admittedly sometimes even relationships that are toxic to our health) is a step forward, a deep some freedom and improve your outlook! Page 3 Accelerating Expository Literacy in Social Studies By: Carrie Anna Courtad, Carol Sue Englert, Troy Mariage, Nicole Martin, Cynthia Okolo, Kara Sevensma, and Rebecca Shankland The adoption of the Common Core State Standards have increased the academic expectations for students in K-12 classrooms (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). Students will be expected to read and learn from texts that show greater text complexity, and students will be expected to read more deeply and critically (Fisher & Frey, 2012). Increasing emphases will be placed on engaging students in close reading, answering text-dependent questions, identifying textual evidence to support one’s claims and arguments, and using reading and writing to engage in flexible communication and collaboration. Scaffolding text complexity through the provision of language tools and practices can help many struggling readers to participate in the curriculum more successfully. On the Accelerating Expository Literacy (ACCEL) Project (Englert, Mariage, Okolo, Sevensma, Martin, Courtad, & Shankland, 2009), we designed and implemented learning-to-learn tools and practices that were taught by content area teachers to facilitate the cross-curricular reading performance of their students in the junior high setting. The ACCEL strategies, however, have broader applications to help teachers and students achieve the Common Core State Standards. In this article, we overview some of the scaffolds that were employed by ACCEL teachers, the literacy strategies they taught, and the results of the intervention on their students’ performance. The ACCEL curriculum was conceived as a dual-strand of resources, serving both teachers and students through the provision of resources that supported teachers in implementing an apprenticeship model of teaching and learning, as well as offering a literacy toolbelt for their students to equip them with the literacy strategies which they might flexibly employ in the reading and writing process. The strategies that were taught by teachers included routines that helped students prepare to read and write, as well as interact with the expository content by annotating and organizing the information to achieve specific purposes. These tools included prereading/prewriting strategies, during reading and writing strategies, and after-reading routines designed to help students construct the information and write a meaningful response. Although we introduce these strategies in sequence, we wish to emphasize that these strategies might be used in any order or used alone based on the reader’s and writer’s purposes and goals. To begin a unit of study, teachers used the Plan It strategic routine to prompt students to get ready to read and to learn by frontloading and priming the reading/writing process as they previewed the text and applied pre-reading strategies by answering several questions: (1) P urpose: (“Why am I reading/ writing this? What was the author’s purpose in writing this?”); (2) L ist Topics: Preview the text and list topics (“What is this about?)” (3) Activate background knowledge (“What do I know? Connect to self, text, and world”); (4) Note your questions (“What do I want to know?”); and (5) Structure (“How is the material organized? What text structures can I use?”). These prompts primed teachers and students to identify the possible features and structures in the text, thereby providing a basis for assimilating the new textual information with students’ background knowledge and experiences (Fisher & Frey, 2012). The PLAN-It strategy was specifically designed to cue students to preview and check the text qualities in advance to prepare for the text, thereby mitigating the tendency of teachers and students to launch units without advance preparation. Second, the HIGHLIGHT-It strategy was used to involve students more deeply in interacting with the text during reading as they highlighted the main ideas and details of an expository passage on a first or second reading. Highlighting was an important cognitive step that supported students’ comprehen- Page 4 sion in getting the gist of the passage. During Highlight-It, students were taught to search for and highlight the central ideas and relevant details in a multi-step strategy: 1) Think of the reading purpose/goal; 2) Read the text, 3) Highlight the important ideas (main ideas and details, or ideas that answer the question), 4) Reread your Highlighting, and 5) Self-Check by asking three questions (“Does my highlighting make sense? Did I highlight the important main ideas? Did I highlight the key relevant details? Did I find information related to the reading purpose/goal?). When this routine was combined with close reading and rereading, it was intended that students might become more proficient in understanding the central ideas and key supporting details (Fisher & Frey, 2012), and using textual evidence to answer text-dependent questions that were asked by the teacher or students. To moderate the tendency of struggling readers to highlight without actively processing the content, we encouraged teachers to guide their struggling students to stop, think, highlight, and summarize after reading smaller chunks of information (one or two paragraphs), and by writing marginal notes in the form of a phrase or keyword that conveyed what each part was mainly about. This process of summarizing and comprehending smaller chunks of information was repeated, reiterated, and deepened in the other strategic routines in the ACCEL framework. Third, teachers showed students how to read more closely to annotate and mark-up the text by carrying on an inner conversation with the text using the Marks-It strategies. Marks-it strategies involved the application of symbols or marginal notes to indicate what thoughts or reading strategies were constructed by students while reading, and where those thoughts were formed. This was a more personal and transactional interaction with the text informed by the reading strategies and inner conversations held by the reader with the textual ideas. The Marks- It strategies and symbols, for example, included: Summarize (S), Clarify (CL), activate Prior Knowledge (PK), ask Questions (?), Identify Main Ideas (MI) and Details (D), Connect to self, text or world (C-Self; C-Text, etc.), Predict (P), Infer (I), and Visualize (V). These strategies were developed and personalized by teachers and students based on their reading curriculum and the language or visual symbols they preferred to attach to specific strategies. A Highlight-It and Marks-It cuecard is shown in Figure 1. Students either wrote their annotations directly on the texts, or they recorded their ideas on post-it notes. At the culmination of Marks-It, students had created an annotated or marked-up text that revealed the text locations where they had generated specific questions and thoughts, and made strategic responses. These marked-up texts were shared with partners and the class, and used as part of a larger conversation to debrief and provide feedback to students about reading strategies, meanings, and the expository content that might be useful in answering the text-dependent questions, problems, or goals associated with the unit. Given the fact that many students with disabilities have difficulty in notetaking, the teachers also taught specific note-taking strategies in a fourth strategic routine that involved the representation of ideas in a graphical framework. NOTE-It and MAP-It strategies were similar, although they differed in the organizational format that students were taught to use to represent the information. During NOTEIt, students took notes on an expository passage, using a hierarchical 2-column or double-sided journal to represent the superordinate-subordinate relationship among the main ideas and details (e.g., bolded main ideas with bulleted details). The goal of note-taking was to teach students how to summarize and record important information as part of a process of studying and learning about content-area topics (Armbruster, Anderson, & Ostertag, 1987; Brown & Day, 1983; Day, 1986), and more broadly, across the content subjects in the content-area curriculum. ACCEL teachers emphasized that notetaking externalized the inner organization that readers were creating on the mental plane. That is, good readers and good writers are always making mental notes about the central ideas and details, and correspondingly, note taking is simply the external record of those mental thoughts, decisions and interactions with the text. A cuecard for the Note-It strategy is shown in Figure 2. The acronym for the strategy corresponded to Notice the meaning (“What’s this about?” “Why is the author telling me this idea?”), Organize (“Find and write the Main Ideas and Details; Use the Mark-It Strategies”). Tell yourself and someone else (“Write it down.” “Talk about it”). Evaluate (“Do you have the main ideas and details? Did you annotate and use the Mark-It strategies?”). Self-check yourself and your notes (“Ask Main Idea Questions.” “Ask Text Structure Questions”, “Ask Clarifying Questions”). Page 5 In some cases, graphic organizers were better suited as representational forms to record ideas during note-taking. Several graphic organizers that corresponded to text structures were made available to students during the reading, writing, and note-taking process. Graphic organizers were especially useful when a written product or report was the final learning outcome, or when students needed to synthesize information from multiple sources, text sets, or multimedia formats (e.g., movies, websites, texts, trade books, and experiments). In these situations, teachers presented the text structure components, and instructed students to map the text information corresponding to the components using a graphic organizer. Some of the common text structures that were made available included: comparecontrast or venn diagrams, problem-solution, cause-effect, and sequence or timeline. When graphic organizers were used, this phase was called Map-It to represent the webbing process. It was stressed that students could record their notes using different protocols (2-column entries or graphic organizers) based on their purpose, questions, and learning preferences. These processes were especially important because many students with disabilities do not automatically connect or transfer the strategic processes involved in highlighting or annotating a text with note-taking routines. Finally, ACCEL teachers used the Writes-It routine that integrated all the prior strategic processes into an integrated routine that might support students in the inquiry process. We recognized that students needed to learn the strategies to pursue meaning independently (Boyles, 2013), and this might be best achieved through research and inquiry units where students asked their own questions, and engaged in close reading, taking notes, and organizing their notes to communicate their fundamental knowledge about a topic to inform others. Write-It was designed to help students develop competence in expressing their knowledge and expository ideas (oral and written), and develop their abilities to coordinate learning-to-learn processes and inquiry. As part of Write-It, it was intended that students would engage in an inquiry process to study an expository topic, and they applied the Plans-It, ReadsIt, Marks-It, Notes-It, and Maps-It phases as part of an inquiry cycle involving multiple textual sources. The information that was gathered by students across the various phases in the inquiry cycle was assembled in a report that was organized to reflect the writers’ questions, purposes, and audience. The publication of reports and the dissemination of the information was considered to be important to the goal of enhancing students’ motivation and their awareness of the authentic purposes for studying, interpreting, and constructing expository texts. However, it was the case that the Writes-It strategy was not fully implemented on a sustained basis by seventh-grade teachers in the ACCEL program because of the intense pressure at the district level to cover the curriculum for district and statewide testing. Although it is beyond the scope of this article, we wish to state that ACCEL offered several scaffolds for the use of teachers and students. For teachers, there were scripted lessons or catalyst lessons that could be employed to teach each strategy. These lessons were designed to help teachers explain the purpose and value of the strategies, and to help teachers make their thoughts and actions public as they used think-alouds to demonstrate each step of the strategy. To scaffold the gradual release of responsibility (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983), teachers provided guided practice by asking students to jointly perform various aspects of the strategy while thinking-aloud. To deepen students’ strategy knowledge and mastery, students worked with partners to apply the strategy as they performed the strategy steps using content area materials. Finally, during independent practice, students applied the strategy to content area material. Throughout the instructional process, teachers were encouraged to monitor the students’ performance, debrief students to help them arrive at a better understanding of the strategy and the expository content, and provide responsive feedback by modeling, prompting or coaching to ensure a high level of content and strategy knowledge. To support students, ACCEL offered several procedural facilitators and instructional scaffolds. First, cuecards were made available that contained the specific self-questions, self-talk, and prompts that might guide students’ thoughts and actions as they employed the strategy steps. Each strategy was introduced and supported through the use of a cuecard that was designed to prompt the strategy steps, and to support students in using the self-instruction and self-monitoring routine in advance of independent performance. Page 6 The measure of the effectiveness of any intervention must be experimentally evaluated. We studied the effectiveness of the ACCEL curricular approach in an investigation that we conducted with the teachers of 138 typically-developing seventh-grade students in social studies classes. In these classes, there was an additional group of 41 students with disabilities who were included in the social studies instruction. We compared the ACCEL students’ performance with another group of 36 seventh-grade students from the same building who completed the same measures, but who received the district curriculum without the benefit of the ACCEL instruction. We evaluated students’ highlighting, notetaking, and retelling performance on a series of pretests and posttests that were administered at the beginning and end of the year, and we compared performance across the groups of participants. The results of the study indicated that students who received the ACCEL instruction showed significant improvement in their ability to highlight expository texts, and to highlight the main ideas and details that were of central importance in the passage. Furthermore, ACCEL students showed a significant improvement relative to comparison students in the organization of their written notes, including their ability to selectively identify, reduce or paraphrase the passage content, as well as to signal or label the relationships among the ideas through the use of conceptual labels and graphical chunks. Likewise, the ACCEL students’ comprehension performance, as measured in terms of their abilities to recall main ideas and details, showed a significant improvement relative to the performance of the students in the comparison group. These results suggested that ACCEL students were becoming more attentive to the textual ideas in the passage, showing an increasing ability to identify, rehearse, and recall the main ideas and relevant details. Most surprising, however, was the subsequent comparison of students with disabilities relative to their general education counterparts who received the standard curriculum. Although students with disabilities performed significantly more poorly than their general education peers in highlighting, notetaking, and retelling at the start of the study, by the end of the year, ACCEL students with disabilities performed equally as well as their general education counterparts who did not receive the intervention. In fact, preliminary performance differences had not only disappeared, but favored the students with disabilities in terms of their abilities to selectively highlight the central ideas and relevant details in the passage. On measures of note-taking, performance differences between general education students and students with disabilities also had entirely disappeared in terms of students’ abilities to organize their notes into conceptual relationships that were clearly chunked and labeled. Furthermore, although the written retellings of general education and special education students were profoundly different on the pretest, there were no significant differences between the groups’ retellings at the end of the year. ACCEL students with disabilities were no different than their general education seventh-grade counterparts in their ability to remember and recall main ideas and details from an expository passage. Since this is an area of great difficulty for students with disabilities, this suggested that students with disabilities who received the ACCEL instruction were making comprehension and performance gains relative to their general education peers. Large performance gaps in comprehension recall that existed at the start of the study had largely disappeared over time. Educational reform efforts targeting students have emphasized the importance of providing literacy instruction that spans the entire school curriculum, and that involves students in a close reading of complex texts to find evidence that answers text-dependent questions. Research suggests that many adolescent readers and writers and students with disabilities will not automatically employ learning-tolearn strategies, and they may not possess the strategies to help them read, understand, annotate, represent, and compose expository texts. To achieve the Common Core State Standards requires attention to meaning-making strategies related to these processes, and how readers and writers might coordinate the meaning-making process to answer deeper questions. Fortunately, this study suggests that literacy instruction can be embedded in content-area subjects to benefit adolescent students enrolled in those subjects. Moreover, the provision of explicit instruction in the learning-to-learn strategies and thought processes associated with close reading can benefit all students, with special implications for instructing students with disabilities in the higher-level thinking processes associated with Page 7 learning and comprehension. As special education teachers are tasked with helping IEP students gain access to and demonstrate progress in rigorous general education core content standards, their role as academic interventionists who might develop and deliver universally designed strategy lessons to all students is heightened. The ACCEL project provided teachers with a suite of strategies and corresponding instructional scaffolds that could create entry points for building strategic performance. Creating access to curriculum is not an endpoint, but a beginning; it is only when students are able to demonstrate self-regulated learning that we can be confident that our instruction makes a difference. References Armbruster, B. B., Anderson, T. H., & Ostertag, J (1987). Does text structure/summarization instruction facilitate learning from expository text? Reading Research Quarterly, 22, 331-346). Boyles, N. (2012/2013). Closing in on close reading. Educational Leadership. 70(40), 36-41. Brown, A. L., and Day, J. D (1983). Macro rules for summarizing texts: The development of expertise. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22, 1-14. Council of Chief State School Officers (2010). Common Core State Standards. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, Washington D.C. Day, J. (1986). Teaching Summarization Skills: Influences of Student Ability Level and Strategy Difficulty. Cognition and Instruction, 3, 193-210. Fisher, D. & Frey, N. (2013). Close reading in elementary schools. The Reading Teacher, 66 (3), 179188. Pearson, P. D., & Gallagher, M. C. (1983). The instruction of reading comprehension. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 8((3),), 317-344. Figure 1. Highlight-It and Marks-It Cuecard. Page 8 Figure 2. Notes-It Cuecard Healthy Children Project - For a Toxic-Free Future Co-chairs: Annette Lalley & Lori Parks Brief Update: October 29, 2013: National Stroller Brigade in Washington D.C. - A team of individuals from Michigan participated in a rally on Capitol Hill calling on Congress to protect families form toxic chemicals. Following a press conference featuring actress Jennifer Beals, the Michigan advocates held meetings with members of Congress and their staffers. November/December 2013 & January 2014: “Mind the Store” Campaign: Sign--on Letter to Walgreens - The sign-on letter was to Walgreens executives asking them to lead in working to get toxic chemicals out of the products they sell. The letter is part of the Safer Chemicals Healthy Families (SCHF) “Mind the Store” campaign that urges the nation’s top 10 retailers to craft and implement a plan to reduce the presence of toxic chemicals in consumer goods. February 14, 2014: Michigan Advocates Talk with Congressman Dingle’s Staff in Washington D.C. via Phone About Strengthening the Chemical in Commerce Act (CICA) February 19, 2014: “Toxic Chemicals, Nutrition and Child Development” was presented by Irva Hertz-Picciotto, M.P.H., Ph.D., at the LDA of America 51st Annual International Conference in Anaheim March 2014: LDA of MI received a Healthy Children Project (HCP) Mini-grant to Participate in a Collaborative Market Campaign Project - The John Merck Fund awarded 7-9 $2500 mini-grants to LDA of America state affiliates. This project will involve regular planning calls and monthly activities aimed at urging retailers to take steps to get toxic chemicals out of the products they sell. April 16, 2014: “Mind the Store” Walgreens Day of Action - On this day, concerned individuals coast to coast gathered outside nearly 50 Walgreens stores asking them to eliminate unnecessary dangerous chemicals from their store shelves. A team of Michigan advocates gathered outside the downtown Ann Arbor Walgreens to return products that had been purchased there and had tested positive for toxic chemicals. Page 9 Improving Transition through Mentorship By: Glenda Hammond Transitions can become less frightening by creating opportunities for students to develop relationships with mentors. Mentors are individuals, with similar challenges, who have experienced success by overcoming obstacles to their learning. Mentors, who are closer in age, can be more effective in communicating with children than their teachers or other adults. For this reason, educators should give consideration to including mentoring as an essential step in educating students. Students, usually, require more individual attention to complete various assignments or master certain academic concepts. They are, also, often uncomfortable in social situations because they lack self confidence. Mentors can play an important role in assisting with these challenges. Where Do We Find Mentors? There are various levels of mentoring: role models in the same age range, two or more years older, college level, and professional. Peer mentoring can take place in the same classroom. Teachers can create assignments that would require students to interact to complete the assignments and share their experiences. We should network with community organizations with similar interests or with colleges and universities to provide organized mentoring opportunities for students who need internships or service learning credit. What Should Be the Focus? Mentors should be expected to focus on the following in their interactions with the students: goal setting, self-advocacy, self-determination, requesting accommodations, and study skills. They may also talk about building social skills and use of technology. Training should be provided for the mentors. How Will the Mentor and Mentee Communicate? One primary consideration would be based on communication strengths of the mentor and mentee. This would determine whether communication will be person-to-person, computer based, or both. As we examine the ways in which our students are influenced, we must conclude that media – face book, twitter, and other social media avenues have the greatest impact on our students’ time. They are communicating with others who are similar in age. Mentoring is another way of connecting with youth to provide the education that is needed in a way that gets their attention in the 21st Century. Healthy Children Project—Brief Update (cont’d): April 29, 2014: LDA of Michigan signed-on to a SCHF letter regarding the Chemicals in Commerce Act (CICA) - The letter was delivered to the Energy and Commerce Committee and entered into the hearing record prior to the hearing on the bill. It is hoped that the bill will be significantly strengthened to better protect everyone from toxic chemicals. Resources: Children’s Environmental Health “wiki”: http://wiki.mnceh.org/index.php/Introduction Further Links: Blog: http://www.ecocenter.org/blog-entries/2014/04/childrens-environmental-health-wiki-live Press Release: http://www.ecocenter.org/newsletters/ecolink/wiki-provide-information-about-protecting-childrenenvironmental-health-hazards The Learning Disabilities Association of Michigan 1026 N. Washington Avenue 2nd floor Lansing, MI 48906 LDA MI is the statewide affiliate of the Learning Disabilities Association of America. The mission of the organization is to enhance the quality of life for all individuals with learning disabilities and their families through advocacy, education, training, and support of research. We’re on the web! www.LDAofMichigan.org LDA MI Board of Directors Officers Co-Presidents: Annette Lalley, Lowell & Annette Puleo, East Lansing Co-President-Elect: LDA MI officers at a recent meeting at Aquinas College. Have a Great Summer! Treasurer: Erin Rooney, Lansing From top to bottom: Erin Rooney, Annette Puleo, Annette Lalley & Regina Carey Secretary: Bethany Arts, St. Johns Roseanne Renauer, Lansing Mary Rivera, Lansing Vicki White, Lansing Executive Director: Mary-Clare Reynolds National Board Representatives from MI Board Members Glenda Hammond, Lansing 4156 Library Road Pittsburgh, PA 15234 Phone (412) 341-1515 www.ldaamerica.org Regina Carey, Okemos & Kendra Tobes, West Bloomfield LDA of America Ed Schlitt, Traverse City Chapter Presidents Regina Carey, Okemos Ruth Berean—Washtenaw County (MI046) Lori Parks, Plymouth
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