Students with Disabilities Meeting State Standards

Helping Students with Disabilities Meet State Standards, Too!
Presented by Pam Musick, Pearson

Pam Musick, a teacher from Hawaii that is now working in Indiana for Pearson, opened her session by having the participants discuss their major Special Education issues including:

• time that is taken away from general education children in inclusion because of needier students
• scores that count in self-contained classes causing schools not to meet AYP (interesting idea: the state test scores of students in self-contained classes counting back to the home school)
• the gap of about 5 years in a single class
• how to provide supplemental intervention that does not supplant the general education curriculum - how do you provide supplemental intervention without missing some of the general eduaction curriculum?

Sound familiar?

If it’s about our expectations, think about this study that Pam presented: Only 26% of teachers who taught Special Education believed that “all or “most” children with disabilities would be able to meet their state standards. 72% of general education teachers believed that “all” or “most” could meet the standards. If 80% of students with disabilities have average or above average IQs, what does that say about our expectations?

An accommodation levels the playing field. (examples in life might be a GPS for directionally impaired, glasses, dishwasher instead of washing by hand, step stool for reaching). It doesn’t give the child an extra advantage. An adaptation (or modification as we call it in Florida) changes the parameters to meet the needs of the student. It makes the task different than the original one. Most of the time students only need an accommodation to be able to meet their swtate standards.

"One instructinal minute lost can never be recaptured." Enjoy Pam's "A Dozen 'Downtime' Activities" (added with permission) so that you can use every single day of instruction.

A Dozen “Downtime” Activities

1. Students play a quick game of “hangman” using spelling, vocabulary or content area words.
2. Play classification games. (Ex: mammals/reptiles or countries that border an ocean, etc.)
3. Play thinking skills games. (I’m thinking for a person, place, thing.)
4. Chain a story. Each student adds one sentence as it moves around the classroom. The story can’t end until each student has added a sentence.
a. Student 1: It was a snowy day.
b. Student 2: The bus was late.
c. Student 3: My friends and I started to play.
5. Brainstorm a list and write it on the board. (provides good visual feedback)
6. Practice reviewing basic facts. (multiplication, spelling, abbreviations, elements on the periodic chart)
7. Play word/vocabulary games. Think of the synonym, antonym, etc.
8. Play round robin jeopardy. One student gives the answer for something learned this week in school and another student answers it with the right question. The student who is correct goes next.
9. List the pros and cons of an issue or topic at school, in the community or from the curriculum.
10. Start a number sequence and keep it going. (Ex: 1,3,4,7…)
11. Take a cause/effect challenge. One student makes a statement and two other students provide the cause and the effect. Example: It was a snowy day.
Cause: The car slid off the road.
Effect: The car will have to be repaired.
12. Find the misspelled word. Ask a student to write two words on the board – one spelled correctly and the other incorrectly. He selects another student to identify the correctly spelled word. If correct, it is the next student’s turn. If not, the first student gets another chance at it.

Pam's session ended with a discussion of Marilyn Friend's models for team teaching including co- teaching, station teaching, alternative teaching, one teach-one support, parallel teaching.

*Pam will be in Duval county on Feb. 11, 2008 to do some work with DRA.