One Boy, Two Perspectives

A few years ago I joined other educators around a table to discuss a preschool student transitioning to kindergarten. Two of the educators at the table were the student's teachers- one had him in the morning in a small special education class with five other students. The other taught the student in the afternoon in a general education preschool class with fifteen other students. As the meeting progressed the two teachers stared at each other in disbelief and horror. They each described a very different student. The special education teacher described a young boy with no academic skills. A boy she felt may need to be placed in an intellectual disabilities classroom down the line. The general education teacher described a bright, though shy boy with many academic skills- a boy who could write his name, count to 10 and knew his alphabet. Neither teacher could believe that the other one would be so blind toward the child in question. They each truly believed they knew the child- they'd taught him all year. They were both experienced educators who have a good understanding of child development. Yet their years of experience gave them each a different perspective on the child.

The following year when I supported the boy in his general education classroom I found a very bright yet shy boy who was able to count to ten, say his alphabet, build anything anyone put in front of him, and write his name. I watched him shut down when the speech pathologist worked with him and I watched the speech pathologist form an opinion of him much like his preschool special education teacher's opinion. From her years of experience she saw a boy with limited functioning. Eventually we helped the student get comfortable enough with her so that she too could see his bright sparks.

The special education teacher and the speech pathologist were not wrong- they made their judgments based off of what they observed. In the special education setting the boy had never been asked to count to ten, write his name, or say the alphabet. He was never given the peer models to show how to behave and therefore his shy, quiet mannerisms morphed into what appeared to be a cognitive disability. Yet in the general education classroom he followed his peer models, overheard the alphabet song being sung, and attempted participating in classroom activities like writing his name. He was given the chance to try these activities so he rose to the challenge.

This experience haunts me this year as I watch the students in my class. I fully support the intellectual disabilities self-contained program but I also realize it has its limits. I worry that my students will not be exposed to activities and lessons their general education peers are exposed to and that this lack of exposure will further separate them from their peers. They may be fully capable of learning and performing academic tasks that their peers can perform, but since they are not being exposed to it they never will learn how. 

Last year I tried very hard to model my classroom lessons after what was happening in the general education classrooms. I wanted it to be as similar as possible so that my students would be exposed to everything their gen ed peers were exposed to. I differentiated for them so that the lessons met their needs, but I also followed much of the same lesson structures and demands of the gen ed classrooms. Last year I was a part of the gen ed kindergarten team and so I was able to follow the gen ed curriculum closely.

This year, sadly, I am not a part of any of the gen ed teams because of time-demands. I am teaching specific, scripted programs that do not allow us to follow the gen ed curriculum. I am terrified that all of this limits my students and that I am becoming that preschool special education teacher who believed a student was not capable of activities he had mastered solely because she never asked him to do them. 

I hope that merely being aware of the problem will help me remember to constantly challenge my students, but I have the sinking feeling that it is not enough. 

Beginning to reflect on the year- placement decisions?

Now that the year has ended and I'm enjoying my summer vacation it's time to start reflecting on what worked really well this year and what didn't.

Last summer I wrote that my goal for the year was to get the majority of my students into full inclusion settings by the end of the year. Of the nine that started in my room in September here's the final breakdown:

Three students are moving on to more restrictive settings.
Three are returning to the non-categorical classroom for next year.
Two will be in full inclusion next year.
One is moving to another school but will continue to be in a non-categorical placement.

When I look at the numbers I have to admit I feel a sense of failure. I would love to see the children either go into full inclusion or stay in a non-categorical classroom instead of a more restrictive program. But if I'm honest I want that for myself. I have to look at what is best for the individual students. On a case by case basis they are going on to what is best for them at this time and I wouldn't change their future placements at all.

Could I have done more to help more of them work toward full inclusion? This is something I'll be trying to sort out all summer. There is one student in particular that I would have loved to see move toward more hours with her gen ed peers.What could I have done differently?

If I could go back I would re-look at the reading program I used with her. Although it was a strong program it was scripted and I let the program lead us through most of the year. It gave her a lot of foundational skills that I most likely would not have spent as much time on if I hadn't been using it, but it also may have held us back. If I had been teaching guided reading the way I did in a gen ed classroom I may have pushed her further along instead of being satisfied with following a teacher's manual.

I also wish I'd spent more time attempting to integrate her into her gen ed classroom. I'd hear reports from others about her struggles with whole group lessons when she was in her gen ed room and when I was able to get into her gen ed room I'd see them myself, but I wish I'd done more to sit with her and help her adapt to the environment. She may be ready for strategies that will help her learn in a whole group but since she was with me for her main academics we never touched on that.

On the other hand, because she was one of two students for math and writing she most likely made more progress than she would have in the gen ed room. She primarily received one on one instruction and we were able to truly focus on those essential early learning skills she'll be using the rest of her life.

What would have been more important? Having her with her peers feeling frustrated but included? Or having her with me where she could work on the skills she needed and truly master them? When you compare the student's achievement in academics and self-regulation to her kindergarten year when she was in a full inclusion classroom she made tremendous gains. Yet could I have done things differently that would have given her a least restrictive yet successful placement?

It's not an easy question to answer and it's the reason that we spend so long on IEPs going over the legal definition of the Least Restrictive Environment and a Free and Appropriate Public Education. Placement decisions are never to be taken lightly and should never be done because of a school's general policy. It comes from a team of people putting their heads together, looking at the facts and deciding what is best for the student. And even then we're not always sure that we found the right answer. I have a feeling I'll keep thinking about what else I could have done for this one all summer.

Goldilocks and the three instructional objectives

I'd never put too much thought into Goldilocks before other than recognizing the oddness of the blond girl thinking she can get away with breaking and entering. But if you can get past that it's actually an academically packed story. The more I get into my Goldilocks unit the more I realize I can actually milk out of this simple story. So of course I am trying to take every advantage.
First of all it's a simple familiar story that is easy for them to retell. It encourages interaction with the text with the repetitive "whose been eating my food?" line and the voices are just fun for the kids to make. The beginning, middle, and end is pretty simple too.
Then there is the whole measurement piece of comparing the bears' sizes. Over and over again we are reminded of the size difference, which fits right into our kindergarten measurement unit on lining up objects by size. So we are comparing sizes of bears, bowls, beds, chairs, and then bears again. We are measuring with non-standard units so we are using manipulatives to measure stuffed bears and predicting whether momma bear will have more or less blocks than papa bear. Some of my little ones have iep goals to recognize the big object when given two choices- Goldilocks is like the original teacher of big/little.

Then we've got a whole unit on opposites. The porridge is hot or cold, the chairs are hard or soft. The bears are big or little. Tall or short.
Rhyming is a bit of a stretch but it can be done- bears/chairs. A couple of 3 bears versions I found are written in rhyme so I can throw that in too.

Then there is the emotional component. There are the happy walking bears, sad baby bear, angry papa bear, and scared Goldilocks. It's perfect for basic identification of emotions that some of my kids need.
-Hmmm Papa Bear's eyes are squinted and his mouth his open. Ever seen Ms Lipstick look like that? Yeah, that is what people look like when they are angry.

Now that we've identified the emotional component our next step is going to be to write an anger-management book for Papa Bear. Although yes, Papa Bear may want to be angry enough at Goldilocks to eat her, well, let's see what else he can do. Take deep breaths?  Take a break? Ask Goldi to never do that again? Get a drink of water?

And then there is the 'don't take things that don't belong to you' lesson. Why is Papa Bear mad? People get mad when we take their things. Let's practice asking first- if Goldi had just asked then maybe they'd all be friends.

I'm sure as the unit goes on I'll find more areas where we can milk it for all it's worth. We're making a mural that includes a retelling component, interactive writing, ordering objects from longest to shortest or shortest to longest, and of course just enjoying being artistic.

I have a feeling I'm going to be very, very sick of Goldilocks when this is all over.

looking beyond behaviors

When I was doing preschool transition IEPs last spring the preschool teachers warned me that one little girl I'd be getting had a bit of a stubborn streak in her behavior. They said that she seemed cute and sweet but that she would use that to not be independent, avoid adult requests, and just generally ignore adults. They warned us that her developmental difficulties were from this behavior, and once her behavior was in check her academics would follow.

The speech language pathologist and I thought this seemed odd after meeting the girl because what we saw in her behavior did not line up with what the preschool teachers told us. Still, we'd only met her a few times and they were with her everyday- so what did we know? We promised ourselves that we'd keep an open mind when the year started.

She didn't come to our summer program so I was not able to get to know her at all before I left on maternity leave. My co-workers have kept me informed of what's been happening in my classroom and it turns out that her developmental difficulties were not from behavior at all, but in fact from a medical reason. The amazing team that is working in my classroom right now quickly figured out that something was very wrong- this was not a stubborn little girl just refusing to do her work. They asked the right questions, got the right people involved, brought her parents in, and soon had it sorted out. This was a little girl who could not hear- it had nothing to do with her ignoring her teachers just to avoid work. She literally could not hear what they were saying- she wasn't pretending to try to get out of work.

Every time someone tells me another piece of this story to update me on what is happening with her case I am so thankful for the team at school.  This little one was so lucky to have a strong team who looked past what seemed to be non-compliant behavior and instead asked what was wrong. Without their questions and concern she could have had yet another year of teachers becoming frustrated because they misinterpreted her behaviors as intentional. 

How often do we see the behaviors in the classroom as though the child has a vendetta against us personally? How often do we as teachers get lost in the frustrating surface behavior and forget to look beyond to the true cause? 

measuring success

Over dinner one night this summer my husband, with his practical MBA thinking, asked me how I'd know whether or not my non-categorical class was successful. Perhaps if I had been sipping a glass of wine at the time I would have been able to laugh it off, but since I've been sans wine due to the upcoming baby, I was momentarily frustrated with his question. What is his MBA thinking doing questioning my class? 
 Not picking up on my frustration he went on to ask if I had clear ways to measure whether or not the class was successful. How would I be able to go to the administration and say "look how well this worked, we should do it again."  I knew he meant well by his question, but for a moment I was taken aback.

I immediately went on a spiel about how in special ed every child has their own set of goals written into their Individual Education Program (IEP) so that how I measure success is easily laid out for me. Did my students meet their goals?  I of course made this sound much longer and more drawn out than that to keep him from getting a word in edgewise and questioning me again. He nodded and sipped his wine (the nerve).

But I kept thinking about his question. How will I measure the success of my class?  Part of it will be in my students' progress in their IEP goals, but that is how I measure success every year. Are they able to meet the goals we set out for them? To be honest, in my head I always tend to aim higher than those goals. The goals I write are the realistic goals I want the child to accomplish. They are goals I have a clear plan of accomplishing. But in my head, no matter who the child is, I always overshoot them. My goals for my students always go above and beyond what is written on that paper. We don't always meet the goals in my head. Sometimes we don't meet the goals on the IEP. It's not for lack of trying. I feel that we get as far as we do because I am always working on my unspoken "shoot for the moon" goals.

The IEP goals themselves do not seem to be enough to measure whether or not my class structure was successful. How will we know whether or not they would have met those goals in the general education classroom? 

So how can I measure success?

After mulling over the question I realized that for most of the students my goal- my measurement of success, will be that the child will be able to transition into the general education classroom smoothly the following year.

For a few it will mean they will have a better handle on their language skills and will be able to communicate with peers and teachers in a way that does not require the support they currently require. They will be able to advocate for their own needs, no longer needing prompts to go to the bathroom, get a tissue, or to ask a friend to share a block.

For others that will mean they will be able to follow the routines in a general education classroom in a way that will allow them to access the material. Their general education teachers will not have to spend time agonizing over their behaviors, but instead will spend time working on their academics.


For a few others whose disabilities make it unlikely that they will transition to a general education classroom, my goal will be that they can stay at our school. We will give them the skills they need to be able to continue attending their neighborhood school, and will not need to be bused to a center that specializes in students with their disabilities.

For all of them success will be measured with their academic progress, of course. Whether or not it is that they learn their colors, their alphabet, or the word wall words, I will want to measure success by what they have learned from their baseline data, regardless if that academic goal is in their IEP or not.

So there is my overall goal for the year. To transition quite a few of them to general education classes. If the class is successful then maybe we wont need the class next year. I kind of feel like I'm setting myself up to put myself out of a job.