I'm totally in favor of accommodations that help students learn, but in my experience sometimes an accommodation is decided in a meeting without the classroom teacher present and while it sounds helpful in that meeting, the reality is different.
Makes sense.
I do think we need to be empirical with these accommodations. Some students with those diagnoses have said they prefer paper and are performing better on paper.
Tech introduces costs as well as benefits. An accommodation that sounds good in theory might be unhelpful in a classroom.
Emailed!
I teach math so those are a bit different in my classroom. I find the best accommodation for dysgraphia is lots of white space on handouts. For dyslexia we offer read-aloud for word problems, but I find many students are able to be successful with scaffolds and well-structured practice.
what are the specific accommodations that come to mind for you? I'm a general ed teacher, and my experience is the fast majority of my special education students benefit from work on paper. Easier to show your work, fewer distractions.
Something I'm trying right now is pairing multiplication practice and division practice for a specific fact family. A disadvantage of flash cards is that each skill is isolated. I'm trying to help students build a rich, connected schema of math fact families. Looks like you're doing this too!
Would you consider using this approach? Sincerely curious, I find some people want to try it right away and for others it's a solid no.
I don't know, that feels like saying NAEP scores are impossible to improve. Are you saying, "there's this middle grades intervention (knowledge-rich curricula) that helps kids read better, but the results will never show up on NAEP?
Just did a very quick search and found this, most of the fadeout from preschool happens in K but some gains persist. But I would want to find a bunch more. www.mdrc.org/news/announc...
Good question, would be fun to explore. I have a vague memory of preschool washout being on the order of 4 years but I could be wrong. I agree it's a bit weird to find no sign of the 4th grade gains. Freddie's take is worth reading. freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/there-are-...
this is a bit of a copout but the same reason all other education interventions (preschool, charter schools, etc) fade. There's some sort of very powerful regression to the mean in education. Except it's not regression to the mean, it's regression to demographics.
All fair points. I should listen to the podcast. Glad it made you think!
I also teach a lot of english language learners, so I see turn and talk as having intrinsic value of getting lots of kids talking, in addition to the learning value of rehearsal/retrieval/consolidation etc.
Key principles of getting turn and talk right: choose questions with a high success rate, keep it short, ask clear and specific questions, actively monitor. I think those are way easier than all the setup to get your class culture right for cold call.
I agree turn and talk is often used poorly. I'm skeptical it's harder to get right. First, there are fewer negative consequences for getting it wrong. Cold call done poorly can alienate students and turn class culture negative. Turn and talk can lead to off-task chatter but that's not as bad.
my take: skip-counting is the bridge from addition to multiplication. If students can't skip-count by 3s, when we try to teach 2x3=6, 3x3=9, 3x4=12 they are harder to remember. Skip-counting helps students connect those numbers to 3, connecting new multiplication facts to math they already know.
Neat! I will add it to my list.
thanks! Is the novel good? I've been reading too much nonfiction recently, I'm looking for a good novel.
Thanks! Glad it's helpful.
