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Article: Rescuing Students from the Slow Learner Trap


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I am curious about hearing from a BTDT parent if this article is a good one. I read about it on a disabilities-focused blog. I have several friends whose kids' capabilities fall in this IQ range (lower end of it, some just below it), and I wanted an up or down vote on passing it along to my friends (via a support group Facebook page, "hey, this looked like a possible resource," not a "here, you need this"). My kids have exceptionalities and diagnoses, but high IQs, so I have to be careful about how I phrase things. We can support each other in a lot of ways (therapy, behaviors, etc.), but this is just not something I'm dealing with.

 

The article context is about not qualifying for special ed (or not qualifying for enough help) and yet not succeeding in a regular classroom, but it gives strategies for helping these students learn. My friends' kids mostly all qualify for an IEP, but I guess some of them function well enough that they are always one ETR meeting away from being put back in a regular classroom, losing scholarship money, etc. (I hear them worry about this out loud). 

 

http://www.nasponline.org/resources/principals/Slow_Learners_Feb10_NASSP.pdf

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The strategies recommended are quite good.

 

I've chatted with parents whose kids fall into the category described--low cognitive ability but with IQs above 70 and consistent academic performance with IQ so they don't qualify as learning disabled. It is a huge grey area and a real problem. The kids obviously need help, but they qualify for nothing.

 

I think it's a great article! Thanks for sharing!

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I have no personal experiences with kids like this, but it sounds like the schools that use "discovery learning" rather than direct instruction will do a terrible job educating these students. 

 

You said it. Discovery-style learning is baaaaaaad news for the majority of kids with learning/developmental issues.

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I get the impression that discovery learning isn't very good for average learners either. It sounds very inefficient to me. Think of how many kids need direct instruction to learn manners and social skills. Some pick them up mostly on their own, but most have to be taught. Why would math or reading be any different?

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I get the impression that discovery learning isn't very good for average learners either. It sounds very inefficient to me. Think of how many kids need direct instruction to learn manners and social skills. Some pick them up mostly on their own, but most have to be taught. Why would math or reading be any different?

:iagree: 

 

I never did learn terribly well through discovery learning situations.  I did much better if I had explicit instruction first, then was allowed to explore further on my own, but with scaffolding.

 

And certainly my non-NT kids learn some things on their own quite well (like DD figured out how to repair our blinds without any outside help or instruction) but most things they can't.  

 

I remember DS getting so hurt and bursting into tears because DD had been picking on him off and on all day (they were maybe 8 and 11 at the time).  I had been asking DD to stop picking on her younger brother all day, too.  Finally I snapped and yelled at her.  She burst into tears and exclaimed that she didn't know what she was doing wrong.  At first I doubted what she was saying, then I stepped back a bit, and realized that I hadn't given her a lot of direct instruction in this.  I started talking to her about vocal tone, body language, word choice, etc.  When you say something to someone, ALL of these things are usually taken into account in some way and may be sending someone signals that make them feel bad.  She had no clue.  I realized that DD is a lot like DH.  Social cues can go over their heads.  They need someone to explicitly state when something is bothering them and WHY it is bothering them or they frequently don't have any idea.  Discovering learning for social cues is useless for them.

 

Just like discovery learning for math and reading was useless for both of my kids.  Explicit, systematic instruction in small increments, with practical application and constant review is the only thing that seems to work here.

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I feel like under certain circumstances, discovery based learning can be an excuse to not teach in the classroom.  

 

MIL is a retired 2nd grade teacher and reading specialist.  I don't know what that means precisely in the ps setting as she received no specific O-G training and had never heard of Wilson or Barton until I mentioned them.  She understood the need for direct and explicit phonics instruction though and trained other teachers to teach before retiring.  Anyhoo..

 

I asked her why she never used c-rods in the classroom, and she stated that it was extremely difficult to manage 25 second graders using manipulatives.  The majority of her students came to school hungry, were ESL, or came from a broken home.  Either there was no dad present or mom was drug addled, and the student was living with a grandmother or other relation.  Given the poor social plight of the vast majority of children, the classroom is simply not a conducive environment for teaching the extreme ends of the learning curve.  DH is constantly reminding me how the public system aims to teach the middle.  The ps fails at teaching the middle, so I don't really see why we expect improvement for the gifteds or learning difference kids.  I am bothered by the fact that so many people have to lawyer up just to hold the ps accountable to DO.THEIR.JOB.

 

The article is great and touches on a serious need.  It also reminds me of why I homeschool in the first place.  

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MIL is a retired 2nd grade teacher and reading specialist.  I don't know what that means precisely in the ps setting as she received no specific O-G training and had never heard of Wilson or Barton until I mentioned them.  She understood the need for direct and explicit phonics instruction though and trained other teachers to teach before retiring.  Anyhoo..

 

A little OT, but my FIL is a retired reading specialist as well. I am not sure how he got into it, but I think he intuitively was good at figuring out what a child needed in order to learn to read and helping them with it, which led to going to conferences, a lot of reading (which he already did), etc. I don't know that he had OG training either, but he dipped his toe into a lot of interests that helped him do this job. I don't know if he'd ever heard of VT while he was still teaching, but he used to regularly screen his students informally for convergence issues and tracking issues to see if that was part of the problem. I have no idea where he picked that up--probably by reading or observing something. I do know that my SIL is dyslexic (undiagnosed as a child), and my FIL devoted a good deal of time to helping her read well (she is still an avid fiction reader by most any standard). I thought maybe she was a stealth dyslexic because she reads so well and became a voracious reader in elementary school, but she told me more recently that it took a long time and a lot of explicit work to gain those reading skills. 

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A little OT, but my FIL is a retired reading specialist as well. I am not sure how he got into it, but I think he intuitively was good at figuring out what a child needed in order to learn to read and helping them with it, which led to going to conferences, a lot of reading (which he already did), etc. I don't know that he had OG training either, but he dipped his toe into a lot of interests that helped him do this job. I don't know if he'd ever heard of VT while he was still teaching, but he used to regularly screen his students informally for convergence issues and tracking issues to see if that was part of the problem. I have no idea where he picked that up--probably by reading or observing something. I do know that my SIL is dyslexic (undiagnosed as a child), and my FIL devoted a good deal of time to helping her read well (she is still an avid fiction reader by most any standard). I thought maybe she was a stealth dyslexic because she reads so well and became a voracious reader in elementary school, but she told me more recently that it took a long time and a lot of explicit work to gain those reading skills. 

How about some more OT?

 

MIL always calls the 1990s the "decade of the brain".  I know she attended reading workshops.  She visited us when DS first started Wilson, sat through one of his tutoring sessions, and gave her approval.  Having not heard of Wilson, she was suspicious.  It is difficult to get much homeschool help out of her because she is so highly classroom focused. 

 

My FIL is a retired logic stage teacher and taught science, PE, and math.  He did not work with many other men, and the female staff members were terrified of some of the students who were older.  Students were older  because they had been retained one and two grades.  FIL taught remedial math to a predominately male population that had fallen through the cracks.  He was ready to retire.

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Interesting.

 

I'm always ambivalent about the whole labeling issue in general. On the one hand, it must surely be a good thing if more children receive individualized supports for their learning. In an ideal world, every child would receive such support (perhaps by 80-90% of children being home educated, thus freeing up the system to provide excellent learning opportunities for those whose parents are genuinely unable to home educate, but that's a whole other thread!). But on the other hand, we seem to be rapidly moving toward a system in which almost all children are either gifted and talented or have learning disabilities, and it's no longer accepted for kids to be normal, but not brilliant. (It's not Lake Woebegone: there have to be some kids who are lower than average!)

 

Are kids really 'falling through the cracks' because of their particular position in the IQ league table? Or is it happening because school cannot work for every kid, and/or schools don't have the resources to cater for every kid optimally.

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I teach some kids like this and it's very rewarding yet very emotionally draining. I worry about what their lives will be like in the future. I also agree about the explicit teaching - and it's been eye opening to realize just how explicit I need to be! The other day my kid was completely failing at adding and subtracting with 5 unifix cubes yet he's totally fine when he visualizes dots. I put the 5 dot card next to him and he looked at it for a while. "Ohh! Five dots, five cubes!" he exclaimed, and then added and subtracted like a pro. But he didn't make the connection until it was completely explicit. 

 

Re: discovery learning, so true about managing kids while they use manipulatives. A lot of the time they just flail around or play with the mantipulatives if left to themselves, and it's super difficult to make sure everyone's staying on task.

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I think discovery learning can take a number of forms, and it's essential to know what someone means when you are talking about it. I think of Montessori as being discovery-based, but it's also explicit, and it was developed for students that were in the struggling learner category. 

 

As for appropriate education, I think schools have changed a lot as jobs are being polarized more and more between jobs that require higher degrees and low wage, unskilled jobs. We used to have a lot more jobs in the middle that required skilled labor, but weren't necessarily accessible only to the highest performing students or people with degrees. And it's not just in industrial jobs, it was in other fields as well, like office work and such.

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