From Struggle to Strength |
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Now that the screenings are complete we must analyze the results and not simply the scores. Then we have to use that information to design strategic interventions. The first step is to look at the class results as a whole. This allows the teacher to identify weaknesses in instruction or curriculum. This is simply good teaching and teachers should not feel threatened by the results. Usually the curriculum you are teaching has been chosen for you without much of your input. I don't think I have ever heard a teacher remark that a chosen curriculum perfectly covers all grade level skills to the level the child needs. Therefore it is up to the teacher to supplement with practice activities or enhances classroom instruction to offset deficiencies in the curriculum. The need for children to be educated never changes but unfortunately the tools we are give change often and sometimes drastically. This is why I use two levels of screening. One measures progress while the other is more of a stand-alone so I can see what the child is and ins not generalizing. So if an entire class is showing deficits in certain areas ask these questions... 1. Did these children get the foundation skills needed in the previous grade level? If no then it is the responsibility of the current teacher to provide the remedial instruction and then re-screen or progress monitor to determine if there is an improvement in performance. 2. Does the class demonstrate these skills during classroom instruction? If so then evaluate how these skills were measured on the screening. Sometimes we inadvertently provide clues to our students in the classroom that are not available in assessment situations. If a child is reliant upon these clues then the depth of their knowledge may not be adequate to not only demonstrate proficiency but also to sustain the demand of new information. 3. Are there enough materials available that allow the child opportunity to maintain mastery of certain skills? This is often overlooked when there is so much to do on a daily basis. This is also a strength in true Montessori instruction. Sometimes there is down time in a classroom and these are great moments to provide activities and materials where children can work together and actually practice skills and often they think it's so fun they don't realize it is educational! These are just a handful of questions to ask when analyzing screening and assessment information collectively. Literacy coaches and lead teachers can also gather this information and compare classrooms with in the same grade. Teachers often have strengths in a certain area of instruction. Maybe mentoring between teachers or restructuring collaborative instruction may enhance the performance across the grade level. Now that we have analyzed the whole we must look at the individual parts that make up that whole which are the students. Too often teachers some to me showing me the results of month after month of screenings where the child is performing below expectation but when I ask what they have done to promote success and development of deficit skills I am given one or more of the following:
-- small group instruction -- extra time -- peer helper -- extra practice -- leveled reading material -- Guided reading This list is minimal but hopefully you get the idea. These are components of good instruction but not INTERVENTION. An intervention identifies 1-2 specific skills and activities are designed to systematically and incrementally address the deficits. If we are still talking only about the classroom teachers responsibility at the beginning level of identifying and remediation of areas of weakness in a student there are often short activities that can be implemented with the child or a small group while independent reading or other independent activities are utilized. Here are a few examples. -- Identifying letters: This is not necessarily my favorite skill to address in an intervention but it is required especially of kindergarten teachers. I prefer to focus more on sound-symbol relationship than simply naming the letters of the alphabet. No matter the expectation I do believe there comes a time when we let this skill go temporarily and focus our energy on other skills but again this is my opinion. When teaching letter names there is often times a sequence is already laid out for you in the curriculum. If that is not the case one way of breaking it down is to divide the alphabet into 3 sections. This can begin to help teach alphabetizing. Then I would set up matching and Go Fish games between the child needing extra help and a child who is more proficient with the letter names because they can correct the child when they don't know a name or say the wrong name. I would also provide multi sensory opportunities on tracing the letter while saying the letter name. I would create a carrier phrase like "This is the letter A" the child would say each time writing the letter. Chunking the letters in to smaller groups and focusing extra help in one section at a time is more efficient. Children often have trouble with this seemingly simple skill because of deficits in rapid naming and retrieval. This is why measuring rapid naming skills for colors and pictures. If the child struggles with these activities then he or she will likely struggle with rapid recall of letters and numbers as well. There are few things to look for when assessing rapid naming skills. First make sure the child is very familiar with the stimuli meaning if he is struggling with identifying letters don't measure rapid naming of letters because you won't be able to determine if there is a deficit in this area or if it is because the child doesn't know the stimuli. (Lots of teachers ask why on dart they measure rapid naming of colors and how is that supposed to help with reading. I'll save a more detailed explanation for another blog.) There are two types of "problems" in rapid naming. One problem is in accuracy. Some children are fast but have multiple errors or stumble frequently. This indicates that the system of retrieving information from long-term memory is not efficient which will interfere with reading fluency resulting in a lot of word substitutions. I would focus on the child slowing down to increase accuracy. Keep the stimuli the same and then increase the rate over time. This type of deficit needs to be monitored because if the child often retrieves the wrong word when speaking or uses a lot of nonspecific words like stuff, that thing, etc. there may be a larger deficit in language skills specifically in processing language and word finding which would require an evaluation by a speech language pathologist. The second problem is in speed not accuracy. This is the problem I prefer because it makes the child slow but since they are accurate they are less likely to make errors in substitution. I know that over time as the child becomes more and more familiar with the stimuli the rate will gradually increase. There is a tremendous focus on reading fluency, which is one of the reasons I do not like the DIBELS and DRA as the main or only screening measure for older students. Students can be very fluent but inaccurate but because they do not stumble over words and often make semantic substitutions their weaknesses are overlooked. However, these types of errors will accumulate over time. Children who do not pay close attention to the text or often make substitution in words based on the supped meaning cannot struggle in content related reading which inadvertently affects their overall comprehension of the material. These are often students who don't quite fit the criteria for needing help but fall apart in middle and high school and get dubbed as lazy. In addition, these kids will study hard and know the information for a test backward and forwards but when it comes time to actually test the level of knowledge is not reflected in the grade on the test. Anxiety increases when anyone takes a test and that decreases the efficiency of our retrieval of information from long term memory. Have you ever taken a test and you knew the answer but couldn't quite grasp it. You might know where it is in your notes or the book. You might be able to picture the example on the board but the actual information remains elusive. Those are retrieval issues. There are may note taking techniques and strategies that can aid in retrieval deficits especially for content related material like science and social studies. I think sometimes educators forget that fluency is speed and ACCURACY and we cannot sacrifice one for the other. If the child is accurate their fluency will develop naturally as their decoding skills develop. Too many times teachers describe a fluency intervention as giving a leveled passage to a student and measuring their fluency over and over. That is NOT and intervention. The skills that are interfering with the fluency are what need to be addressed. The fluency passages should be a tool and opportunity to measure progress not the intervention itself. In my opinion the more important area to be screened, monitored, and addressed during intervention is phonological awareness skills. This is often missing from general instruction after the 1st grade. So, some children who perform fairly well in kindergarten and 1st grade begin to fall apart because their phonological awareness skills will deteriorate over time without the continued support. I'll save that for the next part.
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On line I have participated in a variety of conversations regarding screening children and how to recognize signs of Dyslexia and related learning disabilities early so children can get the help they need. This may end up being a multi part post but here we go. In my area teachers are using the DIBELS, DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment) and DSA (Developmental Spelling Assessment all of which are reputable tools and recognized nation wide. Here are a few things you must know before we dig in too deep. The true purpose of universal screenings (or whatever they are called at your school) is to measure the effectiveness of day-to-day classroom instruction and identify those children who are not making the progress or meeting expectations as one would expect. In regards to the effectiveness of instruction it is similar to the chapter test a teacher might give in science. If the entire class fails the teacher can't assume that every child did not study but rather they have to look at how well they covered the material and was there something they could have missed that would have made a difference. The teacher would use that information or data and reteach concepts missed by the most students or spend a few more days on those chapters before giving another test because the ultimate goal is for the child to learn the information. Weekly tests and chapter/unit tests are basically universal screenings so if we view our universal screenings in literacy like that maybe people will understand their purpose and not feel like it is something else added tot he already full plate of the teacher. In regards to identifying children who are not making adequate progress we must understand this is a multi step process built into the simple act of administering a screening. Using the same analogy from oboe if the class takes a chapter test and only a few children do poorly the teacher must figure out why those children did poorly in comparison to the other students. Maybe one of the children had excessive absences during the days and weeks the majority of instruction was provided. Maybe the child simply didn't study or give the material the attention it deserved for a variety of other reasons. Maybe the child is not a strong reader and writer and the test format required the child to read and write a lot. If that is the case the teacher could simply ask the child the information orally and see if performance improved. If that is the case then steps should be taken to put in place the tools necessary to promote success in the students. So many of the disabilities that interfere with a child's success cannot be seen so I challenge you to think of what adaptations to the test would you make for a child who was blind? Wouldn't that be the same case for a child who is Dyslexic or has another type of learning disability? Providing the right tools and support is not enabling the child or giving them a handout, instead it is teaching them to adapt and succeed in the face of a challenge. Unfortunately for those children who are identified through universal screenings there isn't a print out or manual that states explicitly... if the child does this you do that...So as educators we must become adept at analyzing the information not simply monitoring the scores. If we analyze the performance then the interventions needed reveal themselves. If we monitor the overall score our interventions are too general and therefore not as successful. So what information do you gather from the DRA, DSA, and DIBELS. Well, first we must look at the grade level because the assessment and expectations change with the grade. For instance if a child in the 3rd grade does not do well on the DIBELS and DRA there must be additional screening and assessment done because at that point the foundation skills in reading and comprehension are no longer measured on those tests. So we must have a deeper understanding of the foundation skills required for reading and writing and then systematically measure those skills as well. In the younger grades these skills are more consistently built into screening and assessment tools and yet often times I see teachers providing too broad of an intervention instead of systematically addressing the deficits. One of the most under assessed skill especially after children are out of 2nd grade is phonological and phonemic awareness skills because there is an assumption that skill have been adequately addressed and developed in the earlier grades. For all children regardless of their age, grade, and skill level I will measure spelling skills with the following instructions "Write the sounds you hear." I would use the DSA or a related instrument as well as a measure of nonsense words because the child has to rely on his or her foundation skills without the aid of their vocabulary. I would also do a measure of their phonemes or sounds for both written recall and oral recall. I want to know if the child hears and represents all sounds in a word and if the sound is represented but with the wrong symbol I need to know if they can identify and recall the symbols that could represent that sound. Depending on their performance this is also where I would start with an intervention because if you cannot hear the individual sounds of our language and you cannot accurately represent them then you are going to struggle in reading and writing. In my experience these are not typically and consistently measured in school. The closest is in kindergarten and 1st grade when learning the alphabet and sounds but I challenge you to think about how confusing it is for some children to understand that connection because it is far from explicit. For example we often teach that the alphabet letter A says '_a_' (short vowel sound) and 'a_e' (long vowel sound). Sometimes this is referred to as the letter saying it's sound or saying it's name. Children often remember those sayings but struggle to make the connection when expected to read and write these in words especially since the 'a' alone is a word and we read it as "uh". (Wait isn't there a different letter that has that sound?) Also the long vowel A sound can be spelled ai or ay...(wait I thought i & y had it's own sound and name?) or it is spelled 'eight' as in eight.. (wait how can that make the long vowel sound the alphabet letter isn't even in there?). Another example...the alphabet letter E it also has a sound and can say it's name. The short vowel E can be spelled the following ways in the following words: bet, bread and wait that sound is in the word said and there is no letter E. The long vowel sound can be spelled in the following ways in the following words: be, bee, team, and baby. And then let's throw in how to tell which vowel sound to use when this word comes up...READ? For those who learned to read easily they often struggle to understand how difficult this process is for some. As human beings we have many more years with the development of oral language but the idea and presence of written language is very young so there is still a lot to learn about how to effectively teach these skills especially to those children who don't fit in the instruction provided. The first step is to identify where the break down is and begin building those skills. There will definitely have to be a follow up post to go into this in more depth. Please post specific questions and I'll make sure to address them. I have added the phonemes I typical assess for EVERY student. I call them out and have them write them and then I have them read them from cards. I DO NOT give them examples of words those sounds are in. I want to know can they recall theme without the aide of their vocabulary. This also helps to measure their rapid recall skills.   |
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