Parachute Teachers

Every student has had the experience of coming to class to find a substitute teacher who struggles to present the lessons the regular teacher has left behind and who may have difficulty keeping the class engaged -- or even under control. Let's stop right here and acknowledge that there are many, many excellent substitute teachers. They have the difficult task of walking into someone else's classroom, with a lesson plan that may not be sufficiently detailed, and for which they have had no time to prepare. They are often underpaid - the national daily rate is about $105, although in New York City, substitute teachers receive $168.54 per day.

The Winter 2017 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, looks at a program designed to improve the lot of both substitute teachers and the students in their care. It notes that as of May 2015, some 625,750 substitute teachers were hired annually to fill in when regular teachers were out and that during a school year of 180 days, on average, teachers are absent between 9-10 days. Districts differ in how they match substitutes with open classroom slots, but no matter what the system, it doesn't always work, which can leave classes uncovered and result in disbursing students to other classrooms or having administrators needing to fill in to cover classes.

Enter Parachute Teachers, a Boston based initiative described as Uber for substitute teachers. As founder Sarah Cherry Rice noted, "Boston has an incredible ecosystem of people who have expertise and who want to be in schools, but there hasn't been a clear pathway to come into schools." What Parachute Teachers does is match individuals who have their own expertise and interests with open classroom spots. The substitutes present their own material -- music, computer coding, food and nutrition, just to name some examples -- often using experiments and practical lessons. Parachute Teachers does background checks, offers training, and does the scheduling for participating schools, with the added flexibility for regular teachers of having someone available to cover for just part of a day, if needed, something that is not generally available in the traditional substitute teacher model.

Presently, Parachute Teachers is in its second year of operation in Boston with about 150 participating substitutes. It will be interesting to see if and how this program expands.

Digital Assessment Tools

Assessment is a large, important, and oft-debated necessity in education. The traditional view of assessment hinged strongly on summative evaluations -  assessments after the fact, such as a comprehensive exam or final paper. However, the current best practice in evaluating learning is to deploy frequent and thoughtful formative assessments, where teachers build in "check-in points" during the learning process that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. The goal of this evaluation framework is to inform the educator of what specific needs are present in their students and whether they need to augment their future lessons in response to those needs. It is important to note that the post-evaluation reflection and intervention is the defining feature of a formative assessment. Measuring student performance or collecting data is not formative unless you use the information to help your students.

In today’s classrooms there are a variety of tools to help teachers integrate formative assessments into their curriculum, as well as to gather and organize the data these assessments generate. Some of my favorite tools are discussed below:

Socrative

Socrative describes itself as a digital assessment tool that uses "real time questioning, instant result aggregation and visualization, [so that] teachers can gauge the whole class’ current level of understanding." One strong merit of this application is its flexibility, in that it can be used on multiple platforms, including smartphones, tablets and computers. Furthermore, it allows for personalization and differentiation of the learning process by allowing teachers to create their own assessments based on the specific needs of their students.

Formative

Formative is an exceptional tool to help teachers devise and distribute engaging assessments. The evaluation process is simple with Formative. Within the app a teacher is able to create an assessment, distribute it to students and respond with real time feedback. Formative is also aligned with the principle of Universal Design for Learning that calls for students to be allowed to display their knowledge in multiple ways. Thus, formative allows students to respond to assessment prompts by writing, drawing, or by submitting pictures. Furthermore, Formative is aligned with Common Core and NGSS, and also helps teachers in their pursuit of a paperless classroom.


Exit Ticket

Exit Ticket is a tool that allows teachers to create formative assessment measures, administer them during class periods, and glean real time data about student performance. The types of evaluation tasks a teacher can create are organized into pre-assessments, checks for understanding, tasks to promote discussion, and mid-way checkpoints. Once a student completes an assessment, both the student and the teacher will receive real time data on the student’s understanding of the concepts being taught. Furthermore, Exit Ticket also allows teachers to differentiate their assessments to meet the diverse needs of their student population. For example, using the Groups add-on, teachers can provide special accommodations to sections of their class. When authoring a list of questions, the teacher is able to then customize what questions each group will see.

Top Five Resources for Special Education Teachers

There is an abundance of exceptional, well researched literature out there for teachers who work with diverse students to draw from. However, I find that there are a select few texts that I refer back to regularly for clarification, insight or strategies. I have culled and whittled down my bookshelf to my top five picks, and described the merits of each text:

1. Exceptional Lives: Special Education in Today's Schools (7th Edition) by Ann Turnbull, Rud Turnbull, Michael L. Wehmeyer and Karrie A. Shogren

Exceptional Lives provides a detailed, robust description of the different disability categories and federal special education laws. This excellent text is a foundational "read and return to" resource for any teacher working with diverse learners. Throughout the text, the authors use the framework of three guiding themes: Inclusion, Partnerships, and Universal Design for Progress.

2. Assistive Technology in the Classroom: Enhancing the School Experiences of Students with Disabilities by Amy G. Dell, Deborah Newton and Jerry G. Petroff

This text discusses how assistive technology can be used to achieve the ideals of universal design for learning and differentiated instruction. The authors do not focus on disability categories; they reject one-sized fits all approaches by focusing on providing strategies and tools for specific needs. However, technology is changing rapidly and any book written about technology can become obsolete quickly. Thus, one of the merits of this resource is that the text comes with an accompanying website that the authors update with new tools and advancements in the latest research. 

3. Universal Design for Learning in the Classroom: Practical Applications (What Works for Special-Needs Learners) by Tracey E. Hall, PhD, Anne Meyer, EdD, and David H. Rose, EdD

This practical text describes the underlying principles of universal design for learning (UDL), and details tangible ways to use UDL to meet the needs of diverse students across age levels. This book has the power to equip teachers with the skills required to develop classroom goals, assessments and learning materials that use UDL. The book is cross curricular and provides examples and strategies for reading, writing, science, mathematics, history, and the arts. 

4. The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind by Daniel J. Siegel, MD and Tina Payne Bryson, PhD

Although traditionally a parenting book, the principles of The Whole Brain Child are equally as valuable for teachers working with diverse learners. The book is a simple, practical resource that features twelve strategies for helping kids thrive in the face of common childhood challenges. The text hinges on the current medical and psychological understanding of child cognitive development and describes how a child’s brain is wired. The book explains how to use the understanding of a child’s brain to promote pro-social behavior in children. Drs. Siegel and Bryson also publish the The Whole-Brain Child Workbook: Practical Exercises, Worksheets and Activities to Nurture Developing Minds to help educators and parents deploy the twelve strategies.

5. Smart but Scattered: The Revolutionary "Executive Skills" Approach to Helping Kids Reach Their Potential by Peg Dawson, EdD and Richard Guare, PhD

Often learners with special needs struggle with the important executive functioning skills required to sustain focus, follow directions, complete tasks and regulate their impulses. Smart but Scattered is a great resource for both parents and teachers to help children learn the important skills of organization, time management, problem solving and coping with their emotions. The book provides simple assessment tools to help evaluate your students' strengths and challenges accompanied by activities and strategies to help build their deficient skills.

The Importance of Being There

When most parents think about student absences from school, they think of high school students who skip school or cut classes -- something we generally think of as truancy. But absence from school is also an issue for students as young as kindergarten and first grade and the organization Attendance Works notes that, "one in 10 kindergarten and 1st grade students misses a month of school every year. In some districts, as many as one in four students in the primary grades are missing too much school time."

Students in primary grades are rarely absent without parental knowledge. Many parents don't really think too much of having a young student miss school for a family event, or even just parental convenience. For many families the impact of occasional absences may not be significant, but for students who are at risk of failure -- whether because of poverty, English language barriers, or unstable family situations -- absences even in early grades can have a cumulative impact upon academic performance. A seminal paper on this topic, Present, Engaged, and Accounted For: The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades, from the National Center for Children in Poverty, found that for students in ninth grade, missing 20 percent of the school year is a better predictor of dropping out than test scores.

Furthermore, students with chronic or frequent illness may have excused absences, but unless efforts are made to continue their schoolwork or to make up missed work, something that is often difficult or impossible in less affluent school districts, the fact that these absences may be unavoidable does not diminish their impact upon future performance and graduation. 

via boostattendance.org

In an effort to raise awareness of the impact of absences, The Advertising Council and the U.S. Army created a website, boostattendance.org which includes tools to help parents understand the impact that absences can have on student achievement. There is also a link to a student-focused tool which enables students to sign up for celebrity wake-up calls. As Woody Allen is credited with saying: "80 percent of life is just showing up." Showing up for school, even in early years, can have an important and positive impact on a student's educational success.

Art to Support Learning

Students generally relish the chance to create art. They love the opportunity to express themselves and enjoy experimenting with different media. Fitting art into an already full school day, alas, can be a challenge. But according to Mariale Hardiman, co-founder and director of the Neuro-Education Initiative at Johns Hopkins’ School of Education, choosing between art and core instruction may not be necessary; it seems the two can support each other quite well. Her research has found that the use of arts in the classroom does more than make students happy: it can improve their retention of information.

LWT Gunnersbury Triangle

In a simple, elegant experiment, Hardiman compared groups of students who simply learned facts about history with groups who learned history with an art component. For example, students might draw a picture to illustrate historical events, put historical facts into songs, or write creatively about historical information. After learning, both groups of students were tested, and initially there weren't any differences between their scores. But when the students were tested again three months later, the arts group demonstrated much better retention than the control group.

We think incorporating the arts into learning wherever possible is a great idea, and not just because it seems to promote better memory for facts. Adding an art component to classroom work allows artistic kids to shine in a way that they sometimes can’t in a purely academic setting, building self-esteem. And, of course, art encourages children to be creative, flexible thinkers and to experiment with symbolism and abstract concepts.

Want to provide opportunities for your students to pair art with curriculum? Here are some ideas:


Creative Writing








Poetry

Ask students to write a poem about what they’re learning. Use models and get creative. Show kids some limericks and ask them to write their own about a character in a novel. Rewrite one of Shakespeare’s sonnets to become an ode to a plant cell, a planet, or the Constitution.

Letters

Challenge students to take on the role of a historical figure or a fictional character and ask them to write a letter (or an email) to another figure or character. This isn't a new idea, but it can become really fun when kids are given unexpected roles. A student could write a letter to a cloud from the perspective of a plant who is hungry and needs exposure to sunlight so it can use photosynthesis, for example. Students struggling with algebra? Have fun with tricky concepts such as like terms by asking students to write a love letter from the perspective of 2x explaining why s/he adores 5x but has no interest in mixing with 6y.

Short Stories

Creating fictionalized accounts can make academics come alive. Challenge kids to write a story about the experiences of an oxygen molecule who is breathed in, circulated through a body, then breathed out. Ask kids to imagine that they are Louis XIV’s footman or Genghis Khan’s horse. What would they hear and see in these roles?


Visual Art








Comic Strip

Ask students to tell a story (the plot of a novel, the series of events during an important time in history, the transition of water from a solid to a liquid to a gas) frame by frame.

Cause-Effect Panels

For students struggling with causes and effects, illustrating the relationship can be very helpful. Set the stage for cause-effect panels by asking students to fold a sheet of paper in half. On the left side, they can illustrate the cause, and on the right, they can draw the effect or effects. If a student is studying the effect of temperature changes on matter, for example, he can draw a picture of a thermometer with rising mercury on the left, and molecules bouncing into each other with frantic arrows between on the right. Sometimes, students may need to divide the right side of the paper to show several effects. For example, The Stamp Act caused the colonists to both boycott British goods and to form the Sons of Liberty, so a cause-effect panel illustrating that relationship would have two parts to its effect side. This activity can be enriched by assigning a short piece of writing to describe the cause-effect relationship shown, or by asking a student to explain their work orally.

Diagrams

Need to learn about the anatomy of the heart or the difference between Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns? Sometimes the best way to commit lots of small details to memory is to draw them. Ask students to draw and label their own diagrams showing the details of these complicated concepts. Color-coding can make diagrams even more valuable; perhaps students could color the pathways of blood into the heart in blue and the pathways out of the heart in red, or shade the columns’ similarities in yellow and their differences in green.


Performance Art








Music

Really talented musicians will love the opportunity to come up with their own songs about academic topics. For students who don’t play music or write songs, challenge them to rewrite songs they know so that they lyrics are about an academic topic they are studying, like the events in a novel, the Bill of Rights, or the order of operations.

Skits

Challenge kids to write and perform short skits that illustrate important events and concepts. Perhaps they could perform a short dialogue between nobles as they discuss the merits and potential risks of presenting King John with the Magna Carta. Have students act out word problems to help them visualize the situations being described. Assign students the roles of different elements and ask them to come up with a skit about what would happen if some of them ran into others at an element party or on a bus; what reactions would occur? What would passers-by notice?

Staged Debates

Comparing and contrasting the ideologies of historical figures, the concepts of different geometric shapes, or the arrangement of plant and animal cells? Give pairs of students opposing roles and ask them to generate some arguments about why their perspective is superior to that of their opponent. Costumes can bring this idea to life!

Icon credits: Itzik Gur (paint, music); Design Contest (pencil).

Free Professional Development Event for Educators March 6 in NYC

The Yellin Center's acclaimed (and complimentary) Professional Development Series for Educators continues Wednesday, March 6 at 4:30 p.m. at our offices in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. Dr. Yellin will discuss Struggling Readers. Some seats remain available as of press time!

Who should attend?

• Teachers
• School Administrators
• School Learning Specialists
• School Psychologists
• Other Related Professionals

The event is free - however, advance registration is required and restricted to professional educators and related professionals only (Parents, fret not! New parent-focused presentations will be announced in the coming days!).

You may register for the presentation online here, or by calling The Yellin Center at (646) 775-6646. Don't miss out!

Visit our Events Calendar for more information on upcoming events at The Yellin Center and beyond.

Interested in having Dr. Yellin speak at your school or organization? Contact us to learn more.

Photo: CC by Karin Dalziel

Study Shows Online Education Has Promise

Online education, particularly when it’s free, is exploding in popularity around the planet. A recent article in the New York Times explores the success of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Traditionalists may be surprised that one of the primary findings reported in the article is that MOOCs can be more efficient and effective than traditional classes led by a teacher. Surprised? Duolingo, a popular Web-based language instruction site, commissioned a study to determine how effectively their product teaches languages such as Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, and English to non-native speakers. The results showed that the average learner with no knowledge of Spanish would need to devote 135 hours to cover a semester’s worth of entry-level Spanish curriculum, whereas the same content could be learned on Duolingo in only 34 hours! The study was small and its results can’t realistically be generalized beyond its preliminary findings. Still, the indication seems to be that, done right, MOOCs can be effective indeed. And the best part? MOOCs are free.

One problem with MOOCs, however, is that students are unlikely to finish courses in which they enroll. Perhaps it’s easier to drop a free service than one that charges tuition, or maybe students are less motivated by a computerized instructor than they would be by face-to-face interactions with classmates and a professor. Whatever the reason, the New York Times piece reports that fewer than ten percent of MOOC students complete their coursework. Still, the article reasons, if 5,000 people out of the 100,000 who initially signed up walk away with a new knowledge base, it’s hard to say that the MOOC was unsuccessful. We agree.

Photo: CC by Daniel Feldt

Friday Favorites

SchoolBook
The School Book pages of the New York Times are an excellent "go to" resource for what is going on in the world of New York City education. They include links to helpful guides and websites, a school search feature, and articles, blogs, and conversation threads about current issues.


Education Week
We liked the article in the May 23rd issue of Education Week about how introverted children may be overlooked by their teachers -- and how their more thoughtful nature can be an asset in other situations, such as taking standardized tests.


Inside Schools
We have recommended the InsideSchools website before (a project of the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School), but haven't mentioned their presence on YouTube, where they have posted excellent instructional videos on how to choose a school and special education services. In the complex New York City public school maze, these video guides help provide clarity. For a sampling, check out the video below about specialized high schools in New York City.

Photo: Josh Pesavento/Flickr Creative Commons

Neuroscience & The Classroom

Dr. Yellin is a featured faculty member in an exciting new initiative from Annenberg Learner, a program "to advance excellent teaching in American schools through the development and distribution of multimedia resources for teaching and learning." Annenberg Learner is one of many projects of the Annenberg Foundation, whose mission is to assist nonprofit organizations throughout the U.S. and the world, with a focus on improved communication and education.

The course in which Dr. Yellin is featured is Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections, designed to help K-12 teachers learn more about the field of Mind, Brain, and Education, and to thereby become better able to understand the continually growing body of scientific information about how brains work and how students learn.

Among the other speakers featured in this series are Kurt Fischer, Director for the Mind, Brain, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Matthew H. Schneps,  director of the Laboratory for Visual Learning at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), who has been previously featured in this blog; Dr. Todd Rose, a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he teaches a course on educational neuroscience, as well as a research scientist at CAST (the Center for Applied Special Technology), Dr. Antonio Damasio, who directs the University of Southern California Brain and Creativity Institute, and numerous others.

The course materials are available for free as streaming video, with downloadable written materials. The materials can also be purchased from Annenberg Learner in other formats, along with printed course material.

Watch an interview with Dr. Yellin from the series about creating a common language shared by neuroscientists and educators (depending on your browser, you may need to page down on the linked page to the appropriate link).

It's Friday - Let's Look at Spelling Tests

Perhaps no memory of elementary school is as universal as the Friday spelling test. We all went through it -- the list of words in the beginning of the week, using the words in sentences as part of our homework and, on Friday, the weekly spelling test.

The traditional Friday spelling test may result in students learning the spellings of the words on their lists for a while, but as far as long-term learning, its effects are pretty dismal. As with any experience when students cram before a test, most information learned is quickly forgotten again. This makes sense, since student engagement with tasks like practicing lists of words over and over again is bound to be low.

Gary Alderman and Susan Green, professors of education at Winthrop University, believe that spelling tasks must be both challenging and sufficiently meaningful to cause students to remember the words. Their article “Fostering Lifelong Spellers Through Meaningful Experiences” offers the following suggestions for teachers to use for spelling instruction that works:

• Encourage students to use spelling words in real-world writing. Have them write notes to each other, make lists or signs, or write poems or songs that include spelling words. Not only does this provide practice, it reinforces the notion that the words on the list are relevant in real communication. Competitions that reward creativity, such as who can use the most spelling words in a single sentence, can make these activities particularly motivating and enjoyable for students.
• Use multisensory techniques that involve children with words in auditory, visual, and kinesthetic ways. Have children draw pictures to illustrate words and write them in logical format using different colors (e.g. using one color for prefixes or for blends like st and cr). Have students spell words aloud, clapping out each vowel that represents a short sound and stomping when they say the names of vowels that represent long sounds.
• Teach spelling rules explicitly so that children understand the logic behind spelling. Do not ignore the exceptions to the rules, but teach students that most words can be correctly spelled by following reliable guidelines. This will cause spelling to seem less mysterious and intimidating to students.

Here at The Yellin Center, we sometimes recommend Ginger Software which goes beyond standard spell check functions in word processing programs and helps students correct word usage and grammar mistakes as well. And the traditionalists among us still keep a dictionary on our desks, to complement our quick link to an online dictionary.

Online Resources for Educational Research

There are numerous online resources for new scientific findings in the field of education. Some of these are delivered to us via regular newsletters or newsblasts. Others are out there to be found, but need to be proactively searched. These sites are often designed for different audiences -- parents, scientists, educators-- and can sometimes be focused on specific areas of research or knowledge. Some of the sources we find most informative are:

• The American Educational Research Association provides free abstracts of articles in the several journals it sponsors. These include Educational Researcher, Review of Educational Research, and others.
• ERIC -- the Education Resources Information Center, is operated under the auspices of the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education and provides " a comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information."  The Institute of Education Sciences is, itself, a valuable source of information and publications.
• The International Dyslexia Association provides information on articles and ongoing research relating to dyslexia and reading disorders.
• Connecticut's State Education Resource Center provides information on subjects such as best practices and response to intervention.

With the increasing emphasis on scientifically validated methods of instruction as part of the move to a "Response to Intervention" model of instruction in schools, having access to information about what works in classrooms and how students learn is crucial for teachers and parents. These resources can help.

On Science and Good Study Habits

Benedict Carey’s September 6 New York Times article, “Forget What You Know about Good Study Habits,” discusses one of our favorite topics – the practical application of the latest scientific findings about how the mind works to educational strategies. Carey examines recent research in the emerging field of Mind, Brain, and Education and highlights some important and useful conclusions. 

As we learn more about how we store and access information in our minds, we are identifying more and more effective strategies for learning and studying. Recently, a parent told us their son takes a “Drill and Kill” approach to studying. What he meant was that his son repeatedly re-read and re-wrote the same material over and over again. As the Times’ article points out, rather than relying on rote memory, learning is most effective when we use active study strategies, such as those identified in this article: studying in more than one place, studying a range of related material at once, spacing study sessions, and including self-testing as a study strategy. Rather than treating our minds like a suitcase, into which we stuff as much material as we can, we need to be strategic in how and what we store, so we can find it when we need it. 


(Photo by Sue Clark)

Cornerstone Literacy

Cornerstone Literacy is an exciting national initiative that works in partnership with school districts to provide "a combination of research-based practices, direct in-school supports and intensive year-round training."  They are currently working in 50 schools, 25 in Muscogee County, Georgia and 25 in Springfield, Massachusetts. 

Originally a program of the New York Institute for Special Education, whose Board of Directors includes Dr. Paul Yellin, Cornerstone is in the process of becoming an independent non-profit under the dynamic direction of its President, Victor Young. Its staff includes former teachers and principals, all of whom are grounded in the Cornerstone Literacy model, which works with six "cueing systems" or "avenues" to access texts. Some members of the Yellin Center team got to meet these dedicated professionals when Dr. Yellin was invited to speak at a Cornerstone Literacy retreat in July of this year.

What has us particularly excited about Cornerstone's important work is that for the next year it will be headquartered right here -- Cornerstone Literacy has become our new neighbor! While the organization finishes the process of "spinning off" from the New York Institute and seeks a permanent home here in Manhattan (it was formerly headquartered in Philadelphia, although its teams do much of their work on-site in the schools it serves), Cornerstone is utilizing temporary space in our building. 

We welcome our new neighbors, with whom we hope to find opportunities to collaborate, and are delighted that they have found a temporary home while they settle down here in New York City! 

Labels

We know that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires that a student fit within a labeled category before receiving special support services in the public schools -- but that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

Learning and attention issues – as well as all other aspects of a student’s academic, social, and emotional well-being – are extraordinarily complex and consist of a number of distinct functions. When schools use labels like “learning disabled” or “ADD” to describe a student, they are using a vocabulary that is simultaneously too broad and not detailed enough to describe what is going on with a particular child.

Even more importantly, using an area of difficulty to label a student sends a message to both the child and those he encounters that this weakness is a fundamental part of who he is. Sam may have difficulties with certain aspects of attention, but he is also a gifted artist, interested in music, and has incredible story-telling skills. Sam makes friends easily and is a wonderful big brother. None of these strengths come through when Sam is described as “ADHD”. It’s a label that doesn’t really help – and can be both hurtful and inaccurate.

So, what can you do as a parent? Recognize the power of your words and think before you use an area of weakness to describe your child. Understand your child’s learning profile – his strengths as well as his weaknesses -- so you can work on strategies to improve his areas of weakness and build upon his strengths. And, remember to tell him that he's a terrific kid. That's one label that we do like.