Presume Competence

Since I work with students best described as "consistently inconsistent" I frequently find myself going around and around with well meaning colleagues on the idea that students need to "prove" that they know A or B (usually vocabulary.) (As if any typically developing child is required to "prove" their knowledge of every vocabulary word they can utter.) We usually get stuck because most of my students will not consent to participate in assessment-style activities. They will produce inconsistent or meaningless responses because they simply cannot be motivated to identify a "fork" from a field of 4 pictures. And so, the skeptics tell me I cannot "assume they have the skills:" I have to teach them.

By presuming competence, I refuse to do either. My teaching does not assume that my student can identify a picture of a fork (or numbers, or whatever other vocabulary is in question.) Nor do I spend my time direct teaching basic pre-school vocabulary. I can teach the 8th grade math curriculum (geometry and equations) without knowing for certain if my student knows number symbols. Will I teach number symbols in the process? Absolutely. I can teach mid-grade literature without knowing if my students can identify so-called "functional" vocabulary or know what a "wh" question is. Will they learn that in the process? Probably. They'll also read some really good literature that is appropriate to their age. (Please don't get me started on "wh" questions - I have found that when most people say a student doesn't know "wh" questions they really mean the student doesn't have a certain level of general knowledge, which is generally to be expected of students with complex disabilities and fundamentally Not. The. Same. Thing. One is skill, the other is content. Can you guess which one I care about more?)

My students, like all other students, will use vocabulary to answer questions and create assignments. That will tell me what they know. I don't need them to identify pictures on an assessment they don't care about. I need them to use them in a meaningful context. My students, for whom formal language continues to be a weakness, will demonstrate comprehension of concepts in a myriad of non-linguistic ways, and I will accept those as equally valid measures of their comprehension. Because I understand that, especially for students just learning formal and symbolic language, the symbolic representation and the concept are not the same thing.

That is what Presuming Competence means to me. It means not letting the fact that I cannot prove whether or not a student knows a concept or has a skill through formal assessment hold me back from teaching them higher level materials. Simply put, it means believing that all students can learn and teaching them.

Self Determination through Choices

Several of my students had IEP goals this year around sequencing events on their daily schedule. Sequencing is an important pre-reading and pre-numeracy goal, and working with the familiar concepts of the daily schedule is a logical way to teach that skill. Its a common goal for students in my class and my students mastered it. Along the way, two learner types emerged: the Memorizer and the Requester. The Memorizer attempts to memorize the sequence - bathroom is always first, then reading, and so on. That works fine if the daily schedule never changes (spoiler alert: it does!) and if you always start at the beginning and go all the way to the end (not helpful if you want to check your schedule after lunch, for example.) The Requester sees the list of activities to be sequenced as a menu to be chosen from and will pick the items s/he wants to do - potentially demonstrating a false negative for understanding the sequence.

This year, I had 2 Memorizers and 1 Requester. All of them were able to demonstrate mastery of the concept of sequencing. So at the end of April vacation, my paraprofessional and I decided to try something new. We decided to throw out the structured classroom schedule and let the students create it. We had already been doing this a little bit: morning snack was optional and at different times (one student needed breakfast first thing, one frequently skipped it, and one needed to eat around an inclusion class.) We simply wanted to take it one step further. The new classroom schedule that greeted the students looked like this:

Some activities, like therapies, lunch and inclusion classes, have set times. The rest are listed as choices. Students can make individual and group choices about what to do when.

We’ve only been at this a week, so a lot more work needs to be done to scaffold the language of choosing activities, especially the peer interactions of choosing group activities. My students do not yet have the language to ask peers to join them in an activity or to bargain. But I heard lots of question words being explored on communication devices. We did a lot of language modeling: using those question words and the time words of “first” and “then” (familiar to our students from their sequencing experience,) moving symbols around on the classroom and student schedules as students made choices and then modified them based on peer choices.

Completed Picture Schedule

Empty Picture Schedule

Examples of student schedules before and after they are filled out.

My initial impression of this change is very positive. I felt like my students engaged in more instructional activities for more of the day. I will have to wait until I’ve had a few more weeks of data in order to see how much of that was our excitement to engage them in this new learning activity and how much was caused/supported by the change in classroom structure.

Two take-aways from the first week:

1. I may need to stack the deck a little bit or there are IEP goals we will never address. Right now I am taking this as feedback about areas of the curriculum that need to be addressed to make them more student-friendly. (e.g. Nobody picked math without prompting. However, the students did seem to like the new unit we started, so I’ll be curious to see how that affects their choices next week.)

2. Only one of my students looked to the classroom schedule when asked to choose what he wanted to put on his schedule, visibly having difficultly choosing something on his own. One of the Memorizers, this is my least physically independent student. More so than the other students in the class, this student is used to having his choices, not just made for him, but physically done to him. This is a poignant and important reminder about the importance of giving these students control over their lives, not just academically, but in every domain.

Prove it: A Post for BADD 2015

This is my post for Blogging Against Disabilism Day 2015. Read more posts here.

A kindergarden student, learning to read, gets periodic assessment of their reading, and based on those assessments, moves up or down in their reading instructional level.

Yet, when my nonverbal 13-year-old student, who is also learning to read, takes the same assessment and I say I am going to move her up in reading instructional level as a result, I am met with the following response:

1. assumption that I read the passage to her.

and/or

2. push-back that I must do many more assessments before I can say for certain that she can read at that level.

When I use the formal assessment tools built into our phonics program for assessing symbol/sound awareness with one of my students and comment to one of my colleagues that my student (a non-speaking 14-year old who communicates with a low-tech eye gaze board) seems to know his consonants and be ready to move on to learning CVC words, I get the following response:

1. questioning whether I am going to assess all the letters or “just the ones on this page?"

2. commenting that “well those are the hard ones” despite the fact that I clearly stated that the section needed to be gone back to, not because the student had struggled but because the student had fatigued in using his eye gaze system and needed a break.

Why? Because they are non-speaking and the concept that a non-speaking person who is not yet using formal communication could read is completely alien, even to my fellow professionals working in the field of severe special education.

If they had been a verbal, typically developing, kindergarden students, no one would have questioned the validity of the assessment results. Yet this happens all the time when instructing students with limited formal communication skills in the general curriculum.

Yet there is a hypocrisy here. Because there is one assessment that they only had to take once. It’s the most flawed assessment they ever took, not least because it was a language based assessment given to someone with no formal language. I’m referring of course to the IQ test. The test that showed all the things they couldn’t do. The test that provided the justification for an assessment and therapeutic based education instead of a standards-based  education. No one seems to have any problem taking the results of that single assessment at face value.

That is the heart of ableism. We are only comfortable with accepting with assessments of individuals with disabilities that show us how they are disabled; the ones that show us what they can’t do. (If that reading assessment had shown she couldn’t read it, I doubt anyone would have asked me to do more assessments to make sure I wasn’t wrong.) Show an assessment that challenges those assumptions, an assessment that shows how they are skilled, and people will refuse to believe it without additional irrefutable proof.

Autism Acceptance Month

Yesterday, in a discussion of ways to observe Autism Acceptance as professionals who are on the spectrum, I posted the following in the comments of a friend's post:

Change comes slowly when it comes at all. 

But the best change I can make is teaching my students to be productive independent citizens. Whatever that looks like for them. So that's what I'm spending April doing. Just like every other month. 

With that in mind my contribution to Autism Acceptance Month is this: I will be participating in the #AprilBlogADay educator reflection project. (I probably won't post every day, but I will post regularly.) 

Universal Design for Professional Learning

I usually use this space to talk about student learning, but I want to take a moment to talk about an equally important topic: professional learning for teachers.

There is a lot of talk in the twitter chats I frequent about the benefit of the EdCamp philosophy of professional development. I certainly understand where my fellow teachers are coming from: I have sat through my share of speakers talking about the same basic strategies that I have been using for years or about strategies that are not meaningful for my student population without such significant modification that they lose the essence of what the presenter is trying to get at. I love the idea of teachers sharing what really works. That's why I like twitter chats. However, they lose me when they start going on about how the face-to-face interaction is so much more valuable.

The thing is: text is a lot easier for me to navigate than face to face interaction. I'm not convinced I really will get more out of it than a twitter chat. It's quite possible I'll get less. And yet, whenever I say I haven't been to one yet I get multiple replies telling me how it's so wonderful and why I should. I want to ask those teachers to stop for a moment and examine their privilege.


I'm not saying that EdCamps need to change or that they can afford to provide more accommodations (they are free events.) One of the nice things about the current state of professional development is that we have such a diverse menu of options to choose from: I'm not limited to the one speaker my school brings in this year. My point in writing this post is to point out that every teacher makes their own choices of what professional development to pursue and in what format for their own reasons. What works for one person may be very much the wrong answer for another. The beauty of Universal Design is that we can each chose not just the content but the format that works best for us without each person having to request specific accommodations each time.

We need to be flexible enough thinkers to remember that the content and format that works best for us doesn't work best for everyone. We also need to remember to seek out those voices that are not accessing the same formats we are using (for whatever reason) and make sure they are being heard too. We may not agree with what they have to say, but there may be a very good reason their voice isn't being heard in the forums we're standing in. If our mission is really about teaching all students, then we had better make sure that we are reaching all teachers when it comes to professional development and the sharing of ideas.

Losing Control

Last week at #atchat, I was having a conversation with Ricky of www.atmac.org about the challenges of teachers who fear technology in the classroom, and who fear their students being more capable with the technology than they are. That got me thinking, and I said it at the time, the essence of that fear is teacher fear of losing control over the classroom dynamic.

It is common knowledge that every first year teacher struggles with classroom management. It's one of those rights of passage of first year teaching. There's a teaching urban legend that says "don't smile until October." Great emphasis is put on having an orderly, well controlled classroom.

In special education, this emphasis is paradoxically increased. Because our students struggle with the basic skills of self-regulation that come effortlessly (most of the time) to students in general education, most special education classrooms are filled with behavior charts and other paraphernalia of teacher-directed behavior support programs (incentive programs, reward/consequence programs, positive behavior supports..... the names and philosophies change - sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse, but all are predicated on the same concept: student must do what teacher says: top down.)

How many IEP goals have you seen that have goals for following (x step) directions? Or other goals of compliance. Participation in a structured activity goals? That's a compliance goal too. We spend a lot of time in special education teaching compliance.

And then, at some point, in "progressive" special education classrooms, somebody gets the idea of teaching self-regulation. It rarely goes well. The students are unprepared for there being no "right" answer. The teachers do not want to allow the behavior to become disregulated, so they control the choices, reinforcing the students' belief that there is a "right" answer and their own belief that their students are "too low" or "too routine oriented" to understand how to self-regulate. Because without the behavior plans and structure the class would get out of control.... right?

Wrong.

The problem is not that the students are "too low" (I don't believe such a thing exists) or "too routine oriented." The problem is trying to teach self-regulation in a context, and based on a foundation, that does not support it. The problem is that classroom culture of behavior charts.

I am not saying that we have to do away with extrinsic motivators (rewards) for all our students in every context. I'm not saying visual behavior supports aren't important - they are. But for most of the day, if students aren't motivated to learn the material, we need to find a way to make the material motivating. For example, I have a student who has been acting out during math: he struggles with numbers. We are learning about ratios as part of the 7th grade common core standards. He has been throwing every manipulative I try to use to teach this skill. But he loves time and clocks. So we started talking about the ratio of time to distance. He loves starting and stopping the stopwatch as we check the time to travel various distances. He still doesn't love telling the numbers, but he's more motivated to do so now that they are times.

More to the point, puts my timer to far better use than it was being put giving him check marks for staying in his seat and keeping his hands to himself to earn the swing when math was done. He still might ask for the swing after math, but it's not contingent any more. Sensory breaks are important, and now he's learning both math (which he wasn't before) and early self-regulation skills.

As my students build their skills in the areas of self-regulation, self-advocacy, and self-determination (all areas of the curriculum represented on every IEP in my classroom) I don't expect I will find anyone is "too low" to make progress and develop skills. And I'm not worried about losing control of my classroom to do it, because I won't be giving up any behavior control in order to for them to practice those skills. They are working on them every day in the classroom already. My students are the primary stakeholders in what goes on in my classroom: if they're not invested in learning, I don't waste my time teaching: the standards only tell us what to teach, not how.

To My Non-Speaking Autistic Friends: Please Help

I have a situation in my classroom right now that I need the advice from my friends who are primary AAC users on. I know what my colleagues in education say, and I want more input before making a decision.

I have a student who is just learning to use his AAC device. He is at the stage where he mostly uses it in an exploratory manner. Lots of pressing buttons repeatedly to hear what they say. He also spends a fair amount of time trying to get someone to unlock the iPad and let him into the games that are also on it.

This is a student who exhibits some challenging behavior who, for whatever reason, was never previously taught a break request. He's catching on to the break request quickly.

Here's my problem: When I ask him to start an academic task (and stop for the moment exploring his device so he can listen to instruction) he asks for a break because he wants to go back to exploring/playing with the device. (Yes, there's a slip in presumption of competence there, but I'm not sure he understands that the communication app is different than the games, and that may be where his frustration/confusion is coming from.) I don't want to take the communication device away, but I don't want him to learn that asking for a break is a way to get out of academics and get to play with the iPad. Is it okay to go to low tech symbols on his desk (Yes/No, bathroom, break) to communicate  during a break?

Thanks for your help and insights!