Confronting Ableism

Hehir, Thomas. (2007). Confronting Ableism. Eduational Leadership, 64(5), 8-14.

Hehir discusses “abelism”: society's negative attitudes about disabilities. The popular perception feed by “ableist” ideas is that disabilities are to be overcome with an ultimate goal of gaining normal function—ideas that lead special education. Hehir defines the purpose of special education as “minimizing the impact of disability and maximizing the opportunities for students with disabilities to participate in schooling and the community.” However, research shows that this perspective is detrimental to students with disabilities. Hehir makes some suggestions in terms of how address the issue of special education—such as making students comfortable in terms of being able to communicate in their own medium, emphasizing investment, holding high standards. Based on the idea that an inclusion setting is best students overcoming their disabilities, Hehir suggests this as well. However from my experience, special education programs become too focused on the goal of “graduation” from the program to the point that they miss the position that they put both students and teachers in. The reading of an IEP does not prepare a teacher completely for handling students that have that been made accustom to the levels of accommodation experience in a special education classroom. Moreover, though this may not be complete the case, my experience has show me that once a student is “graduated” from special education there is a void of support and accommodation that the student must get over in order to succeed in a regular class room. This is not to say that inclusion strategies are not successful, but rather to say that inclusion and “graduation” shouldn’t be the only goal over finding the best solution for the student’s educational needs. It is a measure of success that doesn’t necessarily indicate or cause success.

Chapter 3 - Moore

Chapter 3- Setting Goals and Objectives- Moore

Moore

Moore focuses his proper goals and objectives for the classroom. Looking at the need for accountability on teachers leading to national, state and district standards for performance under “No Child Left Behind.” Looking at the impact of this reform on special needs students—having IEPs, Section 504 students, and ELL students. The academic success of all students is tightly tied to the success of the teachers in interpreting and implementing the standards. Moore marks objective is a statement about what students should be able to do after instruction; these are components of standards. Goals are broader statements used to describe purposes of schooling or a course whereas objectives are more narrowly focused. Moore writes that objectives are to be made up of four elements: that they spell out the terminal behavior or performance, specify the product, describe the conditions, and state the criteria. There is introduction of three learning domains: cognitive domain, the affective domain, and the psychomotor domain. It seems that the best instruction would include consideration of all three. The chapter was a bit dense, but provided some good insight in terms of developing instruction and instruction strategies from standards, ever since emphasis that has been placed on them with NCLB.

Gender Equity: Still Knocking at the Classroom Door

Sadker, David. (1999.) Gender Equity: Still Knocking at the Classroom Door. Educational Leadership, 56.

This article focuses on gender and whether or not there exists educational equity. It looks at the lower frequency of dropout rates in girls and the great number of females in higher education—facts that imply that there has been some victory in gender equality. However, the article also mentions the social biases that women and girls still suffer in terms of lower expectations and participation in math and science related fields. It goes further to realize the implicit biases that lead educators to treat boys and girls differently in the classroom. This is something that I have experienced in my classroom. Essentially—I know more about how to work with my male students than with my female students. With that I tend to be overly cautious with them—which must be seen as a bit of favoritism by the males. That’s something that I’ve got to work on.

Testing Stereotype Threat: Does Anxiety Explain Race and Sex Differences in Achievement?

Osborne, Jason W. (2001.) Testing Stereotype Threat: Does Anxiety Explain Race and Sex Difference in Achievement? Contemporary Educational Psychology, 26, 291-310.

This article goes over a test looking at the effects of anxiety related to race and gender on student achievement. The hypothesis: anxiety associated with race and gender would account for different levels of achievement. The study did confirm this in the ways of race as anxiety in students and performance was correlated with gaps in performance between Afro-Americans and whites, and Hispanics and whites. From my experience and from other studies this was a bit of an obvious revelation. The combination of lowered expectations and a sense of starting off on a lowered level tends to bare a dark weight on minority student’s minds. I felt as if I had to prove something, to overcome much more than just my circumstances. For students in positions like this, student achievement seems like that much higher of a obstacle to overcome.

Week 14 and 15

These weeks saw an upswing. Even though since the imposition of the furloughs has shown a lag in student performance and general focus, there was an upswing in how my classes have been going. I feel like I can connect this to a few changes.

The first change has been the deliberate and strict use of a timed agenda. Since the beginning of Week 14, I have written a daily written an agenda with time limits for myself for each activity. In the beginning of class I go over the schedule quickly with the students, then we follow the schedule, and then we go over what we learned. This piece was something I took from a friend that told me that you have to let people know what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them. This has freed up time and has made the flow of the class much more organized.

With the freed up time I’ve added a reoccurring activity section of the agenda. This follows our guided notes, which acts like an INM section. In this activity section students are made to practice what I’ve preached in an application of the objective lesson of that day. This over these weeks has been the use of folding paper and measuring the new shapes’ dimensions to see whether they are similar figures or not. We’ve measured our shadows and the shadows of rulers to estimate our approximate height. This section—while still a bit rusty because of the amount of time it demands—has contributed to student interest during class time. In this I have been more successful in appealing to different types of learners—those that just want to be taught and those that just want to do something.

Also with the time that has been freed up I have been able to more consistently use exit tickets. I write them long with my daily materials—which has led me to be more consistent in my backwards planning. Written to the material of the day and in the format of the questions that they’ll encounter on their quarterly assessments and HSA test—the exit tickets wrap up the day for us. The exit tickets also provide data on how successful the day’s lesson was—I average out those that got the question right for each class. This acts as a grade for me and lets me know how the class went—how much learning went on.

Another addition to my classroom has been the Pau Hana point system. This was a suggestion from a friend and helped me bring a different tone to my class—breaking away from the negative only point system of adding minutes of how long the class has to stay after when they act unruly. This system has been successful to far in three out of my four classes. My third period class has generally been my difficult class in terms of classroom management—and with this they are quick to loose PH points for talking, etc. Though I suspect that perhaps I’m being harder on this class because of their past poor behavior—and have less patience with them. This is something that I have to overcome.

In terms of individual behavior—I’ve had some interesting developments with a few students. One of my most talkative boys I had to move one day because he was disrupting his neighbors. I moved him to the back of the room and made him work by himself. He ended up focusing much more and getting all the questions right. However on the other end of the student achievement spectrum—a few students that had been making strides in terms of their performance have been accused of cheating by other students that have requested to be moved away from them. This reminds me that I have to both keep my eyes open for behaviors like this but also promote clarity and student confidence in my lessons so they aren’t motivated to cheat.

In reflecting on the weeks I still see a couple challenges—that of reaching the entire spectrum of my students’ skill levels in differentiation being the biggest on. In the mean time I’ve gotten used to idea of spending entire day in my room with the doors open for students that are having trouble.

Good: The new changes and mechanisms have shown to be pretty helpful and successful—its sad that it took me so long to realize that I need to control how I used my most vital resource—time.

Bad: I discovered that cheating may be a problem in my class, which begs the question of how reliable so of my measures of achievement are. I’ve got to work on better checks for understanding and positive reinforcement to boost student math-confidence. Also differentiation remains to be an issue.