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IEP Kids and CI
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30 thoughts on “IEP Kids and CI”
It takes a few years of a CI teacher being in a school before the counselors figure out that they can send such kids to the CI classroom. I share Bob’s experience. In my view, though, if the child has been emotionally abused about the quality of their intellect, then they may not adjust to the new atmosphere of trust and individualized treatment.
However, if the teacher is willing to hang with the kid, and the kid is not a disruptive force but tries, as Bob said above, it always works out. Remember, we are not expecting each kid to learn at the same speed. We know that languages are acquired at different speeds by different people, but fluency is ALWAYS the result when enough time has been given to the process, as opposed to the mantra presented by the traditionalists.
So this conversation brings in the assessment piece big time. Are we willing to let the kid proceed at her own pace? Or do we all have to get them ready for the spring exit tests so that we look good? We can’t have both. I vote for the choice of compassion and differentiation and love.
“…Are we willing to let the kid proceed at her own pace? Or do we all have to get them ready for the spring exit tests so that we look good? We canât have both. I vote for the choice of compassion and differentiation and love.”
It seems like this is a good way to look at all the kids, whether or not they are on IEPs. We are just starting to talk about this in our World Language department, looking for ways to assess individual growth in the different areas rather than relying on tests for each level.
I am the only TPRS/CI teacher in the group and brand new to foreign language teaching, but this seems like a good conversation. They are an open and innovative bunch for the most part.
I don’t know anything about LinguaFolio, but they have a self assessment grid that we looked at at our last department meeting. It looks useful to me.
https://linguafolio.uoregon.edu/documents/LFGrid.pdf
I love not having homework and tests and honoring the fact that everyone acquires, but at different rates. I love just having quick quizzes and jGR.
BUT, there are kids who still won’t put in the effort. Some kids I want to strangle for how lame and unmotivated they are. Some really just might not care, but others are hiding their feelings of incompetency, which they have been building since 1st grade from how they’ve been graded and grouped. I’m so wary of raising affective filters, that I have a hard time confronting these kids. They need love and space, but I don’t think 1 year of CI classes is enough to counter all that low self-esteem. In the meantime, they poison my class!
I hate giving up 5-10 minutes in a period to do the formative assessments. And then I’m even worse at entering the grades in the book. I don’t have time after a class to enter jGR grades, since there is no transition time scheduled between my classes. So, I would have to start recording everyone’s jGR grade before the class ended. I also have students self-assess their jGR grade. The problem is that there are those kids who are shy, those with diagnosed and undiagnosed attention issues, slow processors who get drowned out by the faster processors, and many more reasons jGR may not be fairly used with everyone. Additionally, it is hard to monitor the responses and attention of every student. I can only look into the eyes of 1 student at a time! I’m currently using the jGR more as classroom rules, rather than assessment. I would feel more comfortable if I also had a summative, proficiency-based assessment that supported the low jGR grade.
If that proficiency-based assessment measured growth then I could grade every student on growth AND have their jGR grade. And the 2 grades will not always be similar (e.g. barometer students with high jGR, but low growth). On the surface, it seems that growth allows me to fairly grade all kids. I can’t hold everyone to the same standard in a multi-level class given everyone has had different amounts of CI time and everyone acquires at a different rate. At the same time, a slower acquirer would have smaller growth, right? Then, they’d get a lower grade for something they can’t help, i.e. being a slower acquirer. Is that what we want the grade to mean: rate of acquisition? Also, we don’t know if growth is linear. It could happen in bursts and happen differently at different proficiency levels (the range within 1 ACTFL proficiency level is larger and larger as proficiency increases – see the downward-facing triangle model).
Measuring growth means more assessment time taken from CI, but I know that would please the assessment-loving administrators and state. Maybe it’s the kick in the butt needed to reach some of these kids. As the kids see growth, it could be motivating. I imagine having a few assessment pieces I can do regularly throughout the semester that measure improvement. None of the formatives would be entered in the gradebook (teach for June!), but by the end of the semester I can look back at how the kid improved and assign a grade.
So what do we want a grade to represent? Meeting a standard? Growth? Neither are fair tools given the nature of SLA. Should the grade be based on interpersonal communication skills? That is a problem as I mentioned before due to the challenge of accurately measuring that, due to the nature of our (pre-)adolescent students, and also due to the fact that students, parents, and administrators expect grades to be based on standards and/or growth. DILEMMA . . . Maybe the best is to make a grade represent fluency development AND communication skills. I imagine having students with several line/bar graphs. I prefer these be quick assessments and something I can use to assess the entire class at the same time. When it comes to the 4 skills, measuring quantity (number of words) is easier than measuring quality. Here are some examples.
1) fluency write
2) self-assessed and teacher-modified jGR/ICSR
3) timed assessments based on the other input-based skills (reading & listening)
a) speed reading translations (count how many words of a story can be correctly translated in “x” number of minutes)
b) Story-element re-write / dictogloss
4) number/difficulty of books read
I appreciate you, Eric, putting all this thought into a summative grade of some sort. I like how you are working towards defining this summative assessment as a combination fluency development & communication skills. I am certainly following you’re train of thought on this over the past few weeks.
I’ve lately found it very helpful for me to give a jGR grade in the last minutes of class. Usually I have students do some sort of quite activity — a Free Write, a translation activity, or a quick quiz — for the last 5 – 10 minutes of class (I have 87 min block classes), which serves to be a good time for me to slide down the roster and squeeze in a jGR (ICSR) grade for every student. I like doing it on the spot. With my kids, too, I really need to give these jGR grades because it really helps them check themselves on those behaviors. (ICSR / jGR is 60% of the grade for my students.)
Quite a few of my students (whose parents pay me to tutor their kids) are dyslexic and I have had great results with them. One 14 year old girl was told that she should take Spanish when she was 11 because “English would be too hard”. Two years later she learned to her dismay that she would have to take English with kids who were in their Third year because there was no other class for her. I started working with her in September 2013, an hour a week, and by the end of the year she was top of her class. I know TPRS works well with these kids and I try to be as visual as possible, but I’d like to know more of the hows and whys.
That is a really wonderful success!
I’ve had a few IEP kids and while they tend to be slower processors, they can ALL pass and their parents have thanked me. All I say is “if you listen/read and let me know when you don’t understand, you will pass.” I now tell the counsellors– after years of saying “don’t put “weak” kids into Spanish just because they can’t do French”– to put EVERYONE into Spanish!
chris
This thread caught my eye, because I teach a lot of self-contained and collaborative SpEd classes. Overall, more than half of my students have IEPs, and I have found that CI instruction obviates the need for most modifications. The limiting factor, though, is usually attention, especially since these kids usually go through their entire day clueless about what is going on. Who could blame them for thinking that a world language class will be the only one comprehensible to them? Convincing them that THIS class is different is a slow but rewarding process for them and for me. Either way, these are often the kids who would get absolutely nothing out of traditional classes, so even though they can’t/won’t do jGR, they are getting way more out of a CI class. I’m never quite sure what to do about enforcing jGR in this case, since their disability is often that they struggle to maintain attention. By strictly enforcing jGR, they are being penalized twice – once for jGR and another on the Quick Quiz (sometimes). In most cases, I estimate whether they are doing jGR to the greatest extent possible given the nature of the disability. In the meantime, Special Services does not understand CI at all, but they are loving the results. It is so funny to hear the attributions people make about student success in CI classes (“It’s because he’s jumping around and acting things out all the time”), when in reality, we are just allowing kids for one period per day to do something that comes naturally and, in a sense, levels the playing field among students.
“…the limiting factor…is attention…”.
This is so true with those kids. Therefore, I would not use jGR in the same way we use it with other kids, who CAN pay attention and who thus benefit from the direct challenges of interpersonal growth that jGR presents to them.
Teachers must remember that they are charged with the overall well being of all children, and grade accordingly. The overall well being of these kids is what counts, not how many questions they get right or how they show up on the jGR.
No wonder the system has given up on such kids and created an entire school within a school for them – they are being looked at in terms of intellectual prowess and not on the fact that they are human beings. I can see that in a chemistry class but not in a language class.
Good timing on this post. I have parent-teacher conferences this week which include the parents of some of my slower processors. One girl even went to a neurologist who said that she would have a hard time learning a language. I wonder in what sense of the word “learning” (probably not acquiring) the doctor was using.
Interesting observation Scott, because being fair with jGR means giving attention deficit kids more leeway. We could probably enforce jGR for everyone if we were good at giving frequent brain breaks.
Scott said: “I have found that CI instruction obviates the need for most modifications.”
And I think this is key. In a CI class, we don’t have to “accommodate” anyone in the traditional sense. That student gets to participate fully in our language programs, without fear that the expectations might be “watered down” in some way.
Latin has had a complicated relationship with special ed in many schools. This is because many schools have sent students to Latin because it is NOT taught communicatively, the assumption being that a grammar-translation curriculum with no communication in the TL is better than traditional immersion methods (=drowning in INcomprehensible spoken input). Perhaps in some way, it was the lesser of two evils. But now we know this is a false dichotomy, and we Latin teachers must combat the mistaken assumption that IEP kids should take Latin because there is no speaking involved, or that speaking in class prevents IEP kids from being successful.
^ bang on ^
Even severely mentally-challenged people learn a first language via organic CI. And even those who cannot speak can learn to understand!
My only rule is, the kid cannot be disruptive.
Thanks for all the responses here. My wife Amanda who is a special education teacher is going to login and give some of her perspective. We should pick her brain about how to reach those students even more. She even has experience with teaching reading at all levels. I hope we hear from her soon.
Jeff
In my experience, the thing kids want above all else is inclusion and acceptance and to be able to fit in. In a CI class that means they can answer, be a part of stories, etc, also. I don’t see any reason why IEP kids would not function in a well-normed CI classroom.
There would probably have (depending on kid) to be changes re: output expectations etc. But bottom line holds: fi they are tuned in to CI, they are acquiring.
I support what others are saying. On nearly every progress report I write for an IEP or 504, the “other comments” section allows me to include: “Needs no accommodations or modifications beyond what is available to every student in the class.”
At my school the Special Ed teachers like to have their students take German – and for me to be at the IEP meetings – because the students are successful. Our AVID teachers often encourage students to take German. A counselor once told me that she has never heard of a student who expressed regret at having taken German.
It’s been because teaching with CI allows me to do so many things that promote acquisition in an organic way. At lunch today, I was talking with one of our science teachers. He was telling about his weekend field trip with students to Ventura and the Channel Islands for a biology project. On the way they stopped at an organic farm and bought strawberries. While talking to the farmer, he learned that Ventura County is the area of the country with the highest concentration of pesticides. But the farmer he talked to is able to pursue organic farming there anyway, and his strawberries are full of flavor. (I tasted one today.) Teaching with CI is something like that – we create islands of organic, natural acquisition among fields of highly artificial manure.
And the analogy is apt in the sense that those farmers who load up their land with the pesticides with the result of inferior fruit (not natural) believe those who sell them the pesticides, the big companies whose will is imposed on them. So also in our profession, the big book companies are not without their influence on the average four percenter who as a book scholar in high school and college chose this profession because of their ability to conjugate verbs. The only problem there is that they produce manure in terms of student outcomes. But their reign is now giving way to more natural and rational ideas about how to get the best language gains.
There’s a PhD dissertation in there…”the role of institutional memory in the professional formation of second languages teachers.”
My own highly unscientific observation: most of the CI-positive people I have met up here lack formal training in languages methodology, and/or have arrived on the scene late. A lot of 4%ers seem to have flawed memories: they got good marks under the Grammar Grind, but their learning took off the summer in Europe or Mexico or whatever…so the Grammar Grind must have worked đ
I must say, I am not very optimistic about professional training up here. Of the three Universities of which I know have summer 2nd languages methods programs, NONE are offering anything even close to CI. Can you imagine what would happen if we taught student teachers math or science methods the way we do languages methods?
Argh. Rant over.
I have special difficulty with a one learning disabled student, Tierra, that is in self-contained classes for most of the day, then mixed in with the rest of the mainstream for Spanish. (This is common in Chicago – and I imagine in most places – where the IEP students are mixed with the mainstream for P.E., art, and foreign languages.) I just haven’t been able to reach her. The case manager told me when scheduling her that Tierra is a very concrete thinker. I don’t know. I do know that she has built a wall around her in my class, shutting down so that others don’t know she doesn’t understand. Not her peers, at least. I know very well that she doesn’t understand. Tierra started the term this way: shut down. Every time I tried to check her comprehension, she shuts down. Even when I do it on the sly when no one else is paying attention.
Now, there are all kinds of disastrous behaviors Tierra is involved in outside of school. And the worst part is that her parents, I hear, are permissive of these behaviors. These circumstances leave me thinking about how by being in a communal environment were adult and students are acting with kindness and working together, Tierra sees and feels apart of humanity. When I see Tierra’s neighbors helping her in maternal ways, it warms my heart. “Repeat after me, Tierra…” says one of her neighbors. Or, “You can’t cuss out your teacher like that, Tierra.” (Let’s be real.)
Now, I’ve had a couple of other students at some kindergarten like level of reading and writing – having difficulty coping words in writing and what not – but with Tierra there is a an extra dimension. She feels inadequate and is angry as a result. Many of our students like Tierra have behavior issues and get kicked out of school. Tierra doesn’t lash out, but she does shut down. And I haven’t been able to reach her. She will not take any risks, unlike most every other IEP student I’ve had.
I really need to take the time to have a conversation with her about how learning happens in the CI classroom, and what she can feel good about that she has already accomplished. Perhaps I can pull her out of her self-contained math class tomorrow morning for a couple of minutes. No, I need to do this tomorrow.
Dude you need to know when you can’t perform miracles. Tierra shuts down. Get over it. Advise counseling that you can’t reach her. We’re good, our method is good, but it can’t be all things to all people.
Something else to keep in mind is she has probably “looked stupid” in all of her classes all of her life. And typically when called on she doesn’t know the answer and the teacher is just making her look bad (Tierra’s point of view). So her solution is to shut down and hide. This appears to have worked for her. Years of this training will be very difficult to undo. I love that you are working with her and trying! The personal relationship is very important to a student like this and that takes time to build. I am sure she has picked up more than she lets you know.
I certainly hear you, Ben, that there is only so much we can do for students. I’m afraid I’ve let Tierra’s poor learning behaviors slide too much in class though.
I tried talking with Tierra one-on-one, but that didn’t work very well. I did talk with the SPED case manager, though, and we agreed it could be a good idea for me to write 10 sentences using our core vocabulary structures in very simplified format to print out so that Tierra can carry it to one of her SPED teachers she sees during the day, read aloud, and work towards translating. I’m going to start doing that once a week. We’ll see if it helps her out.
Amanda… I sure hope that Tierra has picked up more than she’ll let me know! Funny thing is that she avoids showing me that she knows anything perhaps out of fear that I may think that she knows very little.
Chris said: âIn my experience, the thing kids want above all else is inclusion and acceptance and to be able to fit in.â
This is so true. In Waldorf schools IEP kids usually learn with all the other students in class though they may get additional help by our two IEP specialists. But when they come to my French class (I teach groups of 15 – 18 students from grade 6 on) it will take some time to build trust and relationship until they realize that this class is different and that a dyslexic child for example is perfectly able to acquire a foreign language.
I second Chris when he says that the student must not be disruptive. Though I will never shout with them I have to be firm and send them out of the room if their behavior is not acceptable any more.
But with middle-schoolers, take my 6th graders last year for example, there is not much difference as for the attention span between an IEP kid and most of the other students in class. It was often impossible to do something for more than ten minutes in a row, and any special event, any existing problem in class might ruin my lesson plan for the day. We had a hard time for a year or so. Now in 7th grade things have improved. We are having great fun especially with stories.
IEP kids are especially proud to be able to contribute to our class and to stories. I always let them offer their proposals or answer my questions first when their finger is up. It is really heartwarming to see their eyes shine when I praise them.
The mother of one of my IEP boys told me the other day that French is his favorite class because it is the only âlearningâ class where he does not fail.
Last week when we had finished a reading on the Paperman video I was hesitating what to do next. The finger of another IEP boy (they are mostly boys, arenât they?) went up and he said: âLetâs play the scene! But first weâll need a break. Letâs toss the yellow ball around. You neednât even do anything. Weâll give the commands!â And so thatâs what they did: âJoshua throws the ball to Brian.â âBrian throws the ball to Lina.â and so on.
I was so proud of him and so happy that I felt my tears coming up. When playing the scene with me telling what happened, they did a great job.
By the way, when Teri came to see our classes here in Northern Germany on her trip to Europe in February, she saw this class and this group, too. She loved the story they did, but her comment afterwards (though I donât remember her exact words): âWhat an energy you need. You earn your money hard.â
So in Germany students raise their finger and not their whole hand?
I thought about that, too, Angie, and thought it curious. Then I realized, in the U.S., we raise our whole arm, not just our hand. Made me chuckle. (I can hear me now. Please, raise your “arm.”)
There is in fact no rule for this. Students just do it differently, some raising their arm high in the air, some raising their hand a little bit, some just pointing a finger. Depends on their temperament I think.
“But with middle-schoolers, take my 6th graders last year for example, there is not much difference as for the attention span between an IEP kid and most of the other students in class. It was often impossible to do something for more than ten minutes in a row…”
Boy, does that sound right! I now plan in chunks of about 15-20 minutes, allowing several of those minutes to be used dealing with managing some of the children’s attention and behavior. Then a brain break. It really helps when I don’t feel pressure to finish something.
I was asked how to convince intervention specialists that students should take Latin, and here are some thoughts on that:
Typically we are a hard group to convince because we spend our time setting our students up for success. Latin, as you know, has a reputation for being “really hard” so that is the first myth you have to dispel.
The other thing is the IS fear of not being able to help with assignments because they don’t know Latin and it is “really hard”. This is something that I would NOT address directly “I know you think Latin is hard and you can’t help…” I would go about it in a more indirect route. But it is something to keep in mind.
The way to an ISs heart is through the knowledge of what is on an IEP and how you can meet those needs without more work from the IS. Typically students with learning disabilities need a slower pace, with repetition and vocabulary defined and explained. They need time to work with the language. They also need things read aloud and extended time. So far everything in this paragraph is the basis for CI. . .
Another big piece is the assessments. This is a building climate thing. I don’t know the inner workings of your building, but in mine some teachers are willing and do, give the students the accommodations in the classroom. That saves me a LOT of time and energy. If you have the freedom to do this then and IS would be grateful. If, however, they give all assessments because the IEP says small group, then we need to find another positive to share. Does that make sense?
This is a timely discussion. I am scheduled to teach French half time and study skills half time next year. (This year it’s half French, half 6th grade science.) Study skills is for kids who need extra reading and writing (common core push) and who aren’t taking a foreign language. They aren’t necessarily IEP kids, but some are. I have gathered some research articles and am going to talk to the principal about turning the study skills classes into French. The guidance counselor likes the idea, but the principal will need some “solid research” to convince him. He may not go for it. If anyone has a particularly good article on the subject of the benefits of foreign language, I’d love to know about it. I will also use some of the comments on this post.
I would check Susie Gross’ website – I think that I read an article there once talking about kids with learning difficulties (and taking French) outscoring kids with the same learning profiles who didn’t take French. Can I recall her website address? Sorry, no I can’t right now. Susan Gross TPRS in a search engine?
Krashen writes a leeter or so per week where he shows various idiots/bigots that bilingual kids outperform monolingual kids in various ways. You can follow him on Twitter for daily updates. (he says he’s retired– HA!)