SLDs and IEPs

I'm taking this online class right now with UNCC (towards my Master of Arts in Teaching) that talks about "diverse learners." Basically, this means kids with learning disabilities, behavioral disabilities, kids who are English language learners, or who have some other issue that classifies them as EC (Exceptional Children.) I teach three blocks of inclusion, which means all of my classes have a variety of EC kids included with other non-EC students. Their issues or disabilities are ALL over the map, and are challenging, heart-breaking, and aggravating as hell in turns. Or, all at once.

To give you a little idea of what some of these kids are like, and the challenges they face just PASSING a class, here's one of my recent forum posts from my class. (We have to post three little reflections every week.)

So here's my frustration with IEPs. As I've mentioned, I teach inclusion classes, and have a LOT of kids with IEPs and 504 plans. Their IEPs say things like "extra time on exams" or "testing in a separate setting" or "read aloud their tests." Okay. That's all well and good, and those accommodation definitely help them come test time. But what IEPs don't do is give me any idea of HOW to actually help these kids LEARN better.

We try to use a variety of teaching strategies, and try to engage kids with different learning styles, and so on and so forth. Obviously there is a LOT more improvement we can do in this area, and there's lots to learn about how to best teach all of our students. But I find myself just at a loss with some students, particularly those SLD kids that have retention and comprehension problems. I can sit and talk through an assignment with a student and watch the wheels in his or her head just spinning and spinning without gripping anything.

One student in particular (although there are several) has unbelievably bad retention; you can tell him what a word means, have him say it back to you, and then five minutes later he can't remember it. This same student has a really hard time making sense of what he's reading. We can read a sentence like "President Obama opposes the ban on gays serving openly in the military and wants Congress to repeal the law" and when I ask him to talk through it with me, and ask him "What does Obama want Congress to do?" this student will think out loud something "Obama opposes...with the gays...they are serving openly?" He can carry on a perfectly intelligent sounding conversation with you about his life, but when faced with a piece of text he has absolutely nothing to even grab on to. It's as though he's reading a foreign language with nothing familiar to guide him to meaning.

It's students like him that motivate me the most to learn how to teach better, and at the same time make me feel like I'm hitting my head against a brick wall, or whatever metaphor for futility you choose. His IEP provides no guidance as to how to help him LEARN, only guidance as to how to make it easier for him to show that he HAS learned what little he actually retained. I hope this class will give me some practical ways to help him, and my other students like him, make some degree of progress and acquire new skills.

I can name at least four other students right now who are similar to the one I describe above, in that they struggle so painfully hard to hold on to even the simplest piece of information - and yet sometimes will pull the most random facts out of thin air. Their reading comprehension skills are so bad as to make reading almost a completely non-viable way to acquire information independently. I honestly do not know if their challenges would have been made easier by better teaching throughout the rest of their academic careers. My hunch is yes, but that it would have taken extraordinary teaching to get them up to grade level, and it's going to take beyond-extraordinary teaching to even get them half-way to where they should be. I honestly don't know if we're up to that. I hope we can figure it out. These kids deserve so much more than what they've been given so far. They deserve every chance I've had, and it's just plain shitty that they've had to work so much harder to get just as far as they have.