1 Special Education

Inside Special Education by Kenneth W. Howell

“… special education is, first and foremost, instruction focused on individual need. it is carefully planned. it is intensive, urgent, relentless, and goal directed. it is empirically supported practice, drawn from research.”

Zigmond (1997) pp.384-85

Special education has two definitions today:

a. the instruction of exceptional people

b. the use of exceptional instruction

While these two definitions may seem to be very similar, there is a critical difference. In definition a the focus is on people, and in b the focus is on instruction. Teachers who work by definition a will be interested principally in the characteristics of their students. They may even think that anyone whose class happens to include an exceptional child is automatically a special educator.

Those who believe definition b might be less interested in the characteristics of their students and more interested in the characteristics of instruction. They would believe that a person can be a special educator even if there aren’t any exceptional students in the person’s class.

The field of special education started with definition a. In those early days children with disabilities were more apt to be served by medical personnel than by educators. The few educators who did start working with students did not work in schools. Their students were typically severely disabled. Most often these students had permanent physical and/or intellectual disabilities. Most of these students were profoundly different from the norm. Therefore, when those teachers tried to teach things that might compensate for the impact of the disabilities, they were obligated to focus on skills that typical students were not usually taught in schools. As a result most of the instruction was on skills seldom covered in the regular school curriculum such as language acquisition and self-care.

As time passed, special education expanded its domain to include students we now call mildly disabled (the learning disabled, mildly mentally retarded, and mildly behavior-disordered students). (NOTE 1) Many of these students seem disabled only within the school system. They share the common characteristic of being behind in the curriculum and, therefore, most of their instruction focuses on teaching exactly the same curriculum everyone else needs to learn. They need modified instruction. As the proportion of mildly disabled students has increased, the focus in special education has shifted away from student characteristics and toward instructional modifications: that is, toward definition b.

Today we seem to be stuck between the two definitions. If we want to impress people at parties, we tell them about the characteristics of our students, and they respond in awe: “You must be very dedicated and patient to work with people like that!” On the other hand, if we want to teach our students something, many of us have found that we need to focus on curriculum and instruction. We need to know how to do exceptional teaching.

Special education is in a state of transition, as anything linked to an evolving society should be; however, the forces of change are varied and they intersect in confusing ways. A lot of forces are coming together in special education these days. Some of these are: advancements in educational and psychological research, legislation requiring teacher and school accountability, civil rights litigation, the conflicting paradigms of general and special education, funding cuts, changes in student demographics, advancements in instructional technology and fluctuations of social commitment to education. The professional educator is in the middle of these intersecting forces. Within this maelstrom they must try to solve problems by taking in new information and fitting it to what they already know. This is a thoughtful activity and, as a result, it is influenced by the way each teacher thinks.

Teachers who use definition a when they try to think their way through problems come from a foundation that views people with disabilities as those who need to learn a unique curriculum because they are permanently and significantly different from the rest of us. These teachers think that their students do not learn because they have deficits that are unalterable. Because of this assumption they run the risk of limiting their own growth and learning (and consequently the learning of their students) by focusing on the limitations of their clients rather than on the instructional modalities that might assist them.

Other teachers ground their efforts in definition b. These teachers think of themselves as exceptional educators who may do exceptional teaching with disabled, normal, or academically advanced people. Because they think that their students can learn, and they believe that they are responsible for seeing to it that the learning takes place, these teachers focus their attention on ways to teach. They are not interested in information about student limitations.

TEACHERS

The Mild and Severe chapters of this text focus on the work of exceptional teachers, so to find out about good instructional practice you will want to read them. But it is often clear that how one teaches may be anchored in one’s view of the teaching profession and of students. These attitudes, or dispositions, of teachers can be positive or negative. The following list of “Ideal Beliefs” is from Kaplan and Horton at Portland State University. It provides a good segue to the descriptions of a couple of teachers that follow.

Ideal beliefs for Special Educators

(Based on Kaplan & Horton)

1. All students can learn, even those with special needs.

2. What makes special education “special” is not necessarily who is taught or what
is taught, but how it is taught.

3. School is for students, not teachers; therefore, special educators should always
try to put the best interests/needs of their students above their own.

4. If the student hasn’t learned, it is probably because the teacher hasn’t taught.

5. All students deserve the same respect, dignity and compassion their teachers
wish for themselves.

6. Motivation to learn should come from the teacher.

7. The worse thing to do is to lower expectations of one’s students simply
because they have a disability or are experiencing difficulty learning.

8. As special education is a profession and special educators are professionals,
they should behave in a professional manner.

Alright, here is where we are so far: what we do when we teach is determined by what we know how to do. What we know how to do is determined by what we have been exposed to and what we attended to. All of these factors are ultimately influenced by our attitudes and values as passed on by our own teachers. If we believe that our students can’t learn, our students probably won’t, because we won’t be interested in finding out about techniques that produce learning. If we believe our students can learn, we will find the things that will help them do so.

It’s that simple.

Now we are going to do a little concept development by looking at a positive and negative example.

I think all the people I’ve interviewed for this book are excellent. I haven’t got any ‘bad’ interviewees in here because I couldn’t figure out a way to get them to agree to allow me to hold them up for public examination; however, there are a lot of bad teachers in both regular and special education. And just to start things off on a positive note, I want to tell you about one.

A BAD EXAMPLE

It is late January, and I am at an elementary school doing some consulting. While I am there, the director of special ed. asks if I will go into the self-contained room for students with learning disabilities to observe a student. He tells me that the teacher believes the student (Raymond) should be removed from her room because he does not have LD but is really behavior-disordered. She says the teacher is having trouble controlling Raymond’s behavior.

The room itself is empty with pale green carpet and pastel room dividers. There are no desks, but chairs are grouped around separate tables. Plastic wash tubs contain each student’s daily work. The work is mostly sheets of matching tasks torn from workbooks. The walls have posters of vowel and consonant sounds with key words illustrated: J for “jack-o-lantern”, P for “pup”. There is an obligatory strand of letters across the top of the empty green chalkboard. Surfing posters and Muppet characters appear randomly pinned to the walls. The school menu is next to the door.

In the room are the teacher, an aide, and seven kids. Within thirty seconds I can tell that this is not a teacher I want to interview. She sits at a horseshoe-shaped table with five students. She appears to be teaching a spelling lesson. First she dictates a sentence for the group to spell. After they have all written the sentence, she checks each kid separately. The sentence, while not particularly complex, requires skills some of the students don’t have because they can’t spell well; therefore, the students make mistakes.

The teacher corrects each student’s sentence separately, even though they all have attempted the same words. She corrects them by phonemically stretching the target word while the student tries to recognize the appropriate letters. For example, if the word is rug and a student misses it, the teacher says, “How do you spell rrr-uuu-ggg?”

Sometimes she takes as long as a full minute to correct one word, and some students have missed more than one word. During this time, the other students tap pencils, rock chairs and expand the root word into familiar obscenities. They giggle the loudest when the teacher draws out the “sh” and “f” sounds. The teacher does not tell them to notice that she is correcting the words they have missed themselves, so they don’t benefit from hearing the other students’ work.

It takes eight to ten minutes to dictate and correct one sentence in this fashion so that the group can go on to the next sentence. During the ten minutes spent on each sentence, an individual student actually works on spelling (in writing or aloud) for, at most, one minute. Because she always goes around the table in a clockwise direction, the last student receives teacher attention to his work ten minutes after making an error.

The ratio of “on-task” to “off-task” student behavior during the lesson is one to ten: one minute spelling for every ten minutes in the lesson. That’s five minutes’ work for a fifty-minute school period. Of the six-hour school day, only four fifty-minute periods are allocated to instruction. At five minutes per period, if this engagement rate is typical these students are getting about twenty minutes of actual work each day and have180 minutes of time to kill. That’s twenty minutes of work each day for students who are behind in school.

So here is my “behavior-disordered student.” Raymond. While waiting his turn to correct his second sentence in the last twenty minutes, Raymond reaches under his chair and pulls out another worksheet. It is a math lesson and he starts to work on it. The teacher sees this and tells him, “This is spelling-put that away,” He refuses.

The teacher leans back in her chair and, crossing her arms, announces to the class, “We’ll all wait for Raymond,” She sits statuelike in this cross-armed position while the group gradually becomes a mass of agitated arms and legs. Meanwhile the villain (that would be Raymond) has become the center of attention and abandons working on his math but keeps the worksheet in front of him and goes through an elaborate imitation of work. Another three or four minutes slide past in a power struggle. It’s a struggle to determine who is in charge and it quickly replaces any struggle for skill or knowledge.

The other students, recognizing a good thing, start retrieving their own supplemental materials. Some of them do math, some draw, and others bat poker chips across the table with pencils in an impromptu hockey game. One student even gets up and leaves. Through all of this, the teacher remains immobile, focusing exclusively on Raymond until the bell rings a couple of precious minutes later.

After the bell, the students dump everything into their wash tubs and file out of the room. At the door, the teacher gives out stick-on decals to the students she says were ‘good,’ including the hockey players. She does not give one to Raymond, and as he leaves, he passes behind her, tipping over chairs with a flick of his wrist as he walks. The teach looks at me and then to the up-ended chairs with the look of someone who has won some sort of victory.

She smiles as if to say “You see what I mean”.

The line of upended chairs leads to the door and past a sign the teacher has hung there next to the clock.

The sign says “Self-confidence”.

A GOOD EXAMPLE

I would argue that Raymond’s teacher in the example above lacks the positive dispositions associated with quality special education. She seems to have become comfortable with the substandard instruction she is using and blames its failure on her student. But there are people with different sets of values. Consider this example:

I was supervising special ed. interns. Supervision is one of those things university people do now and then, and as an activity, it ranges from tedious to exhilarating. That particular quarter it was scrambling. During a typical day, I would see both ends of the student spectrum as I traveled from the carpeted, beanbag-chaired classrooms of teachers working with “gifted” students to the cement and tile back wards of a state hospital. The university students I was supervising were masters or doctoral students who were teaching for course credit. Their internships were a lot like student teaching, except many of the people were doing the internships where they were currently employed.

One of the interns I am supervising is James. James specializes in students with physical disabilities and developmental abnormalities. One of these students is a painfully thin boy named Tony, who suffers from some syndrome that I forgot the name of a long time ago.

Tony’s parents bring him to a clinical setting every day for therapy, medical care, and schooling. During the semester I watch as James explains the intricacies of vowel sounds in an indescribably overcast voice, and flashes words at Tony. Tony reclines in a cross between a wheelchair and a gurney. He learns to read the words on the flash cards and I watch him do it through a one-way mirror. As I watch, I note James’ use of positive reinforcement, direct feedback, and appropriate correction. I note these things on an observation sheet used to summarize what goes on during instruction. According to my sheets, James is doing a good job. Tony is on task and James is, too.

Now it is near the last day of the semester. I walk into the building and sign the visitor’s register. I go up the elevator to the third floor and enter the dark observation corridor. But the room where James and Tony are supposed to be is empty. So I leave the corridor and go down the hall to the teachers’ room. I find James drinking a Pepsi and reading about one of his favorite baseball players who has broken a leg while sliding into base.

“Where’s Tony?” I ask.

“He died,” James replies.

I stand there for a moment, holding my clipboard and waiting for clarification. When it doesn’t come, I ask, “Well, was that a surprise? I mean was it expected?”

“Oh, sure, we knew he would die soon. His parents have always known he wouldn’t reach puberty.”

I sit down and try to figure out how to note this on my observation forms. As I fill out the various summaries and end-of-quarter grade reports on James, a question keeps coming to mind, so eventually I ask, “Don’t you ever feel kind of silly teaching someone to read when you know he’ll never use it?”

“Of course.”

“Well, then, why do you do it?”

James looks up from his paper, and I can see that he is giving it some thought. Eventually he responds. “Two reasons. First of all, I am the teacher here. What I do is teach. That’s the only reason I really have to justify being with any of the patients. The nurses and doctors do medical things, the physical therapist does physical therapy, and during the time that the students are in my class, I teach. It’s what I’m paid to do, and I believe I should do my job.

“Secondly,” he goes on without hesitation, “I believe that learning is the essential human experience. I think that learning is part of living a full life. And I would never deprive a person of the experience of learning just because I thought he or she might not make use of what was learned.”

REVIEW

What was the essential difference between Raymond’s teacher and Tony’s teacher? At first the comparison really does not seem like a fair one. It was the teaching behaviors of Raymond’s teacher that clearly made her a bad example and it was the belief system of Tony’s teacher that makes him seem inspirational. But those two factors may not be completely unrelated. I doubt that any teacher with James’ philosophy would subject students to instruction as bad as that used by Raymond’s teacher. Still I am sure that there are many caring teachers out there who do not know how to teach well. James had it all.

Later, as I looked at my observation forms for the quarter, it occurred to me that some critical things were going on between James and Tony that I had not summarized on my observation forms. There are certain “agreements” or “contracts” that evolve between teachers and students that are critical to the definition of a teacher and cannot even exist in the absence of a student. And, as a result, I would now argue that without exceptional students none of us can ever become exceptional teachers. That opportunity is the gift that students give to us.

You hear a lot of talk in special ed. about the limitations students have. Things like low IQ or deprived background. Sometimes I think I see teachers who give up in the face of those limitations, and I’ve even had them tell me, “I don’t care what you say, I know this kid can’t learn. He is just too handicapped.” These days when I hear that sort of talk I view it as a breaking of the contract and it leads me to feel almost as sorry for the teacher as I feel for their students. It makes me think of James and how, by honoring his contract with Tony, he improved both of their lives.

Death certainly has a way of limiting learning.

It seems to me that if James could disregard death, the rest of us can push our way through the daily irritants, disheartening test scores and teacher lounge gossip that come between our students and ourselves. It is our job to do so. The only limitation we should concern ourselves with is our own skill. You see James didn’t just go through some sort of ceremonial show of teaching to care for a sick child. His instruction was excellent! He passed the practicum.

NOTE 1. Today it is common to refer to severely disabled students as being those with low-incidence disabilities because they are the smallest proportion of those students in special education. Similarly, mildly disabled students are often said to have a high-incidence disability.

Zigmond, N. (1997). Educating students with disabilities: The future of special education. In J.W. Lloyd, E.J. Kameenui, & D. Chard (Eds.). (1997). Issues in educating with disabilities. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.