4 The Mild Class

Inside Special Education by Kenneth W. Howell

“I’d be happy if I never heard another addition fact for the rest of my life.”

Participant: Chris

Topic Overview:

· Resource class

· Curriculum

· Student Placement in Special Education

· Response To Intervention (RTI)

· Reading Comprehension

· Math Lessons

· Use of Correction and Feedback

· Teacher burnout

· Self-Contained Classrooms

· Mainstreaming

· Consultation

Chris works in Room 38. It’s a large room with about ten students at any given time. They fall into the mildly disabled range. That range could include students labeled educable mentally retarded, learning disabled, language delayed, or even mildly behavior disordered. It is a resource room, meaning that students only spend part of their day with Chris and the rest of it in general education classes. The student’s ranges in age, but most are late primary (ages ten to thirteen).

In Chris’s class, the students are working in what might best be described as a remedial (or delayed) curriculum. In general, they are doing exactly what “normal” students did at an earlier grade level. The content is phonics, math facts, vocabulary, spelling, and handwriting. These content areas are the same as you might find in a remedial reading or math program; however, this is a special education program, and it has students who have been evaluated, staffed, and placed according to special education criteria. Functionally, the students are in this special class because they are working at a curricular level that is too low for the regular grade-level teacher to accommodate. I’m going to elaborate briefly on what I mean by “functionally,” and I apologize if the next couple of pages seem a little basic to you. I also apologize to Chris for digressing in the middle of her class this way.

Schools have products that they are supposed to produce. The main one is a knowledgeable student. The teachers are supposed to teach something and the students are supposed to learn something. The something students are supposed to learn is the curriculum. The curriculum is made up of learning outcomes in content areas like reading and math. These outcomes vary in specificity from school district to school district and are known as objectives. Objectives are expectations. They are what staff in the districts think their students will be able to do when school is over.

The curriculum (objective list) is made up long before the kid comes along. Usually, it is portioned out by grade level and attempts are made to coordinate the different content areas and grade levels so that teachers and students can handle the curriculum well. Teachers at different grade levels try to buy or make materials that teach the objectives that have been assigned to the same grade level that they (and their students) are assigned to. Devising a curriculum is almost always done very informally, and the results are seldom clear but, supposedly, the whole thing should look something like Table l:

TABLE 1
CONTENT AREA OBJECTIVES
	Reading
	(Decoding)	Math	Spelling	Social Studies
				20 _________
		24 _________		19 _________
Grade 6		23 _________		18 _________
		22 _________		17 _________
		21 _________	13 _________	16 _________
		20 _________		15 _________
Grade 5		19 _________		14 _________
		18 _________		13 _________
	17 _________	17 _________	13 _________	12 _________
		16 _________		11 _________
Grade 4		15 _________		10 _________
	16 _________	14 _________		9 _________
	15 _________	13 _________	13 _________	8 _________
	14 _________	12 _________
Grade 3	13 _________	11 _________	12 _________	7 _________
	12 _________	10 _________	11 _________	6 _________
	11 _________	9 _________	10 _________	5 _________
	10 _________
	9 _________	8 _________	9 _________
Grade 2	8 _________	7 _________	8 _________
	7 _________	6 _________	7 _________	4 _________
	6 _________	5 _________	6 _________	3 _________
	5 _________		5 _________
	4 _________	4 _________	4 _________
Grade 1	3 _________	3 _________	3 _________
	2 _________	2 _________	2 _________	2 _________
	1 _________	1 _________	1 _________	1 _________

Table 1 is a curriculum. It has four content areas, and each area has many objectives (the numbered lines) within one of six grade levels. If everything worked, a fourth-grade teacher would be responsible for: Decoding Objectives 15 and 16; Math Objectives 13, 14, 15, and 16; Spelling Objective 13; and Social Studies Objectives 8, 9, 10 and 11.

While my model curriculum isn’t exact, some things should be noticed. First of all, more is taught in some content areas at one grade level than is taught at another. For example, there are five decoding objectives in the first grade and one in the fifth, while there are two social studies objectives in the first and four in the fifth. Grades four, five, and six have essentially the same spelling objective, number 13 (it would probably be “spell words”).

Now let’s get back to special ed. If Ralph comes into grade four, he should be starting to work on Reading Objective 15, Math Objective 13, Spelling Objective 13, and Social Studies Objective 8. Let’s say that Ralph is four objectives behind in all areas. That means he is working on third-grade decoding, third-grade math, second-grade spelling, and second-grade social studies. This is shown in Table 2:

TABLE 2
	Ralph's Expected Objective		Minus Four Objectives	=	Ralph's Current Objective	Ralph's Current Grade Level as seen in Table 1
Decoding	15	-	4	=	11	3
Math	13	-	4	=	9	3
Spelling	13	-	4	=	9	2
Social Studies	8	-	4	=	4	2

Looking at Table 2 from a teacher’s point of view, Ralph seems worse off in social studies than in decoding because he is further behind in terms of grade level. Actually, he is equally behind in objectives. The thing that confuses all of this is that objectives are sometimes assigned to grade levels in an almost arbitrary manner, often without consideration for their importance or difficulty. At the same time, many teachers take responsibility for only those objectives at their grade level; therefore, the fourth-grade teacher might say, “I’ll work with Ralph in decoding and math because he is already doing third grade work. But you can’t expect me to teach second-grade material in the fourth grade. Someone else has to teach him spelling and social studies.”

Often students who are behind (or ahead) in content can’t work well in the regular school system because the teachers are only prepared to teach objectives at their own grade level. Regardless of why a student is behind in objectives, at some point, if he or she falls far enough behind, the teacher will say, “Someone else has to teach this kid science and social studies.” At that point, the kid becomes a candidate for special education. That’s what I meant when I said, “Functionally, the students are in this special class because they are working at a curricular level that is too low for the regular grade-level teacher to accommodate.”

The thing that gets a kid in special education is the referral. And the referral is almost always for lack of progress in some curricular area (including the very ill defined area of social behavior). Psychological evaluations, child-study team meetings, IEP production, and placement decisions all follow referral. Referrals result from being behind in curriculum, so being behind in curriculum is the operational definition of “mildly disabled”.

Any second now we’ll get back to Room 38, but first let me mention three additional points.

1. Mildly disabled students like those in Chris’s class account for roughly 80% of all of the students in special education.

2. The number of content areas in which a student is behind has something to do with the type of services a student in special education will be given. That is, a student behind in one area will probably get help in a pull-out “resource” program, but a student behind in several areas may end up in a self-contained program. Of course how far behind the student is also has something to do with placement.

3. The quality of instruction in the general class, and the proficiency with which a general education teacher handles a range of student skills, are also important in determining who does, and does not, get referred to special education. One teacher might refer a student that another would not. This means that a regular class teacher’s inability to handle a range of student skills can be as big an origin of special services as the variability in the student’s skills.

4. In general, the best indication that a student needs special education is evidence that the student does not respond to reasonable and high-quality interventions in the regular class setting. Data on a student’s response to intervention, or the lack of it, should be a part of any argument for shifting the student to services outside of the mainstream.

As I enter the room, Chris is working with a group of six students clustered in front of the board. Two students are working alone at their desks, while four others work with an aide. The board says:

want		Kathi would --
water		play with him.
wall		teach him tricks.
wasp		eat with him.
watch		give him a name.
wash		give him a home.
wand		buy him a fish.
walrus
	Walrus
		soft body
		silly face
Ad ver tise
Advertisement	--->	commercial
		try to sell something

In the corner is a sign that says,

“Be friendly with classmates”

The room has five clusters of tables. Student folders sit on each table. There are fabric-covered room dividers and a large set of freestanding bookshelves to break up the space. Signs hang from the ceiling with words like “exit” and “tomorrow” printed on them. Everything is covered with posters, signs, and student artwork. The space above our heads is busy with the gently rotating signs.

Chris is introducing vocabulary for an upcoming story.

“Plan.” She writes it on the board. “Who can give me a sentence?”

“I have a plan,” dictates a girl with pink yarn bows in her hair. Chris writes it out and underlines the target word.

“What’s the underlined word?” she asks.

“Plan,” they all respond at once.

“Everyone read the sentence.”

They read aloud in unison. No one misses a beat! (NOTE 1)

Chris writes plum on the board below plan.

“Who can give me a sentence?”

John, a thin boy, replies, “I have a plum on my thumb,” with a smile to the side of his face.

She hesitates. “--On my thumb? Can you have a plum on your thumb?”

She glances at me and then at the ceiling. “I guess. . .”

“Stuck in my thumb,” John reminds.

“Oh!” she comments to herself. “Good sentence--It just took me a second to get it.” She finishes the drill and then tells them to open their books.

“I want you to read the first paragraph to yourselves and tell me what Dad was going to do.” As they read, she clears off the board. When they’ve finished, Chris asks, “Who can tell me?” (NOTE 2)

Someone raises a hand and tells the group, “He was going to dig a pit next to the kitchen.”

Chris looks around the group and gets nods of agreement. She writes, Dig a pit next to the kitchen on the board. She is left-handed and writes with her right hand on her hip.

“What was he going to do with the pit?” she asks. No one knows.

“OK--read the next paragraph and find out.”

The lesson proceeds in steps. Each reading is preceded by questioning and is followed by the answer and an extension of the answer into a question for the next paragraph. By the end, an outline of the story has been recorded on the board, and Chris uses it to summarize. It’s a nice, tight lesson. It has clear purpose, is easy to understand, is consistent, and has a natural summary. Lots of teachers don’t summarize well, I realize.

Other students are working alone at their desks. They get up and move around to get materials and Kleenex without asking permission. They are on task and well behaved without any attention or direction from Chris or her aide. I sit at a table and sneak a look at someone’s folder. It’s your basic plastic spiral folder with pockets in the front and back. The front pocket holds work that needs to be done, while the back one has stuff that’s finished. The student’s name is on the spine and it’s been personalized with stickers of animals and hearts.

Some of the pages seem to have schedules or directions for working on them, as opposed to actual work. For example, there is a page of spelling with directions and spelling words handwritten in like this: (NOTE 3)

Words to Learn
1.	sand
2.	band
3.