Learning and forgetting: Maximising learning opportunities for students with disabilities.
Views are from my lived experience as an autistic person, my personal experiences and from the study opportunities that I am lucky enough to have had.
A little bit of my research history (a Segway, I promise)
Now, if someone had told me that structured literacy was the way to becoming literate for students with intellectual developmental disabilities (SwIDD) back in 2020, I probably would have ignored them. After all, the message I was hearing was that SwIDD needed a different method to learn. In the end I found myself here, promoting explicit teaching and structured literacy for SwIDD after a lot of research and relearning… plus we have the data to prove it!
Our school’s journey into this space was driven by our abysmal benchmarking results back in 2019. I was horrified and gutted, our university did not set us up to teach our students. I was about 6-7 years into my teaching career, and I had spent all of those years trying to improve my teaching practices to support our students with an ID.
So then 2020 happened (Covid… ahem), and I enrolled in a Grad.Cert (Literacy) to get access to research and to round out my M.Ed (Language Intervention and Hearing Impairment) degree. To be honest the content was not great but all of our assignments related to our context, so I was able to deep dive into the research for our students with an ID. Let’s just say that I was again, incredibly disappointed as I discovered that there was (and still) not a lot of research for students with an ID and literacy. What is out there is often too specific, (e.g. phonological awareness) or too broad (e.g. oral language) or focuses on whole language methods (sight words), and I didn’t find a lot of research on ‘writing’ for students with an ID (this is still a heavily under-researched area). So, this reinforced the huge conundrum in our space, of what to choose or use, to improve reading and writing for students with an ID. However, this research did point me in the direction of dyslexia research, so I grabbed onto that.
How did I end up here?
After I finished the Grad Cert, I naively approached Prof Pamela Snow and Prof Tanya Serry and asked them if they knew anyone taking on research students. I say naively because
I didn’t know that the Science of Reading space existed
I didn’t actually realise how important they are in the space- SoR hadn’t really made it into the special ed world
So after a few meetings they decided to “make room in their little boat” and took a chance with me, and Dr Anne Southall joined my supervision team. So for the last 3 years I have been ‘officially’ researching under the guidance of my very knowledgeable and experienced supervision team. What a huge learning curve it is!
So, now I write these blogs to share my research/PL/reading discoveries that have influenced our schools literacy/academic journey… with the evidence to prove that it works.
The subconscious bias of a diagnosis: what impacts learning?
I feel that one of the biggest hurdles/questions that educators face is ‘Can a student learn to read and write (enough) when they have working memory, processing, language, executive function etc. deficits?’. I am sure that I am not the only one who may have unintentionally lowered my learning expectation for my students. On reflection, I believe that it is our subconscious bias that impacts and hinders, a student with a disability to achieve, more than their actual capability.
Don’t get me wrong, I was one of those teachers who devoured all of the reports in a bid to try and understand ‘what I had to do’ for each student in my class. However, on reflection this did not help as I was trying to put every recommended strategy in place, for every student, to account for all of their differences in cognition. It was overwhelming, to say the least, and I never knew what strategy had the most impact because I was using so many different ones.
After moving into the structured literacy space I am now more interested in data, then a diagnosis or IQ score, Linda Siegel actually found that IQ is not as important as previously thought.
IQ is irrelevant to the definition of learning disabilities
Motivation, engagement and wellbeing, for students, is driven through increasing academic growth and success in learning, and these components are more impactful than the results of a diagnosis. Over time, I am less worried about a diagnosis and more focussed on what we can do for the students in front of us.
Why motivation theories in education haven't changed in decades (and why it matters for schools)
What I have learned is that teaching with the right type of instructional practices, at a Tier 1, has more impact on a child’s life, than a piece of paper with individualised ‘tailored strategies’.
Forgetting.
This leads me into the forgetting conundrum. Historically, it has been assumed that SwIDD would go backwards over the school holidays, due to them having a disability. Through effective Tier 1 instructional practices every educator can mitigate this holiday slump and just do a quick refresh to continue a SwIDD’s learning trajectory.
Now, I know that this backwards slide is not because of a disability but is mostly to do with ‘they hadn’t really learned it’. The information was not moving from working memory (WM) to their long-term memory (LTM), and I was making judgements on subjects/lessons that I had just taught, so the information was fresh. I never revisited it until the next time I had to teach it, which could have been a couple of terms away, at best- I hadn’t heard of interleaving- now I know better.
This is why yearly scope and sequences, that do not have interleaving built in, is detrimental to our students. Breaking the curriculum down so it becomes a checklist of concepts taught, is compliance, not teaching, and definitely is not best practice for students’ learning and retaining information.
Learning
To ‘learn’ crudely means to transfer information from our working memory (WM) into our long-term memory (LTM). WM is fleeting and any information in it can be easily lost, but LTM is infinite, although some connections do weaken over time if they haven’t been used recently. To store information or knowledge into our LTM we need to link new information from our WM to a previous memory (information) and build on it- in other words, we build knowledge onto previous knowledge. For students with a learning disability this can mean thousands of repetitions to move information from WM to LTM, but on average most typically developing child needs around 7 repetitions to move information from WM to LTM.
Through refinement (and more research and data) I have also realised that SwIDD need an ‘anchor’ in the form of a reference point to support them to map new information to information in their memory.
In English, we can use a mentor text as an anchor. When I was trying to describe this process to someone I used the analogy of kites, so I have tried to replicate this idea into the diagram below.
This improves student’s knowledge of language comprehension e.g. background knowledge, vocabulary, genre, questioning and syntax, through using the information in a book as an anchor to teach new skills. The easiest way to art this process is using the elements from Colourful Semantics.
For example: To teach a student to write a sentence
Teach the students the vocabulary from the book.
Teachers (with the students) isolate the ‘who’, ‘what doing?’ and ‘what’ from a section of the book.
Teachers orally model a new sentence using this information (students can form their own)
Teachers use guided practice to write the sentence
Then students attempt to write the sentence, focusing on the correct syntax.
This significantly reduces cognitive load because we are providing the vocabulary, for them to focus on sentence structure. Over time this process includes more elements such as ‘where’, ‘when’, different punctuation, and conjunctions such as ‘but’, ‘because’ and ‘so’. When students are asked to complete work independently, the ‘anchor’ (book) supports them to retrieve the information/concepts/vocabulary and then they can use it both orally and in their writing.
The retrieval and repetition of vocabulary from the book helps students to move the vocabulary into LTM, which then becomes automatic. Automatic access to language is crucial in sentence building. Once the student has learned the structure of the book, it is easier for them to sequence the story. Which then leads to learning to write a story utilising components of Story Champs, such as using actions and feelings in their language and writing.
It is advisable to not ability group students for these lessons but teach all of the students in the class even, if there are varying levels of up to 6 different curriculum levels. It is important to choose books based on your highest student’s comprehension level and then scaffold the information up. This can be done by explicitly teaching the vocabulary and background themes within the book so that every student is accessing age-appropriate content in the lesson. Writing tasks can then be scaffolded at individual student level (from labelling to writing a story) so that everyone is successful.
It is this process that has had the most impact on student learning (along with SSP). It is simple, yet deserves its own book to unpack it in full- but at this point you may just have to settle for my blogs.
The most important thing is to use one book for a full term so students can recall elements automatically, and for all of the above reasons (and no our students do not get bored). Ultimately by using a book for a term it works to effectively reduce the cognitive load for students, while maintaining high expectations and improved their learning outcomes like never before.
High expectations with explicit teaching and low cognitive load = successful students.
