Michigan State University > College of Education : JDSDE-Author-Corner : Academic Status - messages

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for DHH students

sreed — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:43:57 GMT

You make some excellent points about parent involvement and how difficult it is for some parents to be involved academically. Once you get over being upset with them for not being involved and find out why, it makes all the difference in the world and you can help them become involved. You've worked to empower your parents, something all teachers need to do. For our DHH students I think this is especially important. We as teachers have to find the ways to involve our parents and the first thing to do is to find out why they aren't involved. Then you can work to 'fix' the situation. One of the principals in our study found that having food at every parent-teacher or PTA meeting was what worked for her parents. Other schools/teachers will have other solutions, I'm sure. Thank you for participating in our discussion!

Sue

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for DHH students

dcs4 — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:19:05 GMT

Although I am new to the field of Deaf Ed, the twenty years I spent as a Bilingual/ELL teacher my colleagues and I also faced some of the same challenges that you’ve all described in your discussions: lack of: parental support, homework, and student study/organizational habits. It was extremely frustrating, most of all, not having parental support, because as we all know that alone aids in overall student achievement immensely. Once we decided to take the approach of building a rapport with our parents – getting to know them as personally as possible, we began to realize that they felt powerless. By this practice we learned that the majority of them did care, did try, but were so “lost” themselves when it came to education. We were not able to take the learning to them, but were able to schedule parent- learning sessions two to three times a year, where the entire family would show up in large amounts. Once we realized how much they were lacking themselves (due to the way they grew up, not being able to attend meetings because they worked nights, etc.) we went so far as to stop assigning homework and opened up student tutoring sessions before and/or after school. They were very supportive of this idea and made sure to send in their paperwork. Suddenly, the very same parents who seemed “less concerned” were our biggest supporters.

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for General Ed. Dand HH Students

dcs4 — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 02:37:25 GMT

Willie, your school sounds very interesting! Reading about it reminded me of the statement made by Marschark and Spencer (2003), "Extensive clinical and research efforts indicate that, although most users find them useful, cochlear implants do not change deaf people into hearing people". Just because deaf children are amplified (in any form) mainstreaming them does not mean that they’ve suddenly turned into these perfect little hearing people who can perform on queue. It seems like the ideal situation in that, if I understand correctly, the teachers may be afforded the opportunity to, as a team, implement the ideas they brainstorm during team meetings. I especially love how the children are not mainstreamed and overlooked once they reach a certain level. The dual program of the Willie Ross School for the Deaf sounds as though they are given the chance to ease into the hearing world while they strengthen their roots in the Deaf world. It sounds like a great way to not only build academics, but a great way to grow some very self-confident people.

Marschark, M. and Spencer, E. (2003). Cochlear implants: Issues and implications. Oxford handbook of deaf studies, language, and education (p.434). New York: Oxford University Press.

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for DHH students

santia — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:54:46 GMT

I am sorry to have taken so long to post a reply here. I was away for a little while and then did not look at the right discussion.

I do think that you have named all the complex communication skills that students need to develop in order to participate in classroom discussion. At the same time they develop these communication skills by being part of class discussion and having access to all the different ideas that come to the forefront during these discussions. So, like all learning it is circular. You need some skills to participate, but you also learn the skills while participating. So of course, when we find that children report great difficulty in participating in the class we need to look at developing pre-requisite skills. But I think it would be a mistake to simply pull them out from a classroom because they don't participate sufficiently!

I do agree with you Gen, that it is so important for administrators and program directors to understand that just watching an interpreter is not access to classroom instruction. So, more research needed!! We know some things through our own experience, but experience is not sufficient to persuade an administrator to invest money. Research results can be persuasive. That is why I really push my pre-service teachers to learn to read and understand the research.

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for General Ed. Dand HH Students

santia — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:08:25 GMT

Thank you for sharing this model. Being with the general education students body seems to be beneficial to teachers as they learn everyday about the expectations for the curriculum, for student learning and behavior. I have found that teachers (and researchers) also become more appreciative of the range of students in general education and realize that some problems have to do with for e.g. being in middle school, not being deaf!.

I have often wondered why we think of placement as an end rather than a means. I actually would like to see a model where children can receive the level of service they need, meet a criterion, and then move to a different level of integration as needed.

Another partnership model that we have been examining is the co-enrollment model with two teachers co-teaching. Our data that were published in Communication Disorders Quarterly showed that these deaf students had good social skills and were also making a year's academic progress in a year's time.

Academic Status : re: Risk scale

santia — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:01:17 GMT

Kathy and Sue and I never know how to design a small study! Let's see if we hear from anyone else re a risk scale.

Academic Status : General Ed Success for General Ed. Dand HH Students

willie — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:20:50 GMT

Thank-you for the interesting article. I wanted to share with you the dual campus model of the Willie Ross School for the Deaf. In summary we offer two campuses one a traditional center based campus. The other we refer to as our partnership campus. There are three levels elem. middle and high school all housed in a public school system. For our students for whom this is the correct setting we offer mainstreaming as a service rather then a goal. Our students enjoy both the benefits of being enrolled in a school for the Deaf and being in a public school. The model has shown us that given the diversity in the population incremental mainstraming is often the most apporiate approach. Many of the issues you highlight in your article are ones which our school has to address. We have found the combined expertise of both sytems sometimes can help.

Academic Status : re: Risk scale

GHelzer — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 02:05:50 GMT

*I* would like to see something like the scale you are describing. For one thing, it would give us a concrete way to justify asking for more support than our administrators are currently comfortable giving. For another, I think working through a tool like that would help us make sure we are covering all the bases when we make our placement and service decisions. It sounds like another big job on your end--but what a beautiful way to use your research to make a change for kids!

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for DHH students

GHelzer — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 01:57:10 GMT

Thanks for your reply! This is INTERESTING stuff, and so relevant to all of us.

It surprises me that the language skills only explained 16% of the student outcomes, because I would have thought that deficits in the more complex language skills--organizing and expressing thoughts and ideas, changing perspectives, drawing inferences, and the like--would have made following class discussions and completing homework a major challenge in the upper grades. Hopefully the relatively low impact of language delays on academic achievement is a sign that these kids are getting good support services and modifications outside of/in addition to the regular classroom?

I think your point about the need for support services is really a big issue. We are fighting the impression that if a child is placed in the regular classroom and is watching an interpreter, then he should act like a "regular" kid without needing any other help. Hearing aids, cochlear implants, and interpreters are all great things, but we have to keep educating our administrators that these kids are still at risk, and that lots of things have to go right for regular classroom placements to work.

I am looking foward to reading the full article when I get ahold of it!
Thanks again,
Gen

Academic Status : Risk scale

santia — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:21:02 GMT

As we look at our data both quantitative and qualitative, I have been toying with the idea of using the information to develop a risk factor scale. I haven’t quite thought it through, but it seems to me that we might be able to rate risk factors, develop some index of cumulative risk, and then match the kind of services and the intensity of services based on the results of the scale.
In my last response I wrote that we mostly seem to think in terms of placement rather than services. We also think of placement as being permanent, so when we change placement we somehow take for granted that we have changed the intensity of services and I just don’t always see that as being true. I also think that administrators need something concrete on which to base the intensity of services.
Do any of you out there think that developing such a scale might be a good idea? I know that the Colorado CHIP program does something like this for preschool children.

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for DHH students

santia — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:15:52 GMT

Gen,
We did get a lot of data on the students, but since we did not want to add to the assessment burden for teachers we asked them to complete a simple functional rating scale for receptive and expressive communication. The scale is a 3-point scale and asks teachers about communication skills within the child’s typical setting. Our analyses of our other extensive quantitative data tell us that the students’ expressive and receptive communication is significantly related to academic outcomes. However, it only explains about 16% of the outcome. We did not get standardized language assessments because no single assessment would give us the information we needed.

I do think that students who have little interaction at home are going to have deficits in language. I really think that teachers of deaf and hard of hearing children must always pay attention to language, as it is the foundation of all other learning. There just however seem to be so many factors that influence a child’s success. I am coming to believe that we have to think of cumulative risk and provide services based on the child’s cumulative risk, and if all other facilitators are in place, language delay may be the only risk and perhaps could be remedied with intensive intervention. The child that you describe would obviously benefit from intensive language intervention.

However, the support structures and educational structures we have built don’t always provide us the ability to provide such intensive remediation. We mostly seem to think in terms of placement rather than services. We also think of placement as being permanent, so when we change placement we somehow take for granted that we have changed the intensity of services and I just don’t always see that as being true.

One of our case study students who started at the bottom of the ladder sounds a lot like the student you described. About three years later this student seemed to have made huge gains in achievement (we are just beginning to look at that data so I can’t be much more definitive). I suspect that for this student the cumulative risk was low.

I am putting up a question of my own that I hope to get some response to. Please do all of you take a look at the second strand on this discussion board. I would love to get responses from teachers and parents.

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for DHH students

GHelzer — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:40:36 GMT

Drs. Reed and Antia,
Thank you so much for making yourselves available in this discussion! I am glad to have the opportunity to spend more time thinking about your work and how we can use it to improve services for our students. I think we usually have sort of a vague gut feeling of what successful students do in the classroom, but it is much more challenging to nail down the factors that cause kids to struggle. Your study is just the kind of information we teachers need to start targeting those detractors and make a case to our administrators for beefing up intervention to at-risk students.

I don't have a copy of the full article yet, but I have a question for you from reading the summary you posted on this site. It would fall under the "child factors". You had briefly described a typical successful student and a struggling one, and the thing that stood out most strongly to me was that the struggling student was unable to communicate with his family. When I see kids in that situation, I am struck by the years of background information and conversational practice they miss out on through the course of ordinary daily conversation with the adults in their lives. I would expect that even a very bright child with that sort of deficit in language experience might have trouble negotiating the fast-paced, abstract language of a classroom.

I see that you gathered information on individual student demographics--degree of hearing loss, mode of communication, academic achievement scores, and so on. I am curious to know if you have information on students' language abilities and how strongly those skills affected the students' levels of success in the mainstream setting. It seems to me that even if a student's rate of learning was good, the parents were supportive, and the team was working well together, a student would still have a hard time if he couldn't understand and use the sorts of vocabulary, language structures, and functions we expect kids to have mastered when they start their school years. Did your study include that sort of information, and if so, did you see that having mastered more complex language skills made a significant difference in how well kids succeeded in mainstream settings?
Thank you for your time!
Gen

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for DHH students

sreed — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:30:24 GMT

Mary,
You've shared some wonderful self advocacy writing ideas that have real life applications. As an itinerant (for 11 years) and as a center based preschool teacher, I worked at getting writing into my curriculum on a daily basis and always as something real. Writing a letter to ask someone a question, making a list of who was there for the day, writing an explanation of their personal hearing loss for next year's teacher, etc. But it takes careful thought and hard work to come up with good assignments that have real life meaning and that will help the student in the long run to be good advocates for themselves. It also takes hard work to finish such an involved project on an itinerant's schedule. Bravo to you!

Thank you to all the other respondents, too. As Shirin said in an earlier posting, it's so rewarding to know that people are out there reading our work and that it just might make a difference.

Sue

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for DHH students

mebrewer — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:33:29 GMT

Hello, Shirin--
Self-advocacy is a skill that we are trying, as itinerants, to start with our students from the youngest levels...kindergarden on up. By the time students are able to write a paragraph we are having them write an introductory letter to their next year's teacher or teachers at the end of the Spring semester. In this letter we ask them to write a bit about themselves as far as personal interests, strengths and weaknesses academically, and specific accommodations they might need due to the hearing loss. This takes some consideration and time but has been very successful. Teachers absolutely love this as it gives them some insights into the student and his or her personality right off the bat. Students enjoy the power it gives them over what type and how many accommodations they might have. Another strategy I employ is to write specific goals on the IEP for self-advocacy appropriate to the age and ability of the student. Some of the goals include: asking for repetition or restatement, requesting help, accessing notetaking services, utilizing FM technology as recommended, and taking the initiative to meet with teachers as needed to make up work or tests. We make sure the students become aware of all of the accommodations on their IEP's and how to request services be implemented (e.g. notetaking or captioning) if they are not already in place in a particular class. Younger students have proven by their actions that they can take charge and ask for repetition or restatement, to be moved to a better seat, or to have the captions turned on for videos. We need to empower our students so that they are capable adults when they leave 12th grade.
Mary

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for DHH students

santia — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:56:10 GMT

Do you know how wonderful it is for researchers to know that people actually can read their work and that it might make a difference? Thank you all for taking the time to respond and give us your thoughts. Thanks also to all you parents and teachers who are out there every day trying to make success for students.

When possible, technology is a great way to communicate. Since communication networks are key to success for students, maybe we can persuade administrators to put resources into communication technology. If you read the full article you will see that one of our findings was that every successful student had a communication network in place either between the parents and school, or between professionals serving the child. The children who were not doing well, often were missing both networks (but again not always!).
As Mark has mentioned team work is important. One mantra that a wise mentor drilled into my head when I started in the profession was that parents are doing the best they can at the time, and that it is our job as professionals to always support and not criticize. As a parent, I have been on the criticizing end and I know that it didn’t help my daughter or me. As Mark mentioned I needed to feel and know that the teachers were listening to me and that they did trust that I knew my daughter well! At the same time I appreciated any concrete suggestions from them.

Self-advocacy can be taught, and many of the teachers and parents we interviewed mentioned that it was a goal on the IEP. I would love to hear from some of you how you are developing self-advocacy.

Shirin

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for DHH students

Drolz — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:36:55 GMT

As a parent of a deaf child in a public school (who has an ASL interpreter and an itinerant teacher), I feel compelled to say that it's teamwork amongst everyone that makes it work. The itinerant teacher makes excellent use of the resources she has and is a great liaison for everyone involved.

It also helps that my wife has a background in Deaf Ed. She has this ability to use ASL in situations where English phrases, idioms, or word problems go over our son's head. You can practically see the light bulb turning on -- his eyes widen that very moment when everything suddenly makes sense. I'm not saying everyone needs a teaching degree to teach their own kids, or that ASL is the answer for everyone -- but I do see certain general strategies that can and should be shared with parents as much as possible. It's helped me, and I'm not a natural teacher.

So far our son is performing at grade-appropriate level (he's in 3rd grade) but it hasn't been easy. The itinerant teacher and the classroom teacher are quick to inform us of any gaps in learning so we can address them quickly. Lately it's been social studies so this summer they're giving us a head start on next year's 4th grade social studies curriculum by loaning us a textbook.

They're also concerned about self-advocacy. One of the inadvertent pitfalls of having so many support services in place is that a child may become accustomed to the extra help, at the expense of his or her ability to work independently. Great to see that they're on top of this.

By the way, obviously I'm only talking about one kid. To those of you on this list who are itinerant teachers with full caseloads -- I can't imagine how you keep up. Thank you for all that you do :)

Best regards,
Mark Drolsbaugh

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for DHH students

mebrewer — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:30:08 GMT

I totally agree with you regarding the increase in caseload numbers and consequently less time to get out to see students. In my 35 years as a teacher of the deaf/hard of hearing I certainly have seen the pendulum swing away from special day classes and into more of a full inclusion model. For many of my students this works quite well because they have excellent support services both at school and at home. However, it is always challenging to provide the level of service I see fit as the "expert" on deaf/hard of hearing education. I know that most of my colleagues are spread just as thinly as I am and face the same problems. All I can say is use technology to its fullest. I have a "current families" group in my e-mail address book. This is a quick way to get information to all the parents. I also contact teachers and other staff working with my students via e-mail. The response time is much quicker and I can make better use of my time. I can't tell you the number of hours lost in travel only to find the student absent, the class gone on a field trip, or special testing going on. Itinerant teaching is no place for inflexible people!!

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for DHH students

carolynviereckl — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:11:46 GMT

Very interesting research. As an itinerant for 25 years, I have seen similar patterns as the success factors and detractors. Highly motivated students with involved parents do well, students with additional factors (attention issues, family issues, ELL issues etc.) struggle.

It is interesting that you mentioned the amount of time the itinerant teacher of the D/HH dedicates as an indicator/factor of success. Over that time I have seen our itinerant program struggle with growing caseloads and less time for consultative duties. As the time for daily, or sometimes even weekly consultation decreases, I imagine that success for our students will also diminish. It also adds to the itinerant stress level. It is a struggle to make regular education administration understand the need for so call "extra" service consultation minutes. However, with research showing the consultation support influences student success we may be able to convince them to provide this invaluable support service.

Academic Status : re: General Ed Success for DHH students

santia — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:31:13 GMT

What was really interesting about the findings, for me at any rate, was that there was a lot of similarity in facilitators among the successful students, but each academically below average student had a different combination of detractors. In some cases the parents or guardians were extremely emotionally supportive but did not have the resources to support the student. If parents cannot get to the school because of work hours or transportation difficulties we are going to have to think strategies of communicating with them that don’t involve them traveling to the school. I think itinerant teachers should have time on their case load to communicate with parents and maybe even visit parents if need be. We make many efforts to involve families when children are toddlers – why not when children are in school? We may need to take services to the parents instead of asking the parents to come to where the services are. And, like the kids, each parent and family is different. So we probably need to tailor services to each family. We should also document successes and failures of our attempts to tailor family services, and if possible effects on student progress, so that we can make an argument for resources (and time is definitely a major resource) based on data.

Do I really think this will happen? Unfortunately, I realize that institutions are not very flexible, and administrators are constrained by lack of resources. However, administrators are also influenced by research. Thus making a case based on research is often more palatable than making a case based on individual anecdote.

As to getting students motivated – apparently extrinsic motivation works, but again, it needs to be tailored to each student. I’ll see what I can post about this – but others may have more insight and knowledge than I do on this topic.

Academic Status : General Ed Success for DHH students

mebrewer — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:16:20 GMT

I totally agree about the multiple factors affecting academic success for our deaf and hard of hearing students in the general education classroom. As an itinerant teacher for the deaf (35 years experience) I have found that unless the student is motivated, has a solid background in reading, language, and math, and has parents who are committed to their success even above average students can fail. For those of us at the school sites working directly with the DHH student the frustration comes from the lack of parental support regarding amplification, acceptance of the hearing loss, attendance, and study/organizational habits of the student. All of these are factors in the success or failure of our students. I have had students with the same ability end up in totally opposite positions by 12th grade because of lack of motivation and parental support. We have had parent involvement forums for our families but the ones who tend to show up are the ones who are already the strong, supportive parents!! What are your suggestions to effect change??