Sadie Guthrie, special education teacher at Lawton Alternative School in San Francisco, who started a "coffee cart" to get her students out into the school community and contributing in meaningful ways.
As part of my teacher's licensure program, Teach Now, I've been learning more about special education. Before this module, I didn't know much. In my schools growing up, special education students would leave class for a few hours a day to work in a smaller group with the special ed teacher. I knew this support was being provided, but I didn't think much about it. Then when I started teaching I was working at universities and as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi, Africa, and neither educational setting really offered special support for students with learning disabilities. When I thought of special education, I certainly didn't think about progressive initiatives like the one started by special education teacher Sadie Guthrie at Lawton Alternative School in San Francisco.
She started a project called “coffee cart” at her school. Guthrie and her students planned and carried out a coffee and snack service for teachers. They arranged with a local bakery to receive baked goods donations. Each student has a role in the operation, from taking teachers’ orders to being a barista or cashier. Every day, students go to pick up the baked goods, make the coffee, and then go through the school delivering teachers’ orders. The daily coffee service provides teachers a chance to get to know the students Guthrie works with, and the students themselves feel a sense of pride and accomplishment because they have a legitimate and appreciated role in the school community. Only these particular students get to run the coffee cart, so it’s really cool for them. Through the experience, they’re also learning life skills like navigating public transportation in their visits to the bakery and handling the logistical concerns of running a business. The project meets these students’ particular needs in a creative and effective way. It also enhances the entire school community.
Lawton school principal Gina Ferrante recognizes the potential of such activities to enhance special education and schools. "Any school in this country could take this example to help transform their own school community, to help make sure that every child feels accepted, that every child feels that they belong, that they have a place," she said. I truly hope that the future of special education, and education in general, will include lots more projects like Sadie's, that break down barriers between the classroom and the wider world and give students a meaningful role to play in their learning communities.
The future of special education will also need to reckon with several challenges that teachers and school counselors face today. As part of my exploration of this topic, I interviewed my current school’s pedagogical psychologist, Angie Renolds, and a 7th grade math teacher, Patty Baker, from the school in Iowa where I grew up. From Angie, I got a sense of some of the limitations we face at our school when working with special-needs students. From Patty, I got a detailed look at the strategies a classroom teacher implements to aid special-needs students, as well as the pressures teachers are under in the public school setting.
Angie’s overall theme was the importance of administrative initiative in meeting the needs of special education students. Currently, we have students with diagnosed learning disabilities in every grade and almost every class. Our school has several students with ADHD, and other learning disabilities include dyslexia and visual and spatial deficit. Potential learning disabilities are detected based on teacher observation and/or assessment results, and sometimes parent concern. Students suspected of having a learning disability are given a psycho-pedagogical evaluation, which indicates student IQ in cognitive and academic abilities. The evaluation also assesses visual and motor skills, attention, and emotional dynamics. Because the school has no special education department, learning support is coordinated by the psychologists. They offer targeted instructional strategies to teachers, and it depends on teachers to take the initiative to follow these recommendations. After school, therapists are often involved in providing additional academic and/or emotional support, and parents take an active role.
One plus for students with special learning needs in our community is parent openness. Angie explained that almost all parents of special-needs students are open to the interventions the school proposes, and in some cases parents even request the psycho-pedagogical evaluation themselves. This parent support extends to hiring therapists and tutors, resulting in improved learning gains and comfort level at school for their children. However, in Angie’s view what is really needed is clearer policies and a much more significant investment by our school’s administration in addressing learning disabilities.
Patty spoke at length about the process for referring and teaching special education students at her middle school. Students with special needs are most often diagnosed in elementary, so she has rarely been involved in the referral process herself. Still, she was able to offer several details on how the process works. Students being considered for special education services are given computational and problem solving evaluations to determine if there is a significant discrepancy between their performance and the grade level norm. There are also observations of the student in class, done by special education staff and the AEA (Area Education Agency). If it becomes clear that a student is quite discrepant from his or her peers academically or emotionally, he or she will qualify for special education services. Then the IEP (Individualized Education Program) is drafted, with specific goals, accommodations, and time frames for completion or re-evaluation.
Before a student is referred for special education services, a teacher needs to try (and document) several interventions. In the case of math, interventions can include cutting down on the number of problems in practice activities, seating students near the teacher during direct instruction, seating a student next to a specific classmate for peer help, providing partial notes for lessons, working one-on-one with the student for reteaching during study hall, assigning the student for computer-based remediation, or assigning the student to the “success” study hall, where they will receive homework monitoring and targeted support.
Once a student has been referred and an IEP has been written, Patty’s classroom accommodations include slowing down the overall instructional pace to make sure that all students are able to be successful, at the same time adding extension activities for students who are more comfortable with the content and may finish early. She also pays careful attention to student grouping dynamics and tries to maintain firm class control, nurturing an environment in which all students feel comfortable to learn and try, without always being successful the first time. She also encourages students to show patience toward classmates who may need more time to achieve the learning objectives.
Patty’s response was quite honest, in the sense that she admitted that these accommodations take an enormous amount of time. Creating adapted notes, increasing copied notes or assignments to a size of 150%, making sure that certain students are placed strategically in the classroom is “just simply overwhelming,” she confessed. She lamented that some other students receive less attention because of the time and attention she needs to dedicate to students with special needs.
The article "The special education referral process," from Project Idea, adds a few more details to Patty's description. According to this article, when a teacher, counselor, parent, or other concerned party has reason to suspect that a student has a learning disability, the first step is for the teacher and parent/guardian to meet and discuss the issue. If, after meetings and follow-ups, it is suspected that the student may need more support than can be offered in the regular classroom alone, the teacher informs the parents that he or she will be requesting help from the school-based pre-referral team. The pre-referral team suggests interventions to try with the student before referring him or her for special education services. If these interventions are not fully effective, the child is referred for special education and an evaluation is completed. If the evaluation demonstrates that the child does in fact need special education, then an IEP is written. The IEP team includes parents/guardians, at least one classroom teacher, at least one special education teacher, a representative of the local education agency, an individual who can interpret the instructional implications of the evaluation, and, when appropriate, the student him or herself. Once the IEP is implemented, student progress is monitored and the IEP re-evaluated on an ongoing basis.
In comparing my two interviewee’s responses, I can see that in our Mexico City private school, infrastructure and clear policy is lacking. Students tend to receive the special support they need outside of school hours. At Patty's middle school in rural Iowa, the policy is clearly defined. Patty knows exactly what the expectations are and how she should fulfill them. As a result, special education students receive significant support within the regular education classroom. However, the requirements sometimes put an untenable burden on the classroom teacher. Neither setting is ideal. In both cases, it would seem that policy leaders underestimate the demands of meeting the needs of all students, and do not provide the resources necessary for the task. Still, caring individuals step in to fill the gap and make the system work for students.
Soon, I will be one of those teachers working with special education students. I'm not planning to go into special education, but, as Patty's interview made clear, all K-12 teachers are responsible for providing accommodated instruction for special education students in their classes. In the case of Patty's work in middle school math, the required accommodations (pre-written notes, extra large text, strategic placement in classroom, one-on-one tutoring, slowing class instruction and offering extension activities to students who finish early) are incredibly time consuming. However, having taught for several years and developed a passion for seeing all my students succeed, I'm willing to put in the extra work required. I harbor no illusions that teaching is or ever will be easy.
Still, I do harbor hope that our approaches to education will become more progressive on a large scale, not just in trend-setting schools like the School of One in New York, where students work in smaller groups with open and collaborative classroom design features and a personalized, largely computer-based curriculum. What seems to be required to make education in general as effective as it is at places like the School of One is a sense of vision for what is truly best for students, rather than a dogmatic adherence to the status quo. Along with this sense of vision, we need increased investment. What if we treated special education services in the U.S. as they do in Finland, where the majority of students participate in special education at some point during their K-12 journey? What if the referral process encompassed a wider range of learning difficulties, so that most students could quality for some kind of support? We would need more robust special education investment nationally, but if we are serious about matching the educational quality of countries like Finland, we should be willing to increase our investment.
In the meantime, I will keep seeking out creative ideas for supporting special education students, and all students, like the idea that Sadie Guthrie came up with at Lawton School. If more teachers look for ways to shake up the status quo, maybe we can transform teaching from within the classroom, rather than waiting for the magic solution to come down from national policy makers.
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