Book review of "Inclusion strategies for secondary classrooms".pptx

Editor's Notes

• #3: Mildred C. Gore is a special education teacher who taught 6th through 12th graders with learning problems for 15 years. She describes her book as “a quick resource for research-supported strategies” that she and her students “had field tested and found teacher-friendly”. The second edition includes information on Response to Intervention and No Child Left Behind, updated research, and new strategies. It is a book that “unlocks the doors to learning”.
• #4: The first edition of the book appeared in 2004, so clearly these concepts are not new to the experienced teacher, and even the second edition (2010) is now already dated. However, the book provides clear examples of field-tested, teacher-friendly approaches that support struggling students at various stages of academic development.
• #6: The author argues that new teachers need strong reasons for having to learn how to teach struggling learners. And this is why NCLB and RtI (the requirement of the reauthorisation of IDEA – Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) are so important.
• #7: There is plenty of literature on inclusion strategies but the purpose of this book is to provide middle and high school teachers with scientifically based UDL strategies (keys to the locks on the doors to learning) for whole-class instruction. The book is full of research-based strategies that have been proven to work well in diverse international school classrooms. The fact that it is presented as a set of “keys” (strategies) to unlock students’ “doors” (problems), makes it easy for teachers to choose and pick the right strategy for the problem they are struggling with in class.
• #8: M. C. Gore recreates Bloom’s taxonomy in the shape of a stronghold full of jewels (the big ideas of content teachers’ subjects) to which ELN students have no access unless teachers provide them with the right keys to the five rooms (Acquisition, Proficiency & Fluency, Maintenance, Generalisation & Transfer, and Adaptation) that correspond to each level of learning (Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation). Students must have full access to the first room before they can enter the second one.
• #9: Attention problems: sustained attention and selective attention (lack of focus or mindwandering). Perception problems: the image or sound has a difficult time finding the right place in the brain so that the brain can make sense of it. Discrimination problems: the ability to differentiate between two or more entities. Sequencing problems: the ability to put various items in order.
• #10: Confusion problems: linguistic, cognitive, confusion about how to execute a task, confusion about their confusion. Organisation problems: difficulty organising bits of information to consolidate them into concepts. Reasoning problems or dysrationalia – the inability to think rationally despite adequate intelligence. Memory problems: affect students’ performance across the curriculum. Metacognition problems: thinking about thinking and controlling thinking.
• #11: Frustration problems: low frustration tolerance is evident in both academic and social arenas of ELNs. Motivation problems: or the ”learned helplessness lock” contributes to ELNs’ low achievement motivation.
• #12: Students with ELN experience difficulty persisting in and completing classroom assignments and homework.
• #13: The author argues that when we use the master keys of explicitness, structure, and repetition and we employ those keys through multisensory and multirepresentational means (i.e. multiple examples or multiple types of experiences of a concept), we will be able to help our ELN students unlock the doors that block their way to the jewels in our stronghold. She adds that these master keys are the basis for the individual keys presented in this book.
• #14: M. C. Gore states that instructions have received insufficient attention from researchers. She relies on research done in the fields of law and medicine in order to provide a set of keys for successful instruction.
• #15: Mastery of the vocabulary concepts of a discipline provides the basic building blocks for comprehension and all higher-order thinking skills in that discipline. Our goal as content teachers is to help students move words from the unknown to the established, from high-frequency to specialised content-area.
• #16: M. C. Gore argues that when we teach new vocabulary, we need to use explicit instruction and multisensory strategies. These help us increase explicitness because they help students see, hear, feel and move to experience a word. She adds that while most of these strategies are used at elementary level, very few are present at secondary level. For example, she says that “interactive Word Walls can be an important part of the vocabulary development of secondary students” (p.60).
• #17: Research (Putnam, Deshler and Schumaker, 1993) found that teachers still lecture half the time in junior high and high schools. Brown and Bakhtar (1987) found that students did not dislike lectures – they disliked poor-quality lectures (e.g. teachers who were inaudible, talked too much, tried to cram in too much information, were incoherent or used visual aids poorly).
• #18: Students with ELN do not learn well from traditional lectures and need accommodations. These are 10 keys that help unlock the doors to acquisition and knowledge.
• #20: M. C. Gore argues that teaching students strategies and heuristics for analysing, synthesising and evaluating is possible and not difficult. GOs are excellent tools for teaching HOTS to students with ELN.
• #21: The author believes that many of the future keys will come from the field of technology.