Teacher Candidate ePortfolio

 FASD, ASD and Down Syndrome

Sara McManus

School of Education, University of Northern British Columbia
EDUC 336: Inclusive Education
Melanie Baerg, M.Ed. – Lecturer
July 31, 2022

Sometimes I feel like a broken record player in my reflections because I connect my past lived experiences so passionately to almost everything we study. But then I pondered, isn’t that the most genuine intention of a reflection? Isn’t it true that “without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful” (Wheatly, 2002)? Not that my past experiences have not been successful; that is to say, I am gaining a genuine appreciation for the value of this learning experience and its impact on my future practice.

Myles Himmelreich is the grown-up version of one of my Math & PE students at the Alternate school. He was one of the most challenging students that the school had in my two years teaching there. I couldn’t help but imagine while watching The Myles Himmelreich Story (Sask. Prevention Institute, 2018) that it was an inside look into my student’s amazingly complicated mind. Teaching him twice a day was like walking on eggshells. I never knew what to expect on any given day. (That is one of my favourite parts about the profession of teaching – no two days are ever the same!)

I appreciated seeing Myles Himmelreich’s growth in his teachings on FASD and his development of the Faith, Ability, Strength, and Determination acronym (Sask. Prevention Intervention, 2020) It gives me hope that my student will someday come to understand his life better in a similar way. I agree wholeheartedly that we need to focus on every student’s strengths and help them to forge their paths as they increase in age. This brings me round to the heart of my ongoing pedagogical development. I want my students to know that the World is Better Because They Are in It. One of the biggest gifts I gave my student at the Alternate school was that he knew that I saw him as a whole person who could accomplish anything he set his heart on.  When I stepped onto the school grounds this past spring, I was nearly pummelled by this young man’s energetic run across the field to hug me. I was so incredibly proud of him for accomplishing his goals, and he was so proud to share with me his future plans. There had been many days where his behaviours jeopardized his ability to continue his path to graduation within the high school environment.  Understanding more about FASD will enable me to become a better advocate for students like him in my future practice to ensure that their disability is accommodated appropriately.

I welcomed learning more specific FASD details in the second video with Myles Himmelreich, Let’s Change the Conversation and Challenge the Stigma (Sask. Prevention Intervention, 2020). I found myself thinking about how there were no sentinel facial features on any of the three students designated with Chronic Health for FASD at the Alternate school. In fact, I would not have known had I not been privy to their IEP meetings. All three students certainly did not see themselves as disabled. Using disability first language directly with them would have been beyond insulting. These three young men came from diverse ethnic backgrounds and socio-economic environments. Each of them had unique learning needs and different responses to my teaching methods, but had I not known otherwise, they were just complicated students, like everyone else. I believe they appreciated that I treated them that way.

Onto subject number two – Autism. I have much less experience with autism; however, I had one scout in my group when he was nine to twelve years old. He two graduated from high school this past year. He won the Citizen of the Year award and scholarship, and I was incredibly proud of him. When this young man was little, he taught me a lot about teaching children with autism. Similarly, I found that the YouTube video series embedded in the POPARD reading by Amythest Schaber was highly informative as an educator (POPARD, n.d.) My scout taught me that he was capable, and I was the one that needed to remember patience and to take extra time with him. He reminded me that I needed to vary my teaching style and give everyone good instructions (what I now know to be explicit instructions) through various methods. For example, if I needed to send the kids to bed at the end of a day at camp, I couldn’t say, “Time for Bed,” and send them off. I had to give them short, easy-to-follow directions with visual reminders. “#1 (pointer finger) Brush your teeth (move a finger up and down like a toothbrush in front of the mouth). #2 (two fingers up) Pajamas on (pretend to pull off clothes and put on PJs top and bottom – two things). #3 (three fingers) Quiet Time in Bed (hold fingers in front of the mouth – make shhhhh sound). #4 (four fingers) Sleep Time (lay head on the side of hands).”   This allowed me to quietly walk around the room as the time passed, reminding all the kids the order to do things, and they all had a small list they could accomplish with less than one hand because of him. (UDL and I didn’t even know it – LOL.) Schaber’s video series, Ask an Autistic, has expanded my learning. She goes into much more detail regarding the different aspects of autism that can be presented in people and how people, like educators, need to presume competence, such as in episode #10 – How to Be An Ally (Schaber, 2014).

I don’t know where my scout would have been placed on the spectrum; he was certainly not high functioning or incapable of performing self-care tasks. I remember his parents telling another leader that he was bigger in size than his average age but younger in every other way by four to five years.  We permitted him to stay two extra years with the younger group before moving him up with the “Explorers” when he aged out of “Timber Wolves.” We moved him to the older kids, that were less play-based when he showed interest in what the older group was doing. When he arrived back with his age-based peers, they accepted him like he hadn’t missed anything and had gained the skills he needed to be in the older group. I suppose, in retrospect, he might be one of the reasons I am hesitant to keep all students with their peers’ rules (especially when it is student-led). However, I am open to it, knowing that my one-off tiny life experience with one child pails in comparison to actual research on the subject.

In closing: Down Syndrome is something where my learning far exceeded my personal experience. However, it provided my mother and me a great launching point to discuss the history of Down Syndrome in our family and how she remembers people with Down Syndrome being treated when she was younger. I found the website from the reading list (https://cdss.ca/resources/general-information/) and enjoyed the embedded videos. As much as I enjoyed the light learning experience, I know that in my future practice, when a student with Down Syndrome is placed in my class, I will need to do a substantial amount of learning to make sure that I am doing everything within my capabilities to ensure that the student knows they are capable and valued within my classroom.

References

POPARD – Provincial Outreach Program for Autism & Related Disorders. (n.d.). Autism and Autistic Traits: A Strengths Based Perspective. Retrieved 07 26, 2022, from https://autismoutreach.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Popard-Handout-Autism-and-Autistic-Traits.pdf

Sask. Prevention Institute. (2018, December 111). FASD Realities and Possibilities – the Myles

Himmelreich Story. TommyBrooks. [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B81BNRyrHCg

Sask. Prevention Intervention. (2020, 11 04). FASD: Let’s Change the Conversation and

Challenge the Stigma. [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved 07 26, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb5A6eR_0XU&t=2120s

Schaber, A. (2014, April 24). Ask an Autistic #10 – How To Be An Ally. [Video]. YouTube.

Retrieved 07 30, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= JsllOQeWqNg&list=PLAoYMF syj_k1ApNj_QUkNgKC1R5F9bVHs&index=10

Wheatly, M. (2002, April). It’s An Interconnected World. Shambhala Sun. [Article]. Retrieved July 27, 2022, from https://margaretwheatley.com/articles/interconnected.html#: ~:text=Without%20reflection%2C%20we%20go%20blindly,on%20what%20we%20just%20did.

 

 

 

 

Mathematics Focus

Sara McManus

School of Education, University of Northern British Columbia
EDUC 400: Curricular Enactment in the Early Years with a Focus on Literacy, Numeracy and Fine Arts
Instructors: Dr. David Litz and Melanie Baerg
July 25, 2022

This was a bit of a difficult reflection for me because you don’t know what you don’t know until you do.  I hope that I will not lose what has made me an amazing Math teacher to my students at the Alternate school because of the knowledge that I have gained through readings like Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics: Intervention in the Elementary Grades What Works – Educator’s Practice Guide (2021)and the Math Minds course in EDUC 398 (https://www.structuringinquiry.com/). My students loved how I didn’t use academic language. They appreciated how I could take what other teachers had tried to explain to them for years and turn it into something they could use practically in their lives, in words they understood, in a way that they could relate to. I thought out of the box to find creative solutions as I relearned high school mathematics with them.  I still see my students in the community, and they beg for me to come back because the “real” new math teacher doesn’t teach them the same way I did. I wish I could go back, but in life, that never happens. It will likely be a very long time before I teach in that Alternate School again, and hopefully, they will all be graduated by then. Even if I could, I don’t think I could teach the same way anymore. My understanding, knowledge, and vocabulary of mathematics have expanded, and it would be nearly impossible to do so. I am left needing to find my own new mathematics teaching style, and I am yearning deeply to get back into my own classroom with new students who don’t know my previous style so I can start fresh at the elementary level.

Before I leave the subject of my Alternate students, if I ever could go back in time, I wish I could have recognized the reading deficits that my math students had for what they were. I was so blind. Not one of them in two years told me they couldn’t read. Looking back, I am sure I had all different levels of readers, from completely illiterate to proficient. It is so apparent now. Pre-covid, I floated around the classroom, and the ones who struggled with reading would wait for me.  I would ask if they had tried it on their own, and there was always an excuse, and then we would always work through the question together, which generally involved me reading it upside down and now that I think about it, I would scribe the answers for some of them too. Duh!  Insert -Forehead Slap Emoji!!! So yes… Natalie Wexler hit the nail on the head when she wrote, “if you can’t read a math problem, you can’t solve it. And even if you can read it—or listen to someone else read it—if you don’t have the vocabulary you need to understand it, you’re also out of luck,” in When Language Prevents Kids From Succeeding at Math (2022).

This EDUC 400 course has allowed me some time to contemplate my pedagogical thinking regarding whether I will be a theme-based teacher that does a lot of cross-curricular work with my students versus more of an isolated subject per block kind of teacher in my practice.  I suppose I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into one category, but I feel like I am more of a one-subject at a time teacher, especially as the grades increase in the elementary years. My gut feeling is saying that everything I have been learning leads me toward explicit instruction with Universal Design in a classroom with solid routines and a community culture of inclusive learning. A focused scope and sequence will allow me the most opportunity to impact the largest number of students. I suppose that I like to have all my boxes checked, and it would be highly complicated trying to squeeze specific lessons such as the one given on page 37 of Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics into a multi-disciplinary unit without a tremendous amount of forethought and effort, especially in my first few years as a practitioner.

This isn’t to say that I would be a drill and kill each subject kind of teacher. I think that I can find a million ways to make subjects like math fun and entertaining while educational. I’m very excited to have access to some manipulatives in a math classroom and be able to do some hands-on learning, as well as teaching foundational math rather than playing catch-up and get them through.  I’m also not saying that interweaving ELA through vocabulary into my Mathematics lessons or Mathematics into my Science, etc., lessons are things I would purposely avoid. In fact, just the opposite, but I would allow those to be natural consequences of backwards design from the primary lesson focus rather than intentionally aiming to create a mixed bundle.

All in all, this week’s readings forced me to reflect backwards on my teaching experience and forward to my future practice. As tough as it is to analyze oneself and put it down on paper, it’s always worth the effort!

 

 

 

A Critical Review of How Difficult Can This Be? The F.A.T. (Frustration Anxiety Tension) City Workshop by Richard D. Lavoie, Director of Eagle Hill School Outreach Program – Greenwich, Connecticut

Sara McManus

School of Education, University of Northern British Columbia
EDUC 3336: Inclusive Education
Melanie Baerg, M.Ed. – Lecturer
July 25, 2022

Richard Lavoie begins his introduction to the F.A.T. City Workshop with what would have sounded like a strong statistic of “six to ten percent of the children in the United States today suffer from learning disabilities” (Rosen et al., 1996, 0:51). However, today, not only is the statistic inapplicable, the language of a child suffering from a disability is as well. Research in the United States from the National Center for Learning Disabilities that was published in 2017 shows that these numbers are much greater now and states that there are “current challenges and opportunities facing the 1 in 5 children who have learning and attention issues such as dyslexia and ADHD” (NCLD, 2017).  The National Centre for Learning Disabilities describes that “learning and attention issues are brain-based difficulties in reading, writing, math, organization, focus, listening comprehension, social skills, motor skills or a combination of these. Learning and attention issues are not the result of low intelligence, poor vision or hearing, or lack of access to quality instruction” (NCLD, Snapshot, 2020). Although the framework Lavoie uses for a child with a learning disability or exceptionality may be like today’s language, there is an abundance of terminology that is no longer acceptable in society. Throughout the workshop, he uses disability-first language, beginning by classifying “learning disabled children” as children who are not functioning as they should be but are 1) not mentally impaired or retarded; 2) do not have primary emotional disturbances; 3) have not been given the opportunities to learn, and 4) do not have a modality deficit such as being deaf or blind (1:07-1:32).

Lavoie asks that his workshop attendees “walk for a mile in the shoes” of children with learning disabilities through a simulation activity meant to invoke feelings of “frustration, anxiety, and tension” that are felt by these children through his biased teaching strategies built on the belief that “LD means lazy and dumb” (2:17-3:28).  Simulation is a teaching technique that can be very powerful. Having lived experience with it myself in my scouting training can create sincere empathy and form new pathways of understanding. I wonder where this workshop recording fits in the timeline of special education reform. Were Lavoie and the producers of this workshop breaking ground when this aired on public television in 1996? Despite his language, he seems to have some excellent insights and teachings that are still relevant today.  Some of these would be that sarcasm creates victims (4:30); anxiety affects performance (5:11); teachers make the environment of what is acceptable behaviour, “I don’t know,” and “volunteer” examples (5:50, 16:10); forcing students to look at you doesn’t make any sense (8:27); students process information at different rates (9:56); kids need direct instruction (27:15); students may not know what they did wrong and perceived stimulus (28:12, 31:20); sometimes the most incredible gift can be the gift of time (43:56); object identification is not dictated by spatial orientation – alphabet letters break that rule (47:02), and using rhetorical questions serves no purpose (51:20).

The workshop activity Lavoie gave the participants that helped me better understand what it is like to live with a learning disability was the picture of the cow.  I found it interesting to listen to his perspectives on motivation versus perception. Lavoie said, “you can all see it, but you can’t bring meaning to it until I teach you what it is (20:53)… What the LD child needs is a teacher… to give him direct instruction” (21:02).  Watching the video for a second time a week later, I cannot unsee the cow, and I cannot fathom how my brain did not see it in the first place, but I know I did not.  Lavoie hit it home for me when he said, “all I did was give you direct instruction… but what they need is trained, experienced teachers” (22:22). He goes on to say, “…the real experience of learning disabilities is being the only person who can’t do it” (23:05).

The activity presented at the fifty-three-minute mark was dedicated to the difference between auditory and visual learners.  After the attendees read the passage, Lavoie read it out loud to them. He argues that some students with learning disabilities will only be able to understand materials by hearing the words rather than reading them because until they receive auditory input, it would not make any sense. This contrasts with current scientific thinking, which supports Scarborough’s Rope and the Simple View of Reading which says that Reading Comprehension is the product of Decoding and Language Comprehension. In addition to the fact that deaf people can have excellent reading comprehension, cognitive science has shown us that reading uses multiple parts of the brain, and although auditory components are extremely important to phonemic awareness and development, they do not stand alone in the process of decoding, and it is only one component of many parts. Using the first brief passage as an example, “Once upon a time” was written, “Won supporter dime” (54:53), it becomes evident in my opinion that the attendees of the workshop were struggling to understand what they were reading because the lexical and phrasal semantics created an incomprehensible sentence outside of the norms of prescriptive grammar. However, when the passage was read aloud to them with a purposeful pace and rhythm, the auditory version allowed for syntactic awareness, which enabled the attendees to recognize and interpret the word combinations.

References

National Centre for Learning Disabilities. (2020, March 7). Snapshot of Learning and Attention Issues in the U.S. 1-in-5 Snapshot. [Document]. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://ncld.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/1-in-5-Snapshot.Fin_.03142017.pdf

National Centre of Learning Disabilities. (2017, February 1). Our Research – The State of LD: Introduction. [Website]. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://www.ncld.org/research/state-of-learning-disabilities/

Rosen, P., Richard D., E. H., Peter Rosen Productions, & Video, P. (1996). How Difficult Can this Be? – The F.A.T. City Workshop. [Video]. Retrieved 07 19, 2022, from YouTube. Jennifer Clearwater. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3UNdbxk3xs&t=2s