Adolescents with high incidence learning disabilities

The article I read this week is called, "Learning Strategies for Adolescents with Mild Disabilities."  These learning strategies may help prepare an adolescent with a disability how to succeed in various aspects of his/her young adult life.  These strategies could help a young adult secure a job opportunity instead of running the risk of dropping.  The article states that "students taught using strategies showed the most improvement compared to other methods" (4,) weather these strategies had been published or created by the teacher in his/her classroom based on the common core standards or the needs of a specific student. 

It gives a checklist to the teacher of component we must consider when developing a strategy for a student with a LD.  Some of the suggestions it provides is to break down tasks into small steps student can accomplish, use verbs at the beginning of each task,  provide examples, model, provide visuals, and develop mnemonic as a strategy to remember order of the steps to follow. Other strategies that are suggested for teachers to use are encouraging the student to think aloud to understand the why they are doing an assignment and how they will complete the assignment.

The article then goes on to explain four learning strategies undergraduate college students created at their student teaching site.  The first strategy is called the Payment Strategy.  To help eighth grade girls and boys who had an LD, EBD or ADHD understand life-skills math in a special education class.  She developed a systematic way for students to learn how to balance a check book. Before she began the unit she gave students a pretest to find out what they knew already.  She created a mnemonic strategy with the word PAYMENT so that each word stood for a step the students must follow in balancing a check book.  The teacher combined her lessons with items of interest students would like to purchase, practice writing on laminated checkbooks. and used the smart board.

Another strategy developed was the SWING Strategy. This strategy was developed to help students analyze and complete a job application. This student teacher also provided a two part pretest.  After the pretest, she provided the meaning of each letter in SWING to the students.  This way her and the classroom teacher they could help focus on their strengths, weaknesses and goals. They provide guided practice using applications from local businesses.  On their post test students did incredibly well.

The next strategy mentioned in the article is called The Sales Tax Strategy.  She engaged students with a personal story about not having enough money a t-shirt she really wanted which really engaged the students from the beginning.  First she focused on calculator skills they would need to use to in this math unit.  When the student teacher taught them how to convert percentages into decimals she'd think out loud so students could follow her thought process.  They practice finding the sales tax with items the students really were interested in.   She guided them through the process with a four step mnemonic phrase: WMKA. 1. Write the sales tax percentage as a decimal, 2. Multiply the cost of the item by the sales tax decimal rate, 3. Keep only two number right of the decimal point and 4. Add the sales amount to the cots of the item.

The last strategy suggested is called the BIRDS strategy.  This is a reading comprehension to help students systematically organize text, analyze the information they just read, and understand the meaning.  He developed a mnemonic phrase for each word in BIRDS.  He had the students reflect on the times that they were confused after reading a text and encouraged them to use the BIRDS strategy in all types of reading they would have to do in school.  He encouraged students to break down the sentences in the text that were confusing, locate unknown words in dictionary to understand its meaning and modeled how to ask for help.  The student teacher also helped them summarize parts of a whole paragraph. Students completed guided practice and then given a post test.  Students didn't do so good on their posttest which suggested that the students needed to be retaught and maybe breaking down the steps into smaller steps.

I liked the article because these are strategies that can be definitely used in the classroom.  As I read these suggestions, it reminded me of things that I have done similarly to these strategies, like using local shops advertisement ads to find a final price of an item using the sales tax.  This year, I am co-teaching 7th grade social studies.  The first unit was for the students to learn all 50 states of the United States.  To help my bilingual students we created Mnemonic sentences with clusters of states so they could remember the location of each state.  After the test, one student mentioned he had remembered the silly sentences we had created to help him on the test.  The teacher I worked with had other ideas too, like showing them this silly song on YouTube everyday when students walked into class, color coding different regions of the U.S. map and creating flash cards for each state.

I also liked how honest the student teachers were with their final results.  Some did succeed in having their students learn and improve their skills in that subject, still all four teachers mentioned what failed and what could have been done to improve the lessons.  And that is what teaching is, teaching and re-teaching and going back to the drawing board to recreate lessons.  It is hard work and takes so much brain power but in the end it is worth it because students will benefit in the long run.

Conderman, G., Koman, K., Schibelka, M., Higgin, K., Cooper, C., Butler, J. (2013). Learning
      Strategies for Adolescents with Mild Disabilities. Pages 1-24.  retrieved from
      http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED545373.pdf.