THEME
The Annual Back to School Issue
UPDATE
OSEP Clarification on Coordinated Early Intervening Services
NOTICE
Report: Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research Initiative
PEOPLE IN EDUCATION
Cynthia Curry
RECOMMENDED READINGS
Why We Teach Sonia Nieto
TOOLS YOU CAN USE
NIUSI Motion Charts
RESEARCH BASED PRACTICE
Universal Screening
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
Nelson Mandela
FEATURED WEBSITE
http://www.rti4success.org/
DID YOU KNOW
National Center for Educational Statistics: Back to School Facts
UPCOMING EVENTS
Teacher Education Division (TED) of the Council for Exceptional Children Annual Conference
FOR PARENTS
Helpful Tips for a Successful Start to a New School Year
FOR STUDENTS
Staying Healthy and Fit
The Annual Back to School Issue
It's a brand new year! We hope it is filled with exciting opportunities to learn about what is important to you, and to your families and communities. We at the Equity Alliance believe that education is an essential tool for engaging in the world:
- preparing you to share your own knowledge and skills with you communities,
- providing you with resources to make things better for those who may need support,
- giving you the chance to think and do things about obstacles or injustices in your communities and the worls, and the desire to change what is unfair and unjust; and
- building upon your accomplishments and providing you with tools to set and reach your goals.
We wish you the best school year ever! Your voices are so important to helping teachers, administrators, governments, and organizations build and improve educational systems to meet the needs and celebrate the strengths of all students; let us know if there is anything you think we should be doing or could be doing better to make schools places where students and their families feel valued and heard. Your voice matters! Email us at: niusileadscape@asu.edu
OSEP Clarification on Coordinated Early Intervening Services
The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education (OSEP) recently provided clarification to states regarding local education agencies' (LEAs') use of Part B funds to develop and provide coordinated early intervening services (CEIS) for students who are identified as needing special education, as well as the relationship of CIES to Response to Intervention (RTI). The IDEA Code of Regulations, Section 300.46 requires an LEA to:
Require any LEA identified ... to reserve the maximum amount of funds ... to provide comprehensive coordinated early intervening services to serve children in the LEA, particularly, but not exclusively, children in those groups that were significantly overidentified ...
The OSEP memo, dated July 28, 2008, answers questions including:
- How is "significant disproportionality" defined?
- Can CEIS be used to fund school-wide interventions?
- What personnel can receive CEIS-funded professional development?
- What students can benefit from CEIS-funded interventions?
- What types of evaluations can be funded by CEIS funds?
- How many CEIS funds be used to implement RTI?
- What data must be reported to the Department of Education regarding how the funds were used?
OSEP also offers presentations, tools, and training materials for Early Intervening Services online. As school is starting and states are focusing more attention on early intervening services, now is a good time to solidify our understanding of the legal requirements and procedural guidelines for providing scientifically-based academic and behavioral interventions so that overidentification of students from particular ethnic groups for special education can be prevented.
Report: Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research Initiative
The National Center for Education Research, part of the Institute of Education Sciences, recently released the report on the Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research (PCER) initiative, an efficacy evaluation of several preschool curricula.
In 2002, NCES initiated PCER to conduct efficacy studies of available preschool curricula via rigorous experimental designs by 12 research teams. The report, Effects of Preschool Curriculum Programs on School Readiness, provides results for impact of 14 selected programs on student and classroom-level outcomes, focusing on programs serving populations in low-income communities.
To find out more about how specific preschool curricula affect student learning, instruction, classroom interactions, and more, click here.
After earning her undergraduate degree and beginning a career in chemical engineering, Cynthia is a former middle and high school science teacher who once struggled to meet the needs of all the learners in her classes. After several years working to meet these needs, Cynthia began graduate work in education and simultaneously came across a university-based non-profit organization in Maine that specialized in the use of assistive technology in K-12 settings. This combination of events was her initiation as a teacher committed to (Universal Design for Learning).
Cynthia's own experiences growing up with a sibling with multiple disabilities, her own frustration with having been placed on a non-challenging coursework "track" in school, and her feelings of under-preparation for meeting the needs of all of her students all provided impetus for her UDL work at ALLTech at The Spurwink Institute in New Gloucester, Maine. One of the highlights of this work, Curry says, was her collaboration with a seventh grade science teacher to revise the curriculum so that it was Universally Designed for Learning, which included scrutinizing the learning objectives and curricular and laboratory experiences for potential barriers to students with disabilities and for struggling learners. Maine's provision of laptops for all middle school students and teachers also made it easier to generate multiple ways that students might demonstrate evidence of learning. For example, a routine assessment that the teacher had relied upon in the past was student-constructed responses to weekly prompts. In the past, students were required to submit a traditional essay, which they could choose to complete with or without the support of the word processor on their laptops. In the revised curriculum, students could choose to meet the criteria in several ways: blogging, concept mapping, podcasting, or essay. With this new flexibility, all of the students successfully identified methods that were conducive to their interests and strengths. Also identified were accessible instructional materials such as closed captioned, audio-described videos and digital materials at the National Science Foundation's National Science Digital Library, which allowed all students to access the content using the method of their choice, from traditional reading to the use of specialized reading software.
One of Cynthia's most impactful collaborative contributions was to the revised science curriculum and involved the integration of a digital microscope that allowed the science teacher to capture, save, and upload audio-described videos of cell behavior to a class webpage. Cynthia also assisted in building that webpage to host other materials, including images of class notes and study resources. In a post-reflection of the yearlong project, the collaborating teacher effectively summarized a meaningful consequence of universal design for learning: the shift from content- to learner-centered curriculum. The collaborating teacher commented that at some point in my career, either in training or in practice, I had come across the idea that a good teacher is one who covers all the material and does it efficiently. It sounds really awful now. And the fallacy in that idea is obvious. I must say I am really learning a great deal about my teaching.
As we see it, Cynthia Curry, and her work helping teachers develop their use of UDL, is a highly effective informant. Congratulations to Cynthia on being named the Equity Alliance's Person in Education for August.
Whether you are a veteran teacher or a first-year novice, Sonia Nieto's Why We Teach should be on your bookshelf. As the excitement of a new school year gives way to paper work, meetings, and ineffective curriculum, it is easy to find yourself swimming in self-doubt, asking questions like, "Where did my enthusiasm go?" and "How am I ever going to muster the inspiration to keep going?"
Nieto provides first-hand accounts of teachers' lives in the classroom. Asking herself in the introduction, these very important questions:
- Why do people choose teaching as a career?
- What is it that entices them to spend their days engaged in learning with other people's children?
- Why do they decide to go into what are frequently demanding situations, sometimes in poorly funded and rundown schools?
- Why do they choose teaching rather than other professions that would give them better compensation, higher status, and more respect?
What she gets in response are the beautifully crafted stories of a variety of teachers in a myriad of settings. In Chapter 16, Beth Wohlleb Adel, a middle and high school teacher in Boston, writes, "If I wanted to be a teacher who taught students to truly engage, I had better model courage, continue to be open and honest about myself, and take the same risks that I am asking them to take. When I do take these risks, my life becomes richer, more exciting, and more exhilarating than I ever thought middle school teaching could be."
So go into your classroom with all the joy and expectation that a new school year usually generates, but this time go armed with Why We Teach.
If you've used our data maps, you know how helpful it is to have good, clear ways of visualizing data about student identification and placement. We are proud to share with you an exciting new feature on www.urbanschools.org, the NIUSI Motion Charts!
These graphs, based on the Gapminder project developed by Hans Rosling at the Karolinge Institute in Sweden, our Google Motion Charts display state data related to Least Restrictive Environment for ages 6-21 and risk ratios for special education identification by race. The charts are organized by region for easy comparison with neighboring states, and data points indicate the percentage of the total special education population that are of the targeted race.
There is a remarkable amount of information on these charts! Both the X and Y axes have drop-down menus so that you can change the criteria, and you can watch the progression of data over time by clicking on the large arrow button near the origin of the graph! Spend a little time exploring the different options on the NIUSI Motion Charts, and we're sure you'll want to show your colleagues all of the great information available!
You may have heard of universal screening in relation to Response to Intervention (RTI) procedures as a "first tier" provision for identifying students who may need classroom interventions in order to be successful. In reality, universal screening is an evidence-based practice that is used in a variety of situations in order to determine performance levels. In a school setting, it is common practice for the nurse to screen all students' hearing and vision to identify students who may need additional medical testing for possible hearing loss or vision care needs. In a classroom, universal screening may take the form of regularly scheduled skill assessments, such as DIBELS or AIMSweb, or it may simply be a "pre-test" at the beginning of a curricular unit to determine current knowledge levels.
As the use of RTI for potential special education placement becomes more widespread, it is crucial that we continue to utilize universal screening to inform the teacher's lesson planning, rather than as a tool to search for "problem" students. When analyzing screening results, teachers should consider the following questions:
- Can you identify overall group deficits?
- Are there patterns of weakness (i.e., lower performance from students sitting in the back of the classroom, clear performance differences between genders, etc)?
- Can you identify overall group strengths?
This type of analysis can help teachers plan future lessons to teach specific skills that are low for the majority of the group. It can also help teachers to identify which groups are not responding well to the types of lessons currently in place, and can identify what types of lessons are a good match for the class, as shown by high performance in those areas.
So often teachers feel overwhelmed by the increasing expectations for assessments and identification of "at risk" students and don't feel like they have time to reflect on their own practice. It's important to remember that the universal screening procedures that schools already have in place produce excellent data that can be used by teachers to improve instruction for ALL students.
Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that a son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another. Nelson Mandela
The National Center on Response to Intervention provides technical assistance to states and districts and helps builds the capacity of states to assist districts in implementing proven models for RTI/EIS. The RTI Center's website includes:
- a library of published documents, presentations, and video clips about RTI topics
- archived webinars on RTI
- discussion forums
- upcoming events
- their monthly newsletter, The RTI Responder
Bookmark this website as a great resource to keep you up-to-date on current research and policy around this very important topic in our schools!
National Center for Educational Statistics: Back to School Facts
Nearly 50 million students are heading off to approximately 97,000 public elementary and secondary schools for the fall term, and before the school year is out, an estimated $489 billion will be spent related to their education. (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/)
Teacher Education Division (TED) of the Council for Exceptional Children Annual Conference
As you gear up to begin a new year, we are asking you to think beyond the traditional concerns about curriculum planning, student management, and faculty meetings with an eye toward your professional needs. To do this, we encourage you to engage in professional learning communities inside and outside your teaching community, and attending a conference, especially one that can aid in your growth as an inclusive practitioner, is one way to find a professional home that can introduce you to new practices, engage you to think deeply about your current practice, and initiate professional relationships with others in the field.
The Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children will host their annual conference in Dallas, Texas on November 5-8. The pre-conference workshops and all the sessions will be focused on one theme: Teacher Education and Special Education in Changing Times: Personnel Preparation and Classroom Interventions.
For registration and travel information, please click here
Helpful Tips for a Successful Start to a New School Year
The National Education Agency (NEA) is one of many organizations that are working to support parents in their efforts to start their kids on a positive, rewarding school journey. Toward this end, NEA has published a list of tips for parents that can be helpful in starting the school year right.
NEA's mission is "to advocate for education professionals and to unite our members and the nation to fulfill the promise of public education to prepare every student to succeed in a diverse and interdependent world." They believe that ALL students have the human and civil right to a quality public education, and one of the major steps in making this a reality is to involve parents.
This tip sheet provided by NEA is not exhaustive, but we want to spotlight this as resource for starting the conversation. They understand the ubiquity of first day jitters, the universal benefit of parent involvement in the school, and the collective agreement that mimicry of school practices within the home can lead to greater success within the classroom. To read the list in its entirety, please click here.
As summer is winding down, it is time to start thinking about how you are going to find balance between the frantic schedule of the school year-attending classes, completing homework, socializing with friends, participating in extracurricular activities-which can take its toll on your health, your other responsibilities for which you've been obligated to maintain all summer-chores, work, family, community events-and the body and mind's need for maintenance and nurturance.
When life begins to feel more like a rat race than a human condition, a commitment to leading a healthy lifestyle gives way to less exercise, more junk food and fast food, and less quiet time to rest one's mind. To combat these pratfalls, you need to plan ahead of time. The Centers for Disease Control sponsors a website to help you take care of your body and mind even under the most stressful of situations.
This resource, called BAM, covers a wealth of information for maintaining a healthy lifestyle, addressing topics such as disease, food and nutrition, physical activity, your safety, your life and your body. We hope you can use the games and activity calendar and other invaluable resource on this website to support your balancing act. Without a healthy body and mind, the road to success will be a lot bumpier.
eQuiNews reflects the collaborative relationship between the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt), the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI), and NIUSI-LeadScape. With a new issue every month, eQuiNews can communicate with the broadest audiences and provide the most innovative, vital and current information on issues in education, school reform, cultural diversity, disproportionality, inclusive practices, and much more. eQuiNews will keep you informed of the work of these projects as well as other news and information in related fields.
For questions or comments on this newsletter, please email the editors of this newsletter - Kara Sujansky (kara.sujansky@asu.edu).
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