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State Leaders Summit : Making a Commitment to Systems Change in Deaf Education
May 7, 8 & 9, 2007, Columbia , MD
Session Date and Time: 9:45-10:45
Name of Facilitator/Presenter Marian R
E-mail Address
Name of Recorder Delia Cerpa
E-mail Address dcerp@mail.aum.edu
Literacy
Key Issues or Points of Discussion:
Reading
- The National Agenda reports the average reading scores of deaf and hard of hearing is still third grade level. It has been for years. This is of great concern.
- Response to statement: Those statistics are taken from the Gallaudet reports and does not include all of the deaf children in different educational settings.
- There is an interest in the statistics not reported in the national agenda. The Gallaudet Institute is responsible for gathering that data. The data is not representative of all the students in the nation. We know that those children may not be using the whole continuum.
- For students who enter the general education programs early it is hard to get full data
- Applied research shows that there is a large population that needs to get early exposure to reading
- Early language on is the foundation regardless of it being ASL or English. This is not always practiced.
- In a study done in California 6 out 50 students came from deaf families that sign. You need to get those students early to provide early language other than signing.
- The concepts of Inclusion, bi- lingual and bi cultural are not fully understood and implemented.
- In some public schools, students are semi-lingual in 2 languages. What you have is kids that lack language proficiency in both ASL and English.
Teacher Quality / Teacher preparation, pre-service and in-service
- Lots of hearing teachers don't know how to sign appropriately.
- Recruitment of teachers, finding the appropriate candidates that may understand deaf children, for example, the recruitment of deaf individuals to the profession.
- There is a need for deaf people in the schools teaching and different roles.
- Who is teaching the children? Who are the language (people) models, both ASL and English?
- The issue of highly qualified.
- Some speech and language pathologists are not necessarily trained to assess and to work with deaf children. We have to train them.
Assessment:
- Who is doing the assessment? What are their skills?
- What do you do with the assessment? Are the results and process available to the schools rather than just scores? How can the process and results be used to increase student's performance?
- One participant said - "Assessment is not how we assess - but who is doing the assessment ". If the person doing it is not qualified it is an invalid assessment.
- What do you do with the assessment? Is it available to the schools? Can the process and results be used to increase student achievement?
- In some states they don't extract the test scores for the deaf population; because then they would have to do it for other disabilities.
- Other students are not included in the demographic studies of all deaf children
- Transferring the problems of remediation. The foundation in ASL is the key. If they come without the foundation, how can they do the English?
- There is a lag of academic achievement, now we have to back up with the older student without the foundation, then to address the literacy.
- What about the children that have not had ASL as a core? Then you get them at 3 rd grade and you have to start with ASL with them to move them along. An influx of that subgroup will lower the scores of that school. It will look as if there is no progress; there has been a slippage.
- You need a way of documenting why the group scores went down. You need to document the changing demographics, the students that transferred, who came to the program with no ASL core foundations.
- All tests are reading tests- delay in reading is going to affect the student performance- How do we address this with deaf children?
- Are there benchmarks for ASL?
Inclusion
- The push for inclusion may have negative effects. Decisions are being made using the philosophy that inclusion is for all. If the inclusive setting does not appropriately serve the child's communication and academic needs, if the appropriate supports are not in place, we are doing a dis-service to the child. The result often is that language is flowing past the child. The child just gets by and learns how to fake it. Often the consequences are referrals in upper elementary and high school grades to get the spoken language. Intense catch up and intervention is then needed.
- There is a need to work with parents on how to decide what is the proper placement is for their child.
- How effective is the itinerant teacher model in some districts? This model needs to be examined.
Graduation and High School exit exams
- Graduation rates are low.
- In some states, high school exit exam level is at 10 th grade; in others it is 9 th grade.
- Some deaf schools are not in the system.
- CA Literacy is an important issue. Everyone wants deaf children to succeed.
- I started this year with ASL class and they began to show progress 6+ one of rating assessment. All deaf children need ASL as a first language.
Parents
- Working with parents on how do you talk to the children.
Solutions/Strategies; Commitments of Participants; Improvement Suggestions:
What are the best practices to address these issues:
Reading :
- States are looking closely at the teaching of reading.
- We are using Reading Recovery and modify it. It is a commercial reading program. We had good results. All students passed the exit exam.
- We use the Claire Center guided reading. It explains the questions on guided reading, independent and shared reading, shared writing, integrated and writing.
- A feasible strategy is integrating monitoring student progress methods. This is part of the RTI.
- Connect to the Response to Intervention initiatives/ early intervening in your state, districts, and schools.
Teacher quality/ teacher preparation pre-service and in-service
You need to consider the following:
- Who is doing the training? Who is teaching the children? Who are the language models for the children
- Set up an ASL model program
- To address the issue of "Lots of hearing teachers don't know how to sign appropriately"- train them how to sign properly.
- Through the School Improvement Plan we hired good signers and trained them to be co- teachers.
- We use a yearly ASL instrument.
- Teachers learn about the structure of ASL and the structure of English.
- They have daily classes on structure of the two languages. How do we communicate in ASL? How doe we talk in the English language. They learn of the two ways of communication.
- Deaf individuals talk to teacher and use English (?). ASL is used as the framework
- Use Age level not grade level.
- There are kids that are better at signing and highly aware of the signing process. There are children that are better at the spoken language.
- Test the children on the subject in the language that they are most dominant.
- Explore what it means to read.
- If you use English to measure reading you have a problem but if you use ASL you get a different picture.
- Include mentoring in teacher training. Have teachers from the different perspective work together. Multi- professionals pursuing the same a goal find an equal ground to collaborate Provide a way for them to find a partner to share their ASL skills and the English skills.
- Train teachers in language acquisition.
- Weekly in-service, on-going support - we use each other to talk about providing services (not once a year, on-going).
- Language planning meetings, mentoring full support
- Train top students that are deaf to be teachers.
- Want to see deaf people teaching in the school start talking about how they work with kids
- In our project we have;
- A baby-sitting club
- Saturday nanny
- Lots of deaf people who are in the neighborhood
- Foster grandparents
- Deaf grandparents that visit parent s in their homes-
- Lots of deaf people
- Funding people who can do the job
For more information contact: Robert J. Hoffmeister, Boston University Program for Deaf studies, e-mail: rhoff@bu.edu
- SRP
- The book in a bag
- Showing parents the importance of early literacy
- Establish a policy of "Preferred Communication or Preferred Language of the Child"
- MAS- list of questions that you can list in the IEP
- Not anti oral communication
- Focus on the 0-3 populations
- Be aware of the critical period of early literacy and early interventions
- The Semi lingual children
- System wide, if you are seeing children at 4th and 5 th grade. Those children need a more intense program than early preschool and early elementary. Now that we know more about language acquisition we know how to develop intensive early intervention.
Assessment
- Use Assessing growth tools
- Use the checklist of language development
- RTI may help
- Consider who is doing the assessment. What are their skills?
Inclusion support
- The Clerc Center at Gallaudet University is trying to have 9 areas of focus. They are available to go to the public schools as well as schools for the deaf to provide mainstreaming support.
- There was not much further discussion on the solutions to the issue of inclusion of deaf students. Perhaps it may be a topic for next summit. The issue of inappropriate inclusion at early grades without much support remains.
Research
- We need more studies that answer the questions of the broad spectrum of deaf student/ deaf education .
Graduation
- There were no solutions discussed on the low graduation rate and how to address it. Perhaps this is a topic to be discussed at future Summits.