Back to Basics

I set out to find ways in which technology could be used to enhance learning for students with disabilities and to this point, the information I’ve found does focus primarily on this topic. However, after a lot of searching last week, I decided that it may just be time to find some solutions to the writing problem without worrying so much how a computer or electronic device could help me.
I believe the programs I found last week are decent and would likely be helpful and it’s certainly not an exhaustive list. I also have come to realize that there is a lot I can do to help students the old fashioned way—by teaching them with paper and pencils. The article found here http://www.readingrockets.org/article/6213 outlines a study titled “Prevention and Intervention of Writing Difficulties for Students with Learning Disabilities”. Again this is a long one so I had to decide what parts of it I wanted to focus on without turning this blog entry into a 6 page essay (although it’s a good read and the authors make several comparisons and points using the Peanuts Characters to keep things interesting). One particular statement validated my current frustrations: “The writing problems of children with LD are not transitory difficulties that are easily fixed.” Thank goodness! I’m not the only one who sees this!
About a third of the way down the page, under a section called Table 1, the study outlines key points that represent “Exemplary Writing Instruction”. I focused heavily on this because I want to make sure that I am, at the very least, providing exemplary instruction. Of course I wasn’t surprised to see there are things I can do differently like the ninth tip:
“Instruction covering a broad range of skills, knowledge, and strategies, including phonological awareness, handwriting and spelling, writing conventions, sentence-level skills, text structure, the functions of writing, and planning and revising.
We typically isolate handwriting and spelling from the subject of writing to allow kids an opportunity to be successful in at least one area without worrying about the others. For example, kids can be great writers and horrible spellers. If you combine the two it brings down the so called quality of the writing. It’s interesting to see the suggestion of combining all the areas of writing into one instructional set and it’s worth trying.
Another tip was to integrate writing across the curriculum. This has been something I’ve wanted to do for a while now and something I do attempt now and then but the biggest obstacle to having students write in other subjects is the sheer amount of extra time it takes. It’s one thing to spend 45 minutes of a writing class on writing, it’s quite another to spend 45 minutes of social studies on writing. I think before we get to this point we still have to overcome the hurdle of simply not knowing how to put thoughts on paper.
There are adaptations listed as well but realistically, the teachers at my school have been doing these things for years so this area wasn’t particularly helpful.
The last item of interest is towards the very end. The research describes the importance of early intervention. It states that to the point the article was written, only 4 studies had been done on the effectiveness of early intervention for writing disabilities. Interestingly, in one of the studies research showed that supplementary handwriting instruction raised compositional quality. This is of great importance to me because we focus very heavily on teaching kids to type while spending only about 20 minutes a week on handwriting instruction. Unfortunately a separate study was not able to replicate these results. In any case, all studies demonstrated a positive result for struggling writers when early intervention took place which is further evidence for me, that as a teacher of students with disabilities, the most important step I can take is to return to basics and in the future, start earlier.