Файл: Учебник по английскому языку.doc

Special education teachers who par­ticipate in such team processes may be called upon to assume important responsibilities as team members. Unfortunately, many teachers have had inadequate training and/or experience with technology and its applications. When teachers are not prepared for the responsibility of selecting devices for students and using them in classroom settings, they may rely too heavily on the judgment of other professionals (e.g., the occupational, physical, or speech/language therapist). These pro­fessionals may see the child and his or her needs from a very different (and more limited) perspective than does the teacher.

It is important for the teacher, as well as all other team members, to develop a philosophical base around which decisions will be made when selecting appropriate technology for children with disabilities. It is also important to remember that the concept of "appropriateness" takes on several dimensions. P L. 94-142 was drafted to encompass any need the child has related to learning and/or development, including the need to learn basic self-help skills, have appropriate adaptive equipment, develop appropriate social integration skills, acquire basic prevoca-tional skills, and receive therapy ser­vices. In each of these areas, devices and equipment can play critical roles in ensuring the provision of appropriate learning experiences for children with disabilities in public school settings.

From a more traditional perspective, a technology is appropriate when its application meets one of three criteria. First, it should be in response to (or in anticipation of) specific and clearly defined goals that result in enhanced skills for the student. Second, it should be compatible with practical constraints such as the available resources or amount of instruction required for the student and the teacher to use the tech­nology. Third, it should result in desir able and sufficient outcomes.

To match tech­nology most ef­fectively with any given stu­dent, the teacher and other team mem­bers must keep in mind two parallel considerations: characteristics of the student and characteristics of the technology.

Student Characteristics

The characteristics of the child are of the utmost importance and must be consid­ered first. The comprehensive assess­ment procedures that determine the child's present levels of functioning and precede the actual program develop­ment process provide the initial basis for selection of any devices or equipment. In addition to the obvious selection implications of such characteristics as the child's academic skills, intellectual level, behavioral and social skills, and physical abilities, the teacher and other team members must consider the child's preferences for certain types of technol­ogy. An assistive device that appears excellent on paper but remains unused because the child is uncomfortable with it is the equivalent of no assistance at all. Since the development of the IEP is a joint effort of a team that includes the child (when appropriate), the child can express his or her preferences dur­ing the decision-making process. Inter­views with the parent and child can yield significant information that is not otherwise obtainable. For example, a girl may be uncomfortable using an augmentative communication system that employs a male adult voice. Alter­natively, the IEP team may wish to determine which devices and equip­ment the child has had successful pre­vious experiences with at school or at home. Once this information is ac­quired, the team may wish to purchase a similar technology for use in the school setting with appropriate mod­ifications being made to meet the needs of the child. For example, a par­ticular type of adaptive spoon may have made it possible for the child to feed himself or herself at home.

PRESCHOOL CLASSROOM

ENVIRONMENTS THAT PROMOTE COMMUNICATION

Children learn what language is by learning what language can do. The func­tion of language depends upon it's effects on the environment. An envi­ronment that contains few reinforcers and few objects of interest or meets children's needs without requiring lan­guage is not a functional environment for learning or teaching language.

Recent research suggests that envi­ronmental arrangement is an important strategy for teachers who want to pro­mote communication in classrooms. To encourage use of lan­guage, classrooms should be arranged so that there are materials and activities of interest to the children. In addition, teachers must mediate the environment by presenting materials in response to children's requests and other uses of language. Creating such opportunities and conse­quences for language use through envi­ronmental arrangement can play a critical role in a child's language acqui­sition.

Both social and physical aspects of the environment set the occasion for communication. The physical en­vironment includes the selection and arrangement of materials, the arrange­ment of the setting to encourage chil­dren's engagement, and scheduling of activities to enhance children's partici­pation and appropriate behavior. The social environment includes the pres­ence of responsive adults and children and the verbal and nonverbal social in­teractions that occur among the people in the environment. In addition, contin­gencies for language use, the availability of a communication partner, the degree to which adults pre-empt children's communicative attempts, and the affec­tive style of the listener have an impact on children's language acquisition and production.

As shown in Figure 1, the social and physical aspects of the environment are linked to communication when an adult mediates the physical environment in response to children's use of language. The adult links the child's language to the environment by ensuring that the child's communication attempts are functional and reinforced. As a media­tor, the adult can use an incidental teaching process to model and prompt elaborated language in order to expand the child's current skills.

Environmental arrangement can encourage children to initiate language as a means of gaining access to materials and getting help. By providing the ma­terials requested by a child, the adult serves the important function of specifi­cally reinforcing that child's use of lan­guage. In addition, the environmental arrangement supports the adult in at­tending to the child's interest and com­munication attempts, thereby increasing the likelihood that the adult will respond to the child's interest and provide mate­rials contingently.

Seven Strategies for Arranging the Environment

The basic goal of environmental ar­rangement is to increase children's in­terest in the environment as an occasion for communication. The environment is managed and arranged to promote re­quests and comments by children and to support language teaching efforts by adults. Using the environment to prompt language includes the following steps:

1. Focusing on making language a part of children's routines.

2. Providing access to interesting mate­rials and activities.

3. Providing adult and peer models who will encourage children to use language and respond to their at­tempts to do so.

4 Establishing a contingent relation­ship between access to materials or assistance and use of language.

The seven environmental strategies described here are designed to (a) in­crease the likelihood that children will show an interest in the environment and make communicative attempts and (b) increase the likelihood that the adult will prompt the use of language about things of interest to the children by providing clear and obvious nonverbal prompts for them to communicate. When the environment is arranged in this way, attractive materials and activities function as both discriminative stimuli and reinforcers for language use.

Interesting Materials

Materials and activities that children enjoy should be available in the environment. Young children are most likely to initiate communication about the things that interest them. Thus, increasing the likelihood of children's interest in the environment increases the oppor­tunities for language use and teaching. Teachers usually know which toys and materials individual children prefer. However, a simple inventory of prefer­ences can be taken at staff meetings or by systematically observing children's choices during free play. Parents often can provide information regarding their children's preferred toys and activities. Once toy preference has been deter­mined, teachers can enhance interest in the environment by making such toys or materials available. For example, if a child enjoys bead stringing, various shaped and colored beads, noodles, and sewing spools could be made available. Identifying preferred activities and ma­terials is especially important for a young child with severe disabilities. Variations in activities and materials must be carefully monitored to ensure that the child remains interested. For ex­ample, a child with severe disabilities who likes squeak toys may enjoy a vari­ety of these toys but not like a Jack-in-the-box that makes a similar sound. Rotating the toys available at any given time is also a good way to make old toys more interesting; when they reappear they seem brand new!

Out of Reach

Placing some desirable ma­terials within view but out of reach will prompt chil­dren to make requests in order to secure the materials. Materials may be placed on the shelves, in clear plastic bins, or simply across the table during a group activity to increase the likelihood that the children will request access to them either verbally or nonverbally. These requests create opportunities for language teaching, since when children request a specific material they are also specifying their reinforcers. Thus, a teacher who prompts language and provides the requested material contingent on the child's response effectively rein­forces that response. The effectiveness of this strategy can be enhanced by showing the children materials, naming the materials, and then waiting atten­tively for the children to make requests. During snack time or before a cooking activity, a teacher can prompt children to make requests by placing the cooking materials across the table from them. Children with severe disabilities might gain access to these materials by pointing or eye gazing, whereas more skilled children might be encouraged to use signs, words, or even complete sen­tences. Teachers must be careful not to frustrate students by placing too many communicative demands on them. A balance of requesting materials and playing independently is important in every activity.

Inadequate Portions

Providing small or inade­quate portions of preferred materials such as blocks, crayons, or crackers is another way to arrange the environment to pro­mote communication. During an activity the children enjoy, an adult can control the amount of materials avail­able so that the children have only some of the parts that are needed to complete the activity. When the children use the materials initially provided, they are likely to request more. Providing inade­quate portions of an interesting and de­sirable material creates a situation in which children are encouraged by the arrangement of the physical environ­ment to communicate their needs for additional materials. For example, dur­ing snack time, an adult can encourage requests by presenting small servings of juice or pieces of a cookie rather than a whole cookie. A child who enjoys watching the teacher blow bubbles can be encouraged to make requests if the teacher blows one or two bubbles and then waits for the child to request more. When children initiate language with requests for more, the teacher has the opportunity to model and prompt more elaborate language as well as to provide functional consequences for the children's communicative attempts. For example:

Teacher: (Blows two bubbles and stops.)

Child: "More"

Teacher: "Blow more bubbles?"

Child: "Blow more."

Teacher: (Blows more bubbles)

Choice Making

There are many occasions when two or more options for activities or materials can be presented to children. In order to encourage children to initiate language, the choice should be present­ed nonverbally. Children may be most encouraged to make a choice when one of the items is preferred and the other is disliked. For example, the adult may hold two different toys (e.g., a big yel­low dump truck and a small red block) and wait for the child to make a verbal or nonverbal request. If the child re­quests nonverbally, the adult has the op­tion of prompting the child to verbalize ("Tell me what you want") or simply modeling a response for the child ("Yellow truck"). Children's verbal re­quests can be followed with expansions of their language ("You wanted the yel­low truck") or models of alternative forms for requesting ("Yellow truck, please").

Assistance

Creating a situation in which children are likely to need assistance increases the likelihood that they will com­municate about that need. The presence of attractive materials that require assis­tance to operate may encourage chil­dren to request help from adults or peers. A wind-up toy, a swing that a child needs help getting into, or an un­opened bottle of bubbles are all exam­ples of materials that can provide a nonverbal prompt to ask for help.

Sabotage

Setting up a "sabotage" by not providing all of the materials the children will need to complete a task (e.g., paints and water but no paintbrush following an instruction to paint), or by otherwise preventing them from carrying out an instruction, also will encourage them to make requests. This environmental strategy requires children to problem solve and indicate that something is wrong or missing. They must first deter­mine what is needed, and this initial dis­covery may require prompts from an adult. The missing materials are cues for the children to communicate that some­thing is not right or that additional materials are needed. Sabotage is an ef­fective prompt for language when the cues are obvious and children's cogni­tive skills are sufficiently developed to make detection of the missing material easy and rapid. Sabotage should be car­ried out in a warm, engaging manner by the teacher; the episode should be brief and never frustrating to the child.

Silly Situations

The final environmental strategy is to create a need for children to communicate by setting up absurd or silly situations that violate their expectations. For example, an adult who playfully at­tempts to put a child's shoes on the adult's feet may encourage the child to comment on the absurd situation. During snack time, an adult can set up an absurd situation by placing a large piece of modeling clay or a colored block on a child's plate instead of a cracker, then waiting expectantly for the child to initiate a verbal or nonverbal request.

Children develop expectations for the ways things should be in everyday environments. They learn routines and expect that things will happen in a par­ticular order. When something unex­pected happens, they may be prompted to communicate. Of course, children must have expectations before the expec­tations can be violated. Thus, use of this strategy must be tailored to the individ­ual skills of the children and to their fa­miliar routines. For example, a child who always stores articles of clothing and materials in a specific "cubbie" will probably notice when an adult places a silly picture over it; a child who does not consistently use a specified "cubbie" would be unlikely to notice and respond to such a change in the environment.

Making the Strategies Effective

To make these seven environmental strategies work, the teacher must follow the student's lead. The teacher must no­tice what the child is interested in, estab­lish joint attention on the topic of interest, and encourage the child to make communicative attempts. By monitoring the child's interest and iden­tifying which materials and activities the child enjoys, an adult can select the ones that will best serve as reinforcers for language.

The nonverbal cues that accompany the environmental arrangement strate­gies should be faded over time so the child is responding more to things of interest in the environment and less to the adult's cues. For example, it may be necessary at first for teachers to shrug their shoulders, raise their eyebrows, and tilt their heads, while extending their hands containing different toys, in order to direct children's attention to the environment and to the opportunity for choice making. As children become more skilled at initiating requests, fewer and less obvious nonverbal prompts should be given.

The use of environmental strategies must be tailored to each child's cogni­tive level and responsiveness to the en­vironment. For example, putting a coat on a child backward and waiting for the child to communicate that something is wrong may require additional prompts if the child is unable to problem solve at this level. For environmental strategies to be effective, they must be geared to each child's level and they must cue communicative responses that are emergent in the child's repertoire.

Conclusion

How adults respond to children's com­munication attempts when they are elicited by environmental arrangement is extremely important. Immediate feedback and access to the desired material or requested assistance, as well as a pos­itive affective response, are essential consequences for communication at­tempts. As in all applications of natural­istic teaching processes, these episodes should be brief, positive, successful for the children, and designed to reinforce the children's use of language and their social engagement with adults.

HOW SCHOOLS ARE SHORTCHANGING THE GIFTED

After only a few months, Andi decided that she didn't want to go to school anymore because she already knew most of what was being taught in her first-grade class. While her classmates struggled to add single-digit numbers, she had begun to teach herself multi­plication and division and was fascinated with negative numbers, word problems, and logic problems. She begged her parents to help her to learn these skills, but they were unsure how much they should help her, fearing the impact her precocity might have on her subsequent school experience.

Her parents were justified in their concerns. Because schools have focused for decades on lifting up the lowest achievers, they are shortchanging the brightest students. High-ability children are not challenged in most classrooms and endure a steady diet of dumbed-down textbooks, and repetition of skills mat they have mastered years ago. They suffer from the elimination of many forms of advanced or accelerated classes because it has become politically incor­rect to separate students on the basis of ability. Further­more, a widely used teaching technique called cooperative learning assigns the highest- achieving students to position of peer teacher—essentially pressing them into service as teacher aides.

Recent studies by the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented portray a disturbing pattern of what happens in U.S. classrooms to high-ability stu­dents. For example, a survey of third- and fourth-grade teachers in several thousand public and private schools around the country revealed that fewer than half had ever received specific instruction in how to teach gifted students. Not surprisingly, given this lack of training, most teachers make at most minor modifications in the regular curriculum to meet the needs of gifted students.

Another study entailing daily observation of third- and fourth-grade classrooms around the country revealed that more than 80 percent of the time, high-ability stu­dents received the same kind of instruction, of the same material, as the rest of the class. In a typical summary, a classroom observer reported that "the gifted student was inattentive during all of her classes. She appeared to be sleepy, never volunteered, and was visibly unenthu-siastic about all activities."

By underchallenging such students, U.S. schools delay and even halt these youngsters' mental development. If instructional materials are not above the students' level of knowledge or understanding, learning is less efficient and intellectual growth may stop. It is, for example, not surprising to find a bright first grader in an urban school who reads on a fifth-grade level—and who is reading only slightly above grade level when he or she enters fifth grade.

Because the work is too easy for them, many of our brightest students acquire poor work habits. A recent study conducted by the publisher of Who's Who Among American High School Students found that most high-achieving students study an hour or less a day. My own research on underachieving students in urban high schools has found a similar problem. In one representa­tive response, a student commented: "Elementary school was fun. I always got A's on my report card. I never studied when we were in class and I never had to study at home."

Given this lack of rigor, it is not surprising that this country's most talented students are hard pressed to compete in a global community. One study compared U.S. high-school seniors taking Advanced Placement courses in math and science with top students in 13 other countries. Although these students represent the top 1 percent of students in the nation, on an interna­tional basis they ranked:

* 13 OUT OF 13 IN BIOLOGY

* 11 OUT OF 13 IN CHEMISTRY

* 9 OUT OF 13 IN PHYSICS

* 13 OUT OF 13 IN ALGEBRA

* 12 OUT OF 13 IN GEOMETRY AND CALCULUS

The picture is actually even bleaker than these fig­ures suggest, since a higher percentage of the total school population in other countries takes these advanced classes than in the United States. When the results are controlled to eliminate this source of difference, Ameri­can students scored last in all subject areas. "Our top-performing students are undistinguished at best and poor at worst" in comparison to their counterparts in other countries, according to a Department of Educa­tion report on this country's inadequate treatment of the gifted. The report, entitled National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent, was distributed in October to every school district in the nation and made front page headlines