The author: Julie Tollefson is managing editor of the Center for Research on Learning. This article originally appeared in the August 1999 issue of Strategram, a newsletter for SIM teachers.
During the 1999 International SIM Trainers' Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, we were very fortunate to hear Dr. Naomi Zigmond of the University of Pittsburgh discuss her concerns about special education, including the way special education is delivered to students. She urged her audience to ensure that "special" takes a central role in designing and delivering services to students with learning disabilities.
Zigmond, a prominent leader in the field of special education and chair of the Department of Instruction and Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, has addressed a wide range of issues in her 30-year career. Center for Research on Learning Director Don Deshler, in introducing Zigmond to the conference audience, praised the breadth of her work and her ability to define the challenges faced in the field.
"What I've always been so impressed with is her capacity to understand problems and to frame those problems in a way that you just say 'Man, that's it!' She can take very complex challenges and make them very clear. She describes what is happening, and then she translates that into what we need to do," he said.
During her keynote address, Zigmond focused on her concern that despite years of research pointing to the most effective ways to teach students with learning disabilities, instruction in many schools falls short.
"The more we know," Zigmond said, "the harder it seems to be to deliver special education in ways that really make a big difference for kids."
In reflecting on this problem, Zigmond developed a framework to help educators examine their own instructional practices and the requirements of their jobs to determine whether they are doing the best job possible to serve their students. She challenged participants to ask themselves the following five questions to assess whether they are providing the kind of special education students need:
To answer this question, educators must have an understanding of what constitutes teaching. Zigmond defined teaching as actively helping someone learn something he or she did not know or learn how to do something he or she could not do before. Teaching includes making use of "teachable moments"--those unplanned opportunities that occur throughout the school day. However, Zigmond said, teaching also must be regularly scheduled, planned for, and done well. These components of teaching can be overshadowed by other demands of working with special needs children, but Zigmond emphasized the first two words of the question: "on balance." Other aspects of a teacher's job--watching, cuddling, helping, modeling, observing, troubleshooting, doing clerical work--all have their places and are important. Sometimes, special circumstances make these activities more important than teaching at that moment, Zigmond said. However, if a teacher spends most of his or her time performing non-teaching duties, he or she is not serving the students well.
Zigmond addressed this question in two parts:
Zigmond listed numerous characteristics of good teaching that can be found in the volumes of research literature: modeling, monitoring, giving corrective feedback, modifying instruction based on specific needs. Good instruction is thought through, sequential, planned, systematic, goal-directed, and academically oriented. For students with learning disabilities, Zigmond said, good teaching also includes strategy instruction and encourages students to develop skills that will allow them to be independent learners in the future.
"But they can't handle it on their own yet, or they wouldn't need us," she said.
Good teaching also means taking learning seriously and not taking for granted that because the content has been delivered, the student has absorbed it, Zigmond said. That means teachers must take responsibility for learning and find ways to evaluate whether students are learning.
"Good teaching means saying to yourself, 'If he didn't learn it, I didn't teach it well enough yet, because he can learn this,' " she said. "I think that to be a special teacher means to take this responsibility very seriously. And it's hard to do."
For years, teachers working in the special education field have struggled to identify the best place in which to deliver intensive, sequential, planned, serious, and deliberate instruction: Is a pull-out setting best? A co-taught classroom? A pull-aside setting at the back of a room? Zigmond indicated that the focus of the question distracts attention from the serious issue of providing quality special education services to students. Instead, she said, teachers should ask themselves, "If this is where they're telling me to teach, what do I have to do to teach well in this setting?" If teachers address this question keeping in mind the characteristics of good instruction, they will be better able to teach well no matter where they are asked to do it.
"Good special education is not setting bound," Zigmond said. "Different settings provide different instructional opportunities."
With numerous demands vying for the attention and time of special educators today, it may be difficult sometimes to determine what needs to be taught and to assign priorities for learning. Zigmond's advice is simple: Teach what the student cannot learn without you. In practice, the decisions and planning involved in following this advice are more complex. Zigmond divided a teacher's options into two categories:
In discussing the popular, yet not always adequate, option of teaching the general education curriculum, Zigmond addressed three configurations for delivering instruction for students with learning disabilities:
This method of delivering instruction to students with learning disabilities is neither new nor effective, Zigmond said. At least 25 years ago, schools tried having special education teachers teach the big ideas of the general education curriculum, whittled down to manageable size. The results were inadequate.
"The content that was taught by special educators was generally not as deep, as broad, as complex, or as well-presented. It lacked seriousness," she said.
Zigmond said that when special education teachers try to teach the general education curriculum, they are generally less effective in terms of delivering content, organizing classroom time, keeping students engaged, and providing clear and accurate explanations. The shortcomings of this type of instruction should not be construed as a condemnation of special education teachers, she said. Their skills, training, and expertise are quite different from general education teachers, who have had the pedagogical training to handle large group instruction.
An alternative approach, and one that many schools take, is to have a special education teacher work with a general education teacher to make the modifications and accommodations necessary to help students learn in the general education classroom. In her research on this type of instruction, Zigmond has found that accommodations generally are made available to the entire class, simply because that is easier than making accommodations available to individual students. The accommodations made in this setting often are based on what is manageable in the classroom and on what is known to be helpful for many students with learning disabilities rather than on the needs of individual students with learning disabilities in the class. Is that "special"? Zigmond asked. Many times, the general education teacher sees the benefits of these accommodations in the performance of all students. Even so, Zigmond sees disadvantages to this method of instruction. For one thing, although students may learn what they're supposed to in this setting, they will always need accommodations because that is how they learn. Furthermore, too many general accommodations may send the wrong message to students.
Another approach to teaching the general education curriculum involves the special educator providing daily coaching or tutoring outside of class in addition to co-teaching with the general education teacher during class. Zigmond described the benefits of this arrangement in one school in which a daily supervised study hall supplemented the work done in the co-taught general education classroom:
Zigmond credits the students' success to the structured help outside of class, rather than to the co-teaching during the class.
Although teaching the right "stuff" well could mean teaching the general education curriculum, Zigmond said, students with learning disabilities need more. Teaching more than the general education curriculum is special, she said. Students with learning disabilities need their instructors to teach them a number of skills that usually are not taught in a high school general education curriculum, including skills to help them do the following:
In addition to teaching all sorts of strategies and skills that usually are not taught in a general education curriculum, Zigmond stressed the importance of changing the general education teacher's expectations and mind set.
"If we help kids learn things they haven't learned before, we have to work hard at helping teachers learn that the kids are now more capable than they were before," she said.
Research-validated interventions are easy to find and important to use because of their proven effectiveness, Zigmond said. Many more practices--such as co-teaching or team teaching and cooperative learning--may be beneficial, but the research evidence is not yet in.
Teachers must have a good reason to believe that their teaching practices are effective, Zigmond said. Collecting data in the classroom, reflecting on the results, and using the data to improve practices can provide a solid base for that belief. The results of such data collection can help teachers demonstrate to themselves, to students, to parents, to administrators, and to others in the field that their instruction is effective.
To make a difference, Zigmond said, teachers must
"It's very hard to do all those things in the busy schedule that you have. I understand that," Zigmond said. "But you can and you have to do all those things, because it matters."
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