Student Success Formula
Today's schools face numerous, difficult challenges in preparing
students for their roles in the world. Content explosion - the ever-expanding
amount of information being added to world knowledge daily - can
be overwhelming when content coverage is a priority. Combined with
the pressures of state standards, mandatory testing, and school
reform prevalent in today's educational community, educators can
feel ill-equipped to meet the needs of their students.
What, then, can schools and individual educators do to prepare
students to successfully respond to heavy curriculum demands at
the middle school and high school levels?
This publication describes the "Student Success Formula"
that has emerged from nearly 25 years of research. The formula combines
interventions designed to help students master critical content
in general education courses, a service delivery model designed
to optimize the quality of services provided to students, and a
professional development program focused on changing instructional
practices. Underlying it all is a foundation of strong and active
administrative support and coordination.
A comprehensive array of service
Low-achieving students with learning disabilities require a comprehensive,
well-conceptualized array of services that are focused on developing
independent learners and performers capable of meeting high expectations
both in the general education curriculum and in life.
Successfully teaching subject-area content to students with learning
difficulties is not a simple matter. The Student Success Formula
requires a multifaceted approach by a team of well-trained and coordinated
professionals. Students must receive daily instruction in the skills
and strategies they need to succeed. Teachers must have clear responsibilities
in the process.
Students must have access to instruction in multiple strategies,
across multiple settings and academic areas, from multiple
teachers, across multiple schools and grades, and in
multiple instructional areas.
Foundational policy-level supports should include planning times
that are conducive to teacher collaboration; sufficient budgetary
support, supplies, and personnel; and continuing professional-development
opportunities aligned with the goals of the service-delivery model.
Levels of intervention
We have developed two kinds of interventions to address the performance
gap, the gap between what students are expected to do and what students
are able to do.
- Teacher-focused interventions are directed at
how teachers think about, adapt, and present their critical content
in "learner-friendly" fashion.
- Student-focused interventions are designed to
provide the skills and strategies students need to learn the content.
We have concluded that both types of interventions are needed if
students, especially low-achieving students, are to succeed on state
assessment tests and demonstrate real-world content literacy - fluent
use of listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. To ensure
that students attain content literacy and learn subject-matter content,
teachers can intervene at five levels.
Level 1. General education teachers present content in "learner-friendly"
ways. Teachers compensate for limited levels of literacy by modifying
curriculum and teaching methods to promote understanding and mastery.
The interventions at this level are designed to benefit all students,
making it easier for teachers to embrace their use.
Level 2. Interventions focus on directly teaching students
the strategies they need to successfully learn the content. Teachers
embed strategy instruction in core curriculum courses through direct
explanation, modeling, and required use on assignments. By teaching
students the strategies that are relevant to their courses, teachers
shift their emphasis, in part, from learning course content to acquiring
learning skills.
Level 3. Students receive specialized, intensive instruction
from someone other than the general education teacher. They learn
to use a broad array of learning strategies that they can apply
to a variety of tasks in multiple settings. To ensure that the strategies
students learn are central to meeting the demands in a classroom,
support personnel and general education teachers must work together
closely.
Level 4. Students learn content-literacy skills and strategies
through specialized, direct, and intensive instruction in listening,
speaking, reading, and writing skills. Reading specialists and special
education teachers work together to develop intensive and coordinated
instructional experiences designed to address severe literacy deficits.
Level 5. Students with underlying language disorders learn
the linguistic, meta-linguistic, and meta-cognitive underpinnings
they need to acquire the necessary content skills and strategies.
At this level, speech pathologists deliver one-on-one or small-group
curriculum-relevant language therapy in collaboration with other
support personnel teaching literacy skills.
Service-delivery model
Because the five-level content-literacy continuum is comprehensive
and involves several settings and educators, a well-designed and
coordinated service-delivery system must be in place. The service-delivery
system designed to provide this array of services is called the
Supported Inclusion Model. In this model, many students with learning
disabilities are enrolled in general education classes while their
work in those classes is supported through a variety of mechanisms.
The system consists of three components: individualized assessment
and personalized plans, general education classroom instruction,
and intensive personalized instruction.
Individualized assessment and personalized plans. In this component,
an accurate portrait of a student's skills and abilities is obtained
through assessing curriculum-based measures of a student's strengths
and weaknesses; teacher, parent, and student reports; and student
products. The general education settings the student will encounter
are assessed to determine what demands are inherent in those settings.
Based on these assessments, the student and his or her teachers
work together to develop a personalized education plan.
General education classroom instruction. The general education
teacher takes a central role as both the planner and the mediator
of learning. The teacher carefully organizes and transforms the
content into a form that is "learner friendly" before
presenting that content using Content Enhancement Routines. In addition,
the teacher considers the strategy or strategies that students need
to learn the content and teaches those strategies to them while
simultaneously teaching the content. The general education teacher
creates a "learning apprenticeship" experience in which
the teacher acts as the expert and students are the novices. The
teacher explains and models how to learn the content, and the students
imitate the expert's models. All students are involved in the apprenticeship
in a very meaningful way. The outcome of the apprenticeship is students
who not only know and understand information but who also can learn
information on their own.
Intensive personalized instruction. This component, in which Level
3 through Level 5 interventions take place, is carried out using
Academic Achievement Centers. All students, including normal achievers
and those with disabilities or low academic achievement, can receive
the personalized services that they require in these centers.
Instruction in these centers takes place in three ways:
- Small instructional groups, which may gather for intensive
work on a complex strategy or to receive additional instruction
on strategies being taught in their general education classes,
can be organized for a relatively short period.
- Strategic tutoring is an instructional process in which
the expert learner (the teacher) teaches novice learners strategies
while tutoring the subject-matter content. Strategic tutoring
is different from traditional tutoring in that it is based on
the apprenticeship notion and on teaching students strategies
that they can apply both to the task at hand and to similar future
tasks.
- During peer tutoring, students instruct other students.
The peer-tutoring structure most appropriate for Academic Achievement
Centers is one in which students pair up and one student tutors
the other outside the general education setting.
Professional-development programs
For the service-delivery model to be successful, continuing professional-development
opportunities aligned with its goals must be available. These opportunities
must be focused on teaching teachers how to use research-based practices
that have been shown to affect the performance of students. Not
only must a larger proportion of funds be focused on changing instructional
practice, these funds must be focused on instituting research-based
practices and programs.
Professional-development programs must be carefully structured
with the goal being to bridge the gap between research and practice
- to make validated interventions available to teachers in a way
that will ensure their long-term use for the benefit of students.
Professional development must be viewed as a continuous process
in which everyone in the school engages and must involve at least
four phases:
- initiation (to give basic information to potential implementers
to help them determine the degree of appropriateness and alignment
between the attributes of an innovation and existing instructional
needs)
- learning and implementation (to give in-depth explanations,
models, practice, and feedback)
- follow-up support (to support implementation efforts through
coaching, troubleshooting, support-team meetings, and implementation
refinement)
- maintenance (to routinize use of the innovation within the system)
Teachers must be given the materials they need to support their
instruction. Those materials need to be organized and ready to use.
Additionally, teachers must be afforded opportunities to meet regularly
as support teams.
Furthermore, professional-development sessions must be conducted
within a new paradigm that is founded on the notion of Partnership
Learning, a method for planning and delivering professional-development
sessions in which meaningful conversations take a central role.
By Donald D. Deshler, Jean B. Schumaker, B. Keith Lenz, Janis A. Bulgren, Michael F. Hock, Jim Knight, and Barbara J. Ehren |
