- Build profiles of students with language, literacy, and attentional difficulties and map the presenting characteristics of exemplar students to identify potential barriers.
- Dig into accessible pedagogies and relevant adjustments for students who need them.
- Uncover how teachers can use student consultation and professional collaboration to support inclusive practice.
In this masterclass for classroom teachers, Professor Linda J. Graham and Haley Tancredi are showing how to put the ideas from their keynote (Looking below the surface to understand impacts of language, literacy and attentional difficulties) session into practice.
They start off by exploring the scenarios from the quiz that kicked off their keynote, comparing the results to the assumptions and responses from teachers who took originally part in the questionnaire in Glasby’s study. The results (which often showed teachers “misdiagnosing” children based on common presentations in behaviour and learning) exemplify the importance of really paying attention to student characteristics and the implications for teacher practice.
Their model, which was also presented in their keynote, paves the way forward for students with language, literacy and attentional difficulties. It relies on deep teacher knowledge in concert with data (there are many types of this) and student consultation (not assumptions!), to optimise learning for students.
They remind us that working memory has a limited capacity - kids can only hold so much. For children who may have difficulty with attention, or students with language difficulties, it’s like their cup overflows and their capacity has been overwhelmed. Teachers can support this overload by considering potential barriers in instruction and pedagogy. For example, information may need to be repeated.
All teachers know that teachers will need data to understand their students. But what counts as practical, relevant data?
Sources include:
- Student insights
- Observations
- Standardised tools
- Parent/care report
- Summative and Formative assessment
- Specialist reports
- Past teacher reports (many times teachers may have discovered something about a student months into school, only to find out that another teacher discovered it before them)
Professional collaboration is key when you’re learning about students and their profiles. You may collaborate with other educators or experts like speech pathologists to work together towards supporting student learning.
They then share Consulting students with disability: a practice guide! Creating this guide was Haley Tancredi’s lockdown project, and is designed to help you engage in that critical (and required) consultation process with students and to identify adjustments from that process. You can download this guide here.
“When students have opportunities to be consulted, they engage as agents who can contribute to pedagogical refinements.”
They close this masterclass by guiding participants through several potential student scenarios that would allow them to put these ideas of consultation, data, and adjustments into practice. For example, how might a teacher consider and create adjustments for a student giving a book report in front of the class? Below is a model that could easily be adapted for any group of students.
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