I Speak of Dreams

Special Education Law: Dora Raymaker Interviews Attorney Jennifer Parker

Over at Change.org/autism, artist and adult with autism Dora Raymaker conducts interviews with attorney Jennifer Parker.

I got pretty excited about Jennifer who not only has specific expertise working with students with invisible disabilities (including autism), but is also a special education attorney. So I hit Jennifer up for more than one interview. Here's the first, continuing the themes that were explored in the "real world" post--why can it be so hard to get seemingly simple accommodations from teachers? Is this a problem with individual teachers, with teacher education, with the educational system, with--with what?

Here's the beginning of the second interview:

Thursday I posted Jennifer Parker's take on why it can be difficult for students on the autistic spectrum to get academic accommodations. Now with more of her attorney hat on, I've asked Jennifer some questions more about the legal and self-advocacy side of academic accommodations at the primary and secondary school level.

Dora: Give me a brief summary of the laws that govern special education and public school accommodations.

Jennifer: Section 504 is a civil rights law that allows medical and classroom accommodations for children with disabilities who do not require special education services. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ensures that all children with disabilities have a free appropriate public education that emphasizes education that meets their unique needs.

Attention Bay Area Parents: March 14, The Evolving Reading Brain

March 14, 2009

The Evolving Reading Brain and the Digital Age: A Tale of Caution and Optimism for Parents and Teachers

with Maryanne Wolf, EdD

Palo Alto High School's Historic Haymarket Theater

50 Embarcadero Road, Road, Palo Alto, CA 94301

corner of Embarcadero Road and El Camino in Palo Alto

9:00 am to 12:00 noon

The story of how the brain learned to read can teach us new ways to think about how every young child learns to read, why some children cannot learn to read easily but may grow up to be artists and inventors, and what some of the challenges are to the development of reading in a digital age. This is a program for parents, educators, and the community.

Spanish translation provided. Childcare available by reservation to Cristina at 650.329.3787

Conference/Workshop Schedule for 2009

I'm trying to figure out which conferences and workshops to attend in 2009.  Here's the whole  partial list of conferences and workshops I want to, or should, attend.  Underlined = registered for. 

In my Board of Trustees, Independent School role

• Boardroom Dancing Dec. 5 2008 Milpitas Link
• California Association of Independent Schools Jan 24-25, Los Angeles Link
• Webinar from Goodman Group on Presentations Feb 4 & 11 Link
• National Association of Independent Schools Feb. 25 - 27, Chicago Link
• Independent School Management June 14-17 Philadelphia Link
• Nonprofit Workshop CompassPoint August 27 San Francisco Link
• Nonprofit Board Basics Online Anytime Link

In my Educational Therapist role

• Learning & the Brain Conference, Feb 19-21 Link
• Social Thinking Workshop: Organization Strategies Feb. 24  San Mateo, Link
• Parent-To-Parent CHADD Training, March 2009 Link
• Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) April 1–4,  Seattle  Link
• Social Thinking Portland OR April 16-17 Link
• Association of Educational Therapists (AET) October 22-25,  Atlanta Link
• International Dyslexia Association (IDA)  November 11-14 Orlando Link
• Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD) November
• Nathan Ory presentation/workshop, not yet scheduled. Link

In my blogging role

• BlogHer July 23-25 Chicago Link

Math Facts -- Online game that works well.

Link: Math Facts.  Addition, subtraction, multiplication.  Thanks to Rory, posting at Kitchen Table Math.

Tools for Formative ("Minute by Minute") Assessment

I learned a couple of these in the math class I took last summer.  They're from Jeff Zwire's excellent website, Language and Literacy

Minute-by-Minute Assessment of Learning

Here are several popular formative assessment techniques that allow us to get a better sense of student learning beyond just raised hands or asking if there are any questions. The main goal of these techniques is to quickly build a clear sense of student understanding and their abilities to describe it.

o Thumbs - Students put thumbs up for understanding, thumbs sideways for some understanding, and thumbs down for little understanding.
o Four fingers - Students put four fingers up or against chest to show understanding, three for less understanding, down to one finger for little understanding.
o Cards - Students put different colored cards up on their desks depending on their grasp of the material. Green can mean “let's move on” while red can mean “let's go over it again.”
o Quickwrite - Have students respond to a quick prompt and walk around to see how many of them got it or not. You can even have them use some terms in their responses to see if they comprehend the language. They can also put quick writes on cards with two different prompts on each side, and then turn the cards in to see trends of learning.
o Draw & Describe - Many students are much better at drawing their understandings than writing or talking about them. Go around as students are drawing and have students explain their drawing to you. Other students can be drawing and/or writing about their drawings.

Prop. 4 has been defeated!

Whew.  I was thinking of how to mount another initiative campaign.

I'm heartsick over the passage of Prop. 8.

Executive Attention: Interview with Michael Posner

The blog SharpBrains has published an interview with Michael Posner that should be of interest to all parents, but especially those parents whose children struggle with attentional issues.  Here's a small sample:

SB: The other main area of your research is attention. Can you explain the brain-basis for what we usually call "attention"?

MP: I have been interested in how the attention system develops in infancy and early childhood.

One of our major findings, thanks to neuroimaging, is that there is not one single "attention", but three separate functions of attention with three separate underlying brain networks: alerting, orienting, and executive attention.

1. Alerting: helps us maintain an Alert State.
2. Orienting: focuses our senses on the information we want. For example, you are now listening to my voice.
3. Executive Attention: regulates a variety of networks, such as emotional responses and sensory information. This is critical for most other skills, and clearly correlated with academic performance. It is distributed in frontal lobes and the cingulate gyrus.

The development of executive attention can be easily observed both by questionnaire and cognitive tasks after about age 3–4, when parents can identify the ability of their children to regulate their emotions and control their behavior in accord with social demands.

SB: "Executive attention" sounds similar to executive functions.

MP: Executive functions are goal-oriented. Executive attention is just the ability to manage attention towards those goals, towards planning.

Both are clearly correlated. Executive attention is important for decision-making (how to accomplish an external goal) and with working memory (the temporary storage of information). For example, given that you said earlier that you liked my monograph,  I have been thinking of the subheadings and sections there as I provide you my answers, using my working memory capacity.

Posner also mentions a computer-based attention training program, available here.  I'll be investigating the program and will report on it later.

Educating Education Writers: Great Article from Jennifer Booth Reed on Dyslexia in Florida

Reed used a vignette from a young struggling reader and an adult who is being remediated to introduce new finds in dyslexia research, interviewing not only Marcel Just, but Guinevere Eden and Nadine Gaab.

The piece highlights how  Laurie Frydenlund, an educational therapists, teaches her students to read and write, and Frydenlund's outreach to local public schools.

Frydenlund is hoping to work with local instructors to raise awareness of the disorder. She offered an introduction to dyslexia at one school, Tropic Isles Elementary, and is hoping she can better educate instructors on what to watch for, how to offer accommodations, how to remediate them and when to refer children for testing. She uses a phonics-based, multisensory approach based on the work of dyslexia pioneers, Anna Gillingham and Samuel Orton.

"Teachers are making all the best efforts," she said. "It's just what they do doesn't always make sense for people with dyslexia."

Language Arts Toolbox

I wanted to drop a mention here of Dana Huff's Language Arts Toolbox.
I don't have time right now to play with the presentation, but want to get back to it later (August?)