Welcome to Wheelock! Session 1

1. Welcome to Wheelock!Session 1 Impact of Special Needs on Learning and Development

2. Setting the tone… • “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Aristotle

3. Agenda for this morning • You – the learner and my expectations for you (including a discussion of critical thinking). • My orientation to teaching • Purpose of Course: Impact on Special Needs on Learning and Development: The Early Years • Mini-lessons • Overview of Special Education • The Social Context within which Individuals with Disabilities Reside • Overview of Specific Disabilities • Things you will do today: • Watch a few short videos • Sort yourselves into groups • Discuss and write about your thoughts and ideas based on prior readings and what we examine in class • Select the specific disabilities you will study and identify several centers or places you will visit.

4. Segment 1: Vision My Belief: Everyone is capable of learning and doing great things! What I Expect: The very best from you in terms of attention, effort, attitude, and products! What you can expect from me: 100 percent attention to your learning and progress Framework: Critical Thinking Key Performance Assessment: A dynamic exhibition and symposium during which you will demonstrate critical thinking skills as you engage an audience of educators, policymakers, pre-service leaders, friends and family on matters of disability, inclusion and inclusive curriculum in Singapore

5. My Orientation to Teaching Source: Darling-Hammond, and Bransford, 2005, p.11 Learners and Learning in social contexts -human development -learning -language Curriculum and Subject Matter: Educational goals and purposes for subject matter content and skills Vision/ Professional Practice (framework) Teaching: -Teaching subject matter -Teaching diverse skills -Assessment - Classroom Management

6. How did I Derive my Expectations and Approach to Teaching?Dimensions of Learning An interactive processes that includes five types of learning: • Positive attitudes and perceptions about learning • Thinking involved in acquiring and integrating knowledge • Thinking involved in extending and refining knowledge • Thinking involved in using knowledge meaningfully • Productive habits of mind (Marzano, 1992 pp. vii) •  Video on wikispace: The Science of Learning

7. How did I Derive my Expectations and Approach to Teaching? TheBrain… • Not static - churns things around • Recombines invariant representations. • leads to entirely novel concepts, and these concepts can lead to action.  • Imagination, therefore, is a reinvention of that which we have experienced in new ways.

8. Searching Your Memory Bank: Neocortical Memory is Hierarchical

9. How did I Derive my Expectations and Approach to Teaching? Hippocampus: Helps regulate emotion and memory • Processes and stores unique sensory inputs • A damaged hippocampus impedes memory

10. How did I Derive my Expectations and Approach to Teaching? Neocortex: A Preliminary Explanation • Our experiences are converted to Memories • Our memory pays attention to the unexpected

11. How did I Derive my Expectations and Approach to Teaching?The Brain….An Elaborate Structure The Binding Problem (Francis Crick, n.d.) • How is it that an activity representing a single object in different parts of the brain all come together to make a unified concept?

12. How did I Derive…?Research on Neurobiology of learning • To understand how we acquire, retain and retrieve memories. • molecular cascades underlying experience-dependent changes in neuronal function • Systems in the brain that support different types of memory • Alterations in brain function affect behavior reflecting learning and memory.

13. How I Derive…? Neuroplasticity • The process by which neurons create new connections among themselves. • We can change the way the brain works by making a brain area more active through remedial training • New connections among neurons preserve memories and make learning possible, but they also fortify brain functions.

14. Neuroplasticity and Dyslexia • These fMRI scans reveal the vigor of neuroplasticity • Functional magnetic resonance imaging reveals areas in the right and left hemispheres that are much more active in strong readers than in struggling readers. • With practice there is no discernable difference

15. How did I Derive my Expectations and Approach to Teaching?...Memory: Continual Neural Activity • A bridge to our past and future

16. Implications for Teaching:Facilitating Learning • Creating learning experiences that stretch you beyond that which feels comfortable working in an unanticipated manner • Provide Support • Scaffolding • Feedback • Consultations • Differentiating Instruction in Three ways: by process, content or product • Universal Design • Using Technology • Creating opportunities for students to collaborate • Group work

17. Scaffolding • Building in a variety of supports for each student that moves him or her from one step to the next • Scaffolding comes from Vygotsky’s (1978) idea of a more experienced adult providing support to a novice or peer assisting a novice. • Wood, Brunner and Ross (1975) expanded on Vygotsky’s idea by describing scaffolding as the support that an adult tutor could provide to a younger learner (Quintana, Shin, Norris, Soloway, 2006).  Quintana, Shin, Norris and Solloway (2006) for example, define scaffolding as closing the “conceptual distance between the novice learner and the more developed understanding of an expert” (p.123) in a particular subject area.

18. Ways in which one can Scaffold • Coach (e.g. guide, provide explanations and feedback) • Model a task • Give advice so that students could engage in authentic tasks • Provide a variety of resources (e.g. links on our wiki, plus the book you are about to read together about another approach to school discipline) • Utilize technology (e.g. voicthread & google docs) to facilitate collaboration  • Make authentic practice explicit and visible (e.g. here, the multi-step process in which you will collaboratively engage to read the book -A learning approach to school discipline- is a roadmap for making our collective thinking visible).

19. Teaching for Understanding

20. Critical Thinking Framework

21. Professional Obligations include… • Examining how schools maintain status quo the dominant group • Analyzing and acting against reproducing the same skewed outcomes • Being committed to self-actualization • Reflecting and taking collective action • Working collectively with colleagues, students, and community to develop effective pedagogy that serves students’ academic needs • Illuminating students’ power, social potential and spirit of hope

22. Must Reckon with… The Politics of Difference - It creates a divide and conquer mentality that creates only temporary victories • Requires your daily engagement in the struggle for justice

23. How Knowledge is Traditionally Constructed… • Technical: • Empirical, analytical methods that can only be measured and quantified (usually in tests) • Practical • That which shapes daily actions in the world • Describe and analyze social conditions with the hope of helping students to develop practical skills that transfer into their roles in society

24. Consider another way in which you can construct knowledge…. Emancipatory • Creates the conditions for social justice • Equality • Empowerment

25. How Might You Develop an Emancipatory Orientation to Learning? • Critical Thinking • What does it mean and why is it important? • Key Source: Brookfield, S.D. (1987). Developing critical thinkers: Challenging adults to explore alternative ways of thinking and acting

26. Behavioral Characteristics of Critical Thinkers… • Demonstrate an awareness of the assumptions under which they (and others) think and act • Pay attention to the context in which they (and others) generate actions and ideas • Are skeptical of quick fix solutions, of single answers to problems, and to claims of universal truth • Are open to alternative ways of looking at, and behaving in, the world.

27. Critical Thinking Requires… • The suspension of belief • Jettisoning ideas that you accepted previously without question

28. Critical Thinkers Look for… • Concrete indicators that are directly observable • Behaviors • Actions • Situations • Evidence in outcomes

29. Critical Thinking Involves • Political Education • How power works • How things get done • How you control the process by which things get done

30. Critical Thinking also involves… Affect • Feelings • Emotional responses • Intuitions Imagining alternatives

31. Cornerstone of the Critical Thinker’s Identity Critical thinkers take the reality of democracy seriously. They tend to: • Question the appropriateness of a certain technique, mode of production, or organizational reform • Ask questions regarding the activities of local, state and national government offices • Call for political leaders to account for their actions • Are ready to challenge the legitimacy of existing policies and political structures

32. Dispositions of Critical Thinkers • Are aware of the potential for distortion and bias in media depictions of their private and public worlds • Come to their own judgments, choices, and decisions for themselves instead of letting others do this on their behalf • Refuse to relinquish responsibility for making the choices that determine their individual and collective futures • Are actively engaged in creating their personal and social worlds

33. Central to the Notion of Critical Literacy… Need to develop a collective vision of what it might be like to live in the best of all societies and how such a vision might be practical (Kretovics, 1985, p.51).

34. Skills of Critical Thinking

35. Critical Thinking in Education • Emancipatory learning (Habermas, 1979). • Learners are aware of the forces that brought them to their current situation • Learners take action to change some aspect of these situations • Frees people from personal, institutional, or environmental forces that prevent them from seeing new directions and from gaining control of their own lives, their society, and their world

36. Critical Pedagogy • “Understanding the relationships between economic structures, culture formations, and social practices in the wider society and how they relate to the curriculum pedagogies in school and in the classroom” McLaren & Giroux, 1990, p.155)

37. We Expect that you would… • Ask and respond to critical questions • Engage in collaborative problem solving • Use your experiences as part of the formal course content • Constantly reflect, verbally and in writing, on a problem or theme • Consider and apply new perspectives to interpreting or reinterpreting familiar situations, problems or habitual behaviors • Test new solutions, strategies and or methods • Take some observable actions

38. Other Resources • Critical Thinking and Why it Counts: • http://www.insightassessment.com/pdf_files/what&why2004.pdf • Critical Pedagogy: http://mingo.info-science.uiowa.edu/~stevens/critped/linksarticle.htm

39. An analogy… How might you associate this treewith your work as an educational leader? http://voicethread.com/share/1220950/

40. The purpose of this course…

41. Overview of Special Education Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCdR2vA1g20

42. What are your first thoughts?

43. The Learning Context for Children with Disabilities A few modern philosophers…assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism…With practice, training and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before. –Alfred Binet (1973) . Modern Ideas about Children.

44. What does it look like to have a disability?

45. Articulating Your Beginning Understanding… • voicethread.com/share/1220950/

46. Groups: Collaborative Work Space • Group 1: https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1GDgtG7zKWj7ewwfPFo584hjV5m6eZFYn0K8_W0VLxZ8&hl=en&authkey=CL3y9KgL • Group 2: https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1nbhEhr45VHQg0OPW7uX2dNmcYTMTHXA0L9vimsG0pgI&hl=en&authkey=CM6Tw6ED • Group 3: https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1DWACf5zJLnFkFpbyMNs2RebW-sNfU438lA4dce07igc&hl=en&authkey=CMK1nbsO • Group 4: • https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1sxo7eoUGDidXmKlDW68s1LVaCnHOENZClmZSKwOzvEo&hl=en&authkey=CIee_5IK • Group 5: • https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1EXLoc4fn9vOP4NnQLZpwYHDTtNx3eDDW0vgulNZmB4k&hl=en&authkey=CIf04e8C • Group 6: • https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=18UbM_4skVsJfrtXi4L_A5tv3lslUgmI65_om8zMr8gA&hl=en&authkey=CN6CwL4H

47. Groups: Collaborative Work Space • Group 7 https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1JaRkVygxTryzs9LgizSOQaGDYRQekEksWX9ARt6j4Iw&hl=en&authkey=CKTyt_QH • Group 8 https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1ao2HodLJ-wVuaV9uk9qtVVC5GW938w5FUOEKwVjX8t0&hl=en&authkey=CKv37YQE • Group 9 https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=18ZSf4sCep4OdpnQ1S58aW5X6ZND0uTl5W73t0LfZfW0&hl=en&authkey=CNX7l4EM • Group 10 https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=15ar0jtIjlelbKEmwFF5sDrq0Zuj5DKIMrSB_9vw8QPs&hl=en&authkey=CNO_u4MG • Group 11 https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1pnb5kDqQwzqUisH0MOKAMR9XJBjdVGWcWwR-SxZtEsY&hl=en&authkey=CPb22IQN • Group 12 https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1xMD1PlveToA99vixVKKM9gDWEndwgIVZXF0hWzgkU14&hl=en&authkey=CM-plf8P