Memo #4

I've been a little disappointed with the response (or no response) from teachers. While I have not heard from the elementary school teachers I have spoken with 2 high school teachers. The first is the teacher of the autism classroom. After spending a block in his room I am amazed any writing takes place. The spectrum is wide and very difficult to manage. He clearly acknowledged that YES, writing is a HUGE problem. He stated that there is no writing that appears easier than others. He states there are 2 major struggles the kids have. Organizing their thoughts and transposing them on paper. They stray off task easily or have difficulty even verbalizing what they want to write. The act of writing in itself poses a whole different challenge. With respect to the strategies I've mentioned in secondary sources he states yes, that is what in theory what he was taught and it is a practice he uses. For example, he had several different organizers that help the kids with their thought processes. He believes that those strategies are indeed the best for all kids. Modeling step by step, drafting, scaffolding, revising, use of graphic organizers are all practices he feels works for the kids. What he found was the most difficult was working with such diverse kids and keeping them on task and focused. So what he said in practice worked best was instead of practicing as a class he allowed students to come and go as they needed to and from the tasks. He said it made it extremely difficult to teach as different kids would get up and move about the class and the class would always be at different steps in the process. He said he found it frustrating at times but relies on his TA's to let those kids do what they needed to and then refocus them to the assignment. He said unlike a regular class where kids can be given a time to start and finish his students require lots of breaks, redirection, and may take days to complete an assignment because of the need for all the modeling, prewriting, scaffolding etc. So what I concluded from this conversation was that in fact what secondary sources suggest is something that is happening in at least one classroom. What did not get addressed in my readings was the practical application of the time, patience, and extra hands this whole process takes. Next I interviewed the severe and profound teacher. She echoed much of what the other teacher said. She however, felt that for her students the physical ability to write was a much bigger issue. She too uses several of the same strategies and breaks writing into very specific steps allowing students to work at their own pace. She always models her thought processes, her organization and builds from there. More TA's work beside her but her students require much more physical help. She finds that her students work much better on electronic devises as they struggle with the pen to paper concrete writing. She also stated because of this most students will verbalize their thoughts and she or a TA will physically write for them. This is a practice she has integrated as she said she finds letting them have the thought process and expression is sometimes more important for them mentally than the physical writing. She also said that style of writing wasn't a factor for her class. Because she taught moderate-severe profound disability her focus was on topics to just engage students so they would participate in the process as several of them have extremely limited vocabulary and are difficult to engage in any assignment. What I found interesting as I walked into the classes was although I knew they were given writing assignment I would have never known by the activity of the class. There was so many other things going on like PT and OT, toileting and feeding schedules, among other kids just not being able to sit to complete assignments. The distractions were overwhelming. I mentioned this to the first teacher. He laughed and said "welcome to my world."