Special Education Today newsletter 3(32)
How about more of the regular diets of drivel?
Another Monday morning…another news letter from Special Education Today. OK, so welcome! Here you have the 3nd issue of the third volume of the SET newsletter. I hope you find it both informative and enjoyable.
As usual, the contents include familiar parts. There are (a) notes about activity in the community, (b) a table of contents for last week’s posts, and (c) a little commentary.
First, though, here’re a couple of photos. Pat and I walked through a neighboring park-like area called Fox Haven. A wonderful patron of the neighborhood, Jane Heywood, planted lovely gardens and preserved lots of acres just a couple of miles west of where we live. She gave the property to UVA, and it’s open to runners, walkers, flaura- and fauna-admirers, and others. It’s at 38.02583° N, 78.53818° W, if you want to look on a map. As we walked along Morey Creek (I think that’s it; we’ve heard Louisiana Waterthrush calls there multiple times during previous walks in the spring) I saw the tree shown in the left of the two photos that I’ve posted here and marveled at how it had grown around some aged barb wire. I imagined what the tree might have said to the fence dozens or scores of years earlier.
Activity
I want to acknowledge all y’all (I’m from the south, so I know that’s the plural of “y’all”) who are reading my drivel. In the past 30 days, there have been about 20,000 visits to SET. Some folks (you know who you are!) have visited 4-5-6 times a week. You must know what you’re going to see, but you keep coming back for more!
Some folks share SET posts, and here’s an appreciation of them. Thank you to Tina C., Dan H., Clay K., Jan B., and everyone whom I’ve overlooked for clicking the “share” button.
As great as sharing is (didn’t you learn that in kindergarten?), comments are even greater. So, I have to flash the SET electrons to Adelaide D., Clay K., and Dan H. for wading into the morass and posting comments. They win the SET awards (usual rules for prizes apply).
Table of contents
This week, in addition to the previous newsletter, there were six posts to the Web site. I announced most of them via e-mail, but there were a couple that I only posted to the Web site. Some of you alert readers surely saw all of them—woohoo! In case you missed any and want to go check them, here’s a list of all the new content since last week (including that previous newsletter).
Special Education Today newsletter 3(31): Would you want a warning that this issue is especially high on the Drivel Scale?
Olds: One to watch: What did I publish 30 January 2005 on Teach Effectively?
RTI effects in Tennessee: Did the prevention process contribute to lower identification rates?
February is a long month this year: And SET is on sale all 29 days of it!
Yes, Virginia, we should teach behavior: What does Ollie Lovell say about a curriculum of behavior?
World Read Aloud Day: Wait...what to know about a day to read about so you can be ready for it?
Snippets—Potpourri of recent stories, early February 2024: Does anyone care to know about these stories?
These posts have already been published (and, I hope, read). But, there are new posts coming soon. I plan to post a substantial tranche of miniature tests (“probes”) for early reading and arithmetic, editorials about the sped world as I see it, an important obituary, and more. Some of these will only be available to paying subscribers—those subscriptions are on sale now—so please subscribe to have immediate access to them.
Commentary
Y’all know that I frequently use phrases such as “research-based,” “founded on solid research,” “scientifically grounded,” and other references to empirical evidence. I use those and related terms because I think that decisions about education—what curricula to purchase, what practices to recommend, what ideas to teach prospective teachers, what policies to promulgate—should be on scientific findings.
Education, including special education (though I like to think we are ahead of the curve on this) has too long been basing its decisions on image, feeling, theory, opinion, and unverified findings. If we educators are going to serve our students well—that is, if we are going to help them have desired outcomes—we need to switch our game. We need to base our educational decisions on verifiable evidence.
Alert readers will recognize that this point echoes my interest in open science, a position that I have been fortunate enough to have collaborated with other scholars in promoting (see Adelson et al., 2019; Cook et al., 2018, 2021, 2022). We need open science so that consumers of research can have open access to the basis for scientific assertions of fact. If we don’t have trustworthy scientific evidence, we can’t make solid arguments for improving outcomes.
There’re two important parts of advocacy: Argument and fact. One can only advance believable arguments if one bases those views on verified facts.
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about this problem. I’m taking two actions in that regard: (a) I am collaborating with dozens (scores?) of colleagues across education regarding an effort to advocate for founding education on professional-grade evidence, and (b) I am beginning to use the hashtag #ShowUsYourEvidence whenever I encounter recommendations about educational practices, policies, procedures, programs, and etc. I hope to explain more about the first of these points in the coming weeks when the documents will become public. I hope you, dear readers, will join me in adopting the hashtag (or something damn similar) so that we can ask people without evidence to up their game and allow those who have evidence about the effects of their recommendations to show off, to shine.
So, in that regard, I hope the trees will eat the fences and (apologies to Bob Dylan) “but for the sky, there will be no fences facing…” or at least fewer constraints on our efforts to deliver effective education to our kids. So, buckle up (‘cause this could be a wild ride), practice good health behaviors so you can stick with this initiative, and please help us teach our children well.
JohnL
John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D., editor and founder, https://SpecialEducationToday.com
Reference
Adelson, J. L., Barton, E., Bradshaw, C., Bryant, B., Bryant, D., Cook, B. G., [omitting 30+ coauthors here]... & Troia, G. (2019). A roadmap for transparent research in special education and related disciplines. (free download here).
Cook, B. G., Johnson, A. H., Maggin, D. M., Therrien, W. J., Barton, E. E., Lloyd, J. W., Reichow, B., Talbott, E., & Travers, J. C. (2022). Open science and single-case design research. Remedial and Special Education, 43(5), 359-369.
Cook, B. G., Lloyd, J. W., & Therrien, W. J. (2019). Open science in the field of emotional and behavioral disorders. Education and Treatment of Children, 42(4), 579-600.
Cook, B. G., Lloyd, J. W., Mellor, D., Nosek, B. A., & Therrien, W. J. (2018). Promoting open science to increase the trustworthiness of evidence in special education. Exceptional Children, 85(1), 104-118.