It’s time for this week’s edition of the recurring newsletter for Special Education Today. I hope you are ready for it, because—ready or note—here it comes…of course, you could send it to “device null” right now, if it is unwelcome, disgusting, horrifying, or you’re otherwise not “ready”1 for it.
This is the 1414th post for SET. That’s the number that Substack shows, at least. I estimate that it is the 211th issue of the newsletter, but I may have published one or two more (or fewer) than 50 issues in each of the previous volumes.
I do not think knowing exactly how many is of great import, though. And, regardless of the precise count of the number of newsletters, I can still assert that many of you will be able to predict the structure of this one. In fact, I’ll just skip right to the first section….
Photo
If you, Dear Readers, didn’t get an earlier hint, here; is the full-on declaration: It is hawk migration season and, here in Beautyland, that means you are about to be subjected to intermittent accounts of my visits to Afton, VA,2 for gawking at hawks as they migrate from the beautiful northern parts of North America to the more tropical climes (the Carrib!) where they spend their winters. “Snow birds” have got very little or nothing on these birds.
Those who are familiar with the ways of SET know that pretty much every fall over the last 40-45 years I make multiple visits to hang with folks at the Rockfish Gap Hawk Watch. There’s a lot of visiting with other folks wearing funny hats and looking at the sky using high-powered binoculars and spotting scopes. When someone sees a bird (or lots of birds), they tell each other where to look.
Rather than saying, “Over there, near the white clouds,” gawkers use a shared language to tell each other the direction to look. There are landmarks in that shared language, many of which are shown in this accompanying image.
If any Dear Readers are in the neighborhood over the next few weeks and are interested in gawking, give me a shout. Mayhaps we can find a few hours to practice using the landmarks.
SET status
As of this past week, Substack indicated that there are > 985 subscribers for SET. Yay. We’ve been lurking in that range for weeks.
About 90 subscribers contribute to SET. They help to make it possible to distribute this rag to others, pay the bills, and such. Although I didn’t see any new paid subscribers, there were a batch of folks who have renewed their subscriptions recently (thanks!).
Those new folks who didn’t join the ranks for contributing subscribers missed the chance to join with folks who have been around for a long time, including Bev J., Vicki, W., Jim S., Julie B., Michael K., Ed. M., Linda L., Maryanne L, Jen W., Jane B., Debbie R., Joel M., Marilyn F., Jim P., Roberta B., Nancy C-W., Susan O., Esther F., Clay K., Bob P., Mick N., Carol W., Michele M., Jean C., Kathleen McM., Larry M., Ed. P., John U., Bryan W., Demetis A., Pam S, Paula C, …. Well-informed and savvy readers will recognize many of these names. I find it terrifically flattering that so many important figures support SET.
Welcome to those who have joined the community this past week. Thanks for joining all of us, Simon C., Komal, Paul K., and Jake. May you find the content, including the comments from those listed in the previous paragraphs, informative and, dare I say, enjoyable.
Also, DRs, I want to express thanks to folks who interacted with the content this past week. Lots of y’all dropped “likes” on posts; subjectively, I’d say the rate of liking is higher than ever. Thank you! Please keep it going. And these folks deserve special acknowledgement: They posted comments, which I consider especially valuable: Clay K. (with yet another reminder about Charlotte’s Web), Mike N., Jan B., and Dan H. And, thanks to Shasta K. M (Medical Motherhood) for restacking a post.
And, while I’m saying “thank you,” let me shout out my appreciation to Mandy Rispoli for her contribution to a post this past week and to the other contributing authors for SET: John Romig, David Bateman, Li-Yu Hung, Mitch Yell, and Paula Martins. I hope to publish many more articles by these folks in the coming months.
And, DRs, please keep on sharing SET in whatever ways you can. Copy and share URLs, forward posts; talk about SET in your meetings, classes, or walks with buddies; or just click the share button.
SetBits
You dear subscribers received new SET posts durning the just-passed week. I didn’t publish as many posts as some DRs may have hoped to receive and too many for some other DRs. Some were only available primarily to paid subscribers.
Here is the catalog of the week’s posts, beginning with newsletter for the previous week. Each entry shows authors and availability:
Special Education Today newsletter 5(10): Are you interested in knowing what happened last week for SET? [JWL; free]
Complaints, disputes, resolutions: What's happening in this neck of the IDEA woods? [JWL; free]
Psychologists: Addressing aggressive behavior in schools: What do cognitive psychologists suggest about decreasing aggressive behavior in schools? [JWL & MJR; free]
Lasker prize for medication that arrests cystic fibrosis: Who are the scientists who determined biomedical cause and engineered a therapy? [JWL; free]
US ED projects defunded: What will become of these projects? [JWL; free]
Inclusion, segregation, education: What's something we can learn from some current events? [JWL; paid]
Like the poker players say about the cards they’re dealt: “Read ‘em and weep.” However, please subscribe so that you can get in on the next deal.
Notes
All right, already! Let’s get ready.
Probably most (if not all) or us have heard someone say that a learner is not “ready” for something. “She’s not ready for whole-group instruction.” “He’s just developing those skills, so he’s not ready yet for it.” “ He might mature enough to be ready for it in a few months or next semester.” “These kids just aren’t ready for teacher-directed instruction.” “She’s not ready…doesn’t have the self-control to work on her own.” “They can’t even multiply, so how can they be ready for algebra?”
As some Dear Readers may have already (ahem) anticipated, statements like these rankle me. My jaws clench, my eyebrows go up, and my eyes open widely. “Oh,” I want to say politely (of course), “Well, should we just wait for them to become ready?” If a learner isn’t “ready” for something, does that absolve us of the instructional obligation?
Uhm…, in a word, “No.”
Learning just about anything does, indeed, require learning component skills, and it one does’t have those component skills, one can be said not to be ready.
Decoding printed words requires (a) progressing from left to right while (b) saying sounds for letters and (c) sliding those sounds together and (d) pronouncing the product as if it is normal speech (and, maybe, comparing that pronunciation to one’s vocabulary of word-ideas). If a student isn’t ready for decoding, which of those subskills does she need to learn?
Taking notes from a lecture requires (a) listening to the speaker, (b) restating what the speaker said, (c) writing clusters of notes about what the speaker’s said, (d) organizing those notes as one takes them into bigger (“main” and smaller (“supporting”) ideas (whether as a “web,” a traditional outline, or according to some other convention), and (d) summarizing into a “thesis” the overall argument the speak advanced. If a student isn’t ready to take notes during a lecture, which component skills do we need to teach so that he can be ready?
Working in a small group requires (a) restating the goal of the group activity, (b) sitting quietly and listening to peers, (c) restating what other members of the group say as they talk about the goal, (d) determining categories of activities the group identifies, (e) assigning activities to members of the group, (f) agreeing on timelines for completion of activities, etc….
Now, please don’t take these analyses of the tasks of decoding, taking notes, or group work as fully specified guides for teaching those skills. They’re just outlines of some of the higher-level features of the tasks. The point is that readiness for just about anything is a statement about lots of component competencies.
The Precision Teaching folks sometimes call these clusters of competencies “ladders” and sometimes “pies.”
Ladders have many rungs and one climbs the pretty much sequentially.In the decoding example, the main rungs might be Left-to-right, blending, letter sounds, and such. But there might be rungs that precede those (e.g., segmenting) and there might be more sophisticated variations (for the letter “s” at the end of a one-syllable word, say “zzz”), That is, there are rungs of the ladder between these bigger rungs (start blending using continuous sounds and later introduce blending with stop sounds).
Pies have multiple components and are usually more about knowledge than operations or performance. You need to know a cluster of ideas (slices of the pie) to be competent. To know about the local solar system, you need a batch of facts. Those facts could be organized by object (e.g., Sun, planets, etc.), by actions (orbital periods, objects’ orientation to each other, etc.). (By the way, they should probably be ordered in ways that are consistent with general rules of physics.)
Regardless of whether something to be learned is a ladder or a pie, when learners are not “ready” to learn it, that is just an invitation to teach some important rung or slice of it.
Readiness should not be a call to do nothing, to wait for development, to admire some natural flowering, to give a learner a chance to mature. If our kids are not ready to learn D, q, or Y, then let’s get them ready to learn ABC, opq, and vWx.
Special education is about teaching. Let’s teach our kids.
To be sure, as regular readers know, I think it is important to know about development, psychology, sociology, politics…and all that stuff. But I think we need to attend to teaching. That’s special educators’ stinger. So, please remember to take care of yourselves and your colleagues (including kids and parents). Keep the special education community safe. And be sure you're using evidence-based methods to help our kids climb those ladders and eat those pies. Please help ensure that educators teach our students well.
Peace, love, & happiness
JohnL
John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D.
Founder and Editor, Special Education Today
If you read the remainder (or at least the commentary), you’ll see that I return to “readiness” later in this issue of the newsletter.
When I go to the Afton neighborhood, I think about Jim Kauffman frequently. He lived within sight (less than one mile) of the place where I watch hawks. He never took me up on my offers to pick him up on my way there. Maybe, if I can rewind time, I can convince him to join me once. Ahh, let me find my pal in my past.