Special Education Today Newsletter 2(37)

Here’s this week’s news and info for 20 February 2023

Welcome to this 33rd issue of the newsletter for the second year of Special Education Today.

The 33rd issue of the second year? Yikes! That adds up to something like 80 issues! As Michael K. jokes, I’m really old, but the truth is, I’m not > 80!

After an update about the health of SET, appreciation for readers, and the current contents, readers will find a personal question to contemplate.

Status update

SET continues to grow, though slowly. There were two semi-unsubscribes (people with paid plans didn’t re-up; they are still free subscribers) and three new subscriptions.

Anyway, we are now well over 500 subscribers. The size of the community implies, to me at least, that when subscribers engage with the content, they are having the opportunity to interact with lots of people who share their interests in children with disabilities and special education (as well as related topics). Therefore, I encourage readers to check out the comments, likes, and such…take chances to “talk” with others who are reading the same drivel you are reading.

The total of subscribers represents both paid and free subscribers. Thanks to those who spread the word; please continue to do so! Thanks, especially, to those (like, Mike G., for example) who not only maintain a paid subscription, but have opted to support SET.

Forward. Tweet. Share. Tell friends and others (enemies?) to subscribe!

There were about 3500 visits to the site last week. Some of y’all surely showed up more than once (evidence of those repeat visits coming), so I’m definitely calling that the number “visits” rather than “visitors.” The number of weekly visits rises and falls, of course; some days, the number of visits has gone past 1500.

Flashes of the electrons

Part of the reason the community has grown is that SET pals interacted with the magazine-site last week. I want to acknowledge these folks (who are, in their own right, “influencers” whom I admire and whose efforts I appreciate; I’m honored that they are here and saying nice stuff):

• Larry M. and Vicki were the only folks who dropped comments last week. Thank you for contributing!

• Mary K., Clay K. (more than thrice!), Michael K., Jane B. (frequent suspect), Karen A. (at least seven times!), Anon., Kate P., and Larry M. threw “likes” on posts recently. It’s great that you find them worth “liking,” and I appreciate the feedback. Also thanks to those who clicked likes that I overlooked in this quick accounting.

• Tina C., Clay K., Sofia S., and Jeannie K.-T. used the share button in the last month; lots of thanks for that.

• Thanks, too, to y’all who have followed @speciadedtoday. Twitter allows one to keep up with what’s happening with SET. As I get a chance, I’ll push notices to followers of that TW account. Help SET by retweeting those notices and posting your own tweets about content even when I don’t.

• Also, please note that I’m establishing a Mastadon presence, both for myself and SET. I want a landing pad as Twitter continues to unravel. More on that in future notes.

Table of contents for the past week

If you are only reading this newsletter, you are getting what I think would be called “SET light” or “a lagging indicator.” This newsletter appears once a week. I post messages to the Web site multiple (7) times during the (past) week. These are the posts from the previous week:

1. Special Education Today Newsletter 2(32)—Here’s this week’s news and info since 7 February 2023?

2. And so, it’s heart day!—Why should we care about Valentines?

3. All this “science of X”—What counts as “research based?”

4. Twyman and Heward on improving student learning—What did these perenial all-stars say about evidence-based practices?

5. Terminology, labels, and such—What’s in a word?

6. Problem-based primer on teaching behavior—Can’t we learn a lot from a master behavior strategist?

7. Great need for special education teachers continues in the US—What did the ASDP learn about teacher shortages in the fall of 2022?

8. Optometric training—Should folks put their eggs in this basket?

If you want to keep current with SET content, check the Website during the week. You’ll find an HTML-formated version of this newsletter (much prettier than the version that comes in the e-mail) as well as any newer posts.

Commentary

Rather than prattle on about some personal observations, in this week’s commentary, I simply want to ask readers a question. I’ll get to the question after I provide a little bit of background.

Background

For people who are concerned about literacy instruction, the term “multisensory” or “multi-sensory” teaching are probably familiar. The term is regularly associated with the so-called “Ortan-Gillingham” method—which could just as well be called the Gillingham-Stillman method, because they wrote the book.

As a young teaching assistant, I learned O-G from the then-current edition of Gillingham and Stillman’s book (1970). My lead teacher, Teddee, gave me the big, green version, told me that she also had an earlier red version, and said, “You should read this.”

Teddee and I used the methods with great success for a couple of children who had what California at that time called “Educational Handicap.” In one case, a late-elementary boy went from a child who did not reliably decode “dog,” “cat,” and “tree” to one who, seven months later was beginning to read chapter books—like three years’ growth from fall to spring. Angela, a girl who loyal readers will recall continued to correspond with me into the 1980s, didn’t rocket quite so rapidly, but she learned a lot.

Multi-sensory instruction is one of the keystone concepts in O-G (and its related approaches such as Slingerland, Spaulding, Wilson, and others). The idea is that learners need to learn associations between visual, auditory, and kinesthetic aspects of sensing performances when reading and writing:

• See a letter (visual) and say the sound (auditory);

• Hear a sound (auditory) and write the letter (kinesthetic);

• See a letter (visual) and write the letter (kinesthetic).

Other combinations of these three were also considered important¹. The three are often represented on a triangle with vectors running between the apexes representing auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. And some advocates will emphasize that learners need to entertain all these sensory connections simultaneously.

On its face, multi-sensory idea makes sense. Reading requires mastery of letter-sound (grapheme-phoneme relationships) which are V-A-K connections. Spelling requires writing sounds (A-K-V) as written letters. And there-in lies my question....

My Question

Is it possible to teach literacy skills (even Braille) without including multi-sensory learning? If it’s not possible, what is the magic of multi-sensory instruction? Why is this idea venerated? Especially when a lot of evidence shows that O-G may not be all it’s touted as being (Stephens et al., 2021)?

Please drop your answer as a comment or even reply to directly through e-mail.

Sources

Gillingham, A., & Stillman, B. W. (1970). Remedial training for children with specific disability in reading, spelling, and penmanship (8th ed.). Educators Publishing.

Stevens, E. A., Austin, C., Moore, C., Scammacca, N., Boucher, A. N., & Vaughn, S. (2021). Current state of the evidence: Examining the effects of Orton-Gillingham reading interventions for students with or at risk for word-level reading disabilities. Exceptional Children, 87(4), 397-417. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0014402921993406

I end here with familiar recommendations: Wear your seatbelts (and encourage other passengers in your vehicle wear them, too). Wash your hands frequently. Prefer gathering in well-ventilated spaces. Get vaccinated and help others to do so. And, of course, teach your children well.

‘Till next time....

JohnL

John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D.

SET Editor guy

Charlottesville

SET should not be confused with a product with the same name that is published by the Council for Exceptional Children. SET predated CEC’s publication by decades. Despite my appreciation for CEC, this product is not designed to promote that organization.

1. There was a fellow student in a class who riffed on the visual-auditory-kinesthetic-tactile emphases that were popular at the time. He showed me a paper in which he added additional senses to the VAKT conception. In his paper, he argued that gustatory and olfactory senses should not be omitted. He supported their importance by referring to interventions using edible (and, therefore, olfactory) reinforcers based on B. F. Skinner’s behavioral work. He said he was recommending a new model: GO-VAKT. I now have a smaller posterior because I laughed so much.