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right way to remediate these
students is to create an Individualized Learning Plan. An Individualized
Learning Plan will identify the learning objectives necessary to improve the
student’s skills so that he is working at the appropriate grade level. These
skills include activities and tutorials for the student to learn or review.
The Individualized Learning Plan will include the foundation skills necessary
for the student to master the current material. And, the student isn’t
subjected to hours of additional testing. The teacher asks a few simple
questions to select the proper foundation skills for the Individualized Learning
Plan. This takes the student from struggling to success in an easy to
execute manner.
Foundation skills, also known as Building Block Skills, are the prerequisites
to more advanced skills. Just as the ancient pyramids’ strength was a result of
a very strong foundation, a student’s future success in school is also dependent
on a strong foundation. This concept is known as the Pyramid of Skills.
It is imperative that a student masters certain foundation skills because he
will encounter many skills in the future that will build upon these essential
building blocks. A teacher cannot assume that every student has mastered
all of the important building block skills when they enter the classroom on the
first day of school. The teacher needs to identify the deficiencies of his
or her students and then work with the students’ individual needs. Research
continues to show that the time to offer remedial instruction is early rather
than later. In order to remediate students, educators need the resources
that will enable them to create Individualized Learning Plans to meet the needs
of each student in the class. An Individualized Learning Plan should
include activities and tutorials for skills that a student did not master when
they were first introduced. Without this re-teaching or remediation, it is
impossible for a student to move on and master skills that build on such
foundation skills. Throughout a child’s schooling, he will continue to be
expected to master concepts that build on prerequisite concepts taught in
earlier grades. One student’s Individualized Learning Plan may differ
greatly from another’s, depending on his strengths and weaknesses. If a
student excels in math and science, a teacher may create an Individualized
Learning Plan that offers higher-level activities in those subject areas and
grade-level appropriate activities in the other domains. Similarly, a
student who is several levels below grade level in reading would benefit from an
Individualized Learning Plan that contains activities based on skills that he
did not master in an earlier grade. That same student may excel in
mathematics and would benefit from an individualized plan that offers him
enrichment activities in math.
What do we do when a student doesn’t master the essential
foundation skills?
Many of America’s students are not achieving proficiency in
reading. Why? Learning the alphabet and how to decode words is not
something that comes naturally to children. That is why they must be taught the
necessary skills in the proper order that will lead them to become successful
readers. A first grader doesn’t just pick up a book and begin reading.
The first step, or the base of the pyramid when a child learns to read, is
learning the alphabet. The next step is associating sounds with letters,
then a student learns to blend the sounds to create a word, and so on. But
it all comes back to the very first step - if a child does not learn the
alphabet, he will never learn to read! This seems to be a common sense
statement, but when children are missing some of the “steps” on their Pyramid of
Skills, their foundation becomes weak. An Individualized Learning Plan can
help identify the missing steps early on so that the student does not fall
behind or begin struggling when faced with new material that builds on the
existing skills.
Across the country, students are failing high school exit
exams because they never mastered the essential building block or foundation
skills they were exposed to in elementary school. The majority of skills
that are assessed when a student exits high school are taught in the upper
elementary and middle school grades. So what do we do when that eighth
grader still can’t write an organized paragraph? It’s simple. We go
back to the foundation skill(s) that he never mastered at the elementary level.
Maybe he doesn’t know how to write a topic sentence. Maybe he never
grasped the concept of supporting details. The key is to remediate the
building block skills that he never mastered successfully at an earlier grade.
An Individualized Learning Plan will help the educator identify key prerequisite
skills that were not mastered at an earlier grade and offer remedial skills and
activities that are necessary for the student to move forward.
In the mid 1990s in Virginia,
students exiting middle school were required to pass all three parts of the
Literacy Passport Test to be promoted to ninth grade. What school leaders
discovered was that many students were not passing this test. They
realized that remediation of the foundation skills that are taught in elementary
school was the key.
James McMillan of the Metropolitan Educational Research
Consortium in Richmond, Virginia, conducted a study that identified successful
remediation strategies used by educators. At the study’s completion,
McMillan discovered several things reflected by the study’s results and the
students’ progress.
- “Effective remediation occurs when resources are provided
that give teachers extra help in the regular classroom.” Individual
Learning Plans make this possible.
- Findings suggest that not only do students need to be
actively engaged in the remediation; they must also be applying needed
skills.
- On an individual level, the study results indicate that
small groups, close supervision, and individualized instruction
lead to successful student remediation. “It was helpful to keep materials
at the right level and individualize as much as possible.”
In McMillan’s conclusion, he remarked that individualized
attention was most successful because it addressed the student’s academic
weaknesses. McMillan also concluded that there are a few general
principles and approaches that have common elements that include the following:
- More emphasis on teaching basic skills such as vocabulary,
sentence structure, and grammar
- Allowing extensive practice for students in the skills
that they had deficiencies
- Individualizing instruction whenever possible
- Close supervision with guided instruction, often made
possible by utilizing other adults in the classroom (teacher’s aid,
volunteer, etc.)
- Begin remediation efforts as early as possible in the
elementary school
Simply stated, most skills need direct instruction.
Although John Dewey’s original idea of progressive education has been
around for more than a hundred years, some prominent progressive educators have
taken it to the extreme. An important point to ponder is that you wouldn’t
find too many children who are naturally curious about learning the
multiplication tables or rules that govern grammar. Some skills and
concepts can only be learned through explicit guidance, drill, and practice.
Likewise,
discovery learning is the general idea that people can learn things and
understand them when they discover them for themselves. Obviously, this
will work in some types of learning but not others. For example, a student
who conducts a science experiment that explores the principle of inertia will
learn more by doing the experiment than reading about the principle in a
textbook. However, this same strategy would not work when a student is
trying to master skills related to using proper grammar when writing. One
does not “discover” the rules of grammar independently. There are certain
skills that can be mastered only after a student has learned the rules or
principles that govern that skill. In other words, some skills require direct
instruction or explicit teaching.
Some skills, such as spoken language and fine motor skills
can be mastered through primary cognitive abilities, but recent findings in
cognitive psychology support the need for direct instruction for the mastery of
many other skills taught in school. According to Evers, editor of
What’s Gone Wrong in America’s Classrooms, “Subject matter often has an
inherent internal logic and can be organized on a ladder of increasing
difficulty and complexity—a ladder of learning.” Some skills must be mastered
before a student can go on to the next step. Many skills that are taught
in school possess this hierarchical or pyramid character, and it is important
that students learn such a skill systematically. By identifying a
student’s areas of weakness, a classroom teacher can develop an individual plan
that meets the student’s academic needs. It is imperative that teachers
have access to resources that will enable them to personalize instruction for
their students. For example, an Individualized Learning Plan for a student
who is below grade level in math would differ greatly from a plan for a student
who excels in the area of mathematics.
“In the culturally important academic subjects—math,
science, literature…curriculum planners can and should organize a curriculum
that emphasizes content. Education in these subjects should be cumulative
and sequential, with each year’s study building on what has been learned
previously. We know that to attain advanced conceptual understanding in
all subjects, explicit teaching is necessary” (Evers, 1998).
In How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science
in the Classroom, editors Suzanne Donovan and John Bransford point out the
importance of both conceptual understanding and procedural fluency, as well as
an effective organization of knowledge. “As the mathematics confronted by
students becomes more complex through the school years, new knowledge and
competencies require that those already mastered be brought to bear” (Bransford
and Donovan, 2005). By the time a student takes Algebra in high
school, previously mastered building block skills will be merged with many new
concepts and procedures that must be effectively linked to support new algebraic
understandings. The teacher’s goal should be to build and merge those
prerequisite concepts or building block skills with new concepts and
procedures.
A recent report by the National Research council, Adding
It Up, reviewed a large research base on the learning of elementary school
mathematics. They found the number one factor that predicts student
success to be conceptual understanding (understanding of math concepts,
operations, and relations). Similarly, the results of a study done by the
national Research Council, “Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children,”
stress the importance of providing students with immediate intervention and
remediation at the first signs of reading difficulties. Research consistently
reveals that children who receive a strong foundation of skills rarely struggle.
Who does the remediation?
The answer is everyone from the teacher, an aide, or a
volunteer to the parents, advanced students, or after-school programs. The
possibilities are endless. The important thing is to have a plan in
place that can be easily followed with the instructional material close at hand.
This way, parents can use the material with their children when school days are
missed, aides can use the material in the classroom, and substitutes can use the
material when a teacher is out of the classroom. The student’s
Individualized Learning Plan can be in effect every day of the year, at home and
at school, under any circumstances.
“In any given classroom in America on any given day, there is
a room filled with individual children who are likely to have very different
educational strengths and weaknesses” (Burns, Griffin, Snow, 1999). This
makes the educator’s task a daunting one. Teachers need access to resources that
can introduce, reinforce, or reteach foundation skills in the various subjects,
depending on a student’s needs. If a child does not master a building
block skill that is a prerequisite for a future skill, remediation is the key.
Remediation can rebuild a student’s foundation so their pyramid may have the
potential to reach high. Remediation is not done at the school level
or classroom level. Remediation is done one student at a time with an
Individual Learning Plan. .
Works Cited
Burns, Susan, Peg Griffin, and Catherine Snow, eds. Starting Out Right.
Washington, D.C.: National Academy P, 1999.
Donovan, Suzanne, and John Bransford, Eds. How Students Learn: History,
Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom. Washington, D.C.: The National
Academies P, 2005.
Evers, Williamson, Ed. What's Gone Wrong in America's Classrooms.
Stanford: Hoover P, 1998.
Friedman, Ian. Education Reform. New York: Facts on File, Inc, 2004.
Hirsch, E.D. The Knowledge Deficit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006.
McMillan, James H. Successful Literacy Passport Test
Remediation: Strategies for
Elementary and Middle School Students. Richmond: Metropolitan Educational
Research Consortium, 1995.
April Roethel is Chief Editor for the International
Learning Corporation, developers of Rapid Resources, a tool for creating
Individualized Learning Plans.
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