Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

From Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

A Blog by Dr. Gary G. Brannigan and Dr. Howard Margolis

Parents often ask, “Is my child’s teacher competent?” Unfortunately, science has yet to produce an errorless formula for answering this question. And it’s an important one that test scores and the new rage, “value added equations,” can’t answer.

Fortunately, there are legitimate ways to begin assessing the competence of your child’s teacher. One way is to observe how she presents lessons to your child’s class. This can tell you a lot, but not everything, about the quality of her instruction.

To benefit from your observation, your need to answer the question, “What should I look for?” One answer is SCREAM, Margo A. Mastropieri and Thomas E. Scruggs’ (2010) acronym for summarizing much of the professional literature on the presentation of lessons. Below are the SCREAM qualities, qualities of systematic instruction that teachers can adjust to help most children, including struggling learners. You can use these qualities to begin answering the question, “Is my child’s teacher competent?”

SCREAM

S- Structure: Did the teacher ensure that her students understood the overall organization and purpose of the lesson? Did she make clear when one of the lesson’s activities was about to change? Throughout the lesson, did she help her students summarize and review critical points—what she wanted the students to understand and remember?

C- Clarity: Did the teacher speak clearly and directly to the lesson’s objective? Did she provide concrete, explicit examples? Did the students understand her words? Did she focus on only one objective at a time?

R- Redundancy: Did the teacher reemphasize only a few key concepts, procedures, and rules? Did she refer to these key concepts throughout the lesson? Did she create opportunities for extra practice, such as study groups in study hall?

E- Enthusiasm: Was the teacher enthusiastic about the lesson? Was she enthusiastic about the students’ successes? Did the students find the teacher’s enthusiasm infectious?

A- Appropriate Pace: Was the pace brisk enough to moderately challenge but not frustrate students? To check if her rate was too fast, did the teacher ask students question to assess their learning? Was extra help given to students who were at-risk for falling behind?

M- Maximized Engagement: Was the lesson structured to encourage maximum engagement. For example, was the material at each student’s instructional level—not too difficult, not too easy? Was it interesting? Before the teacher asked students to answer questions, did she ask them to discuss their answers with their neighbor? (This is called Think-Pair-Share.) Did her feedback encourage students to attend to the tasks and engage in the lesson’s activities? If necessary, did she show students how to improve their performance?

A Caution

Nothing is foolproof, including SCREAM. Much of what you see and think, even using SCREAM, depends on your knowledge of teaching and your experience observing teachers in different instructional situations. And SCREAM doesn’t deal with many factors involved in teaching, such as deciding what to teach, when to teach it, and why to make particular adaptations. So use SCREAM cautiously, to get an idea, not make a definitive judgment.

Reference

Mastropieri, M. A., & Scruggs, T. E. (2010). The Inclusive Classroom: Strategies for Effective Instruction (4^th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Howard Margolis, Ed.D. (c) Reading2008 & Beyond

www.reading2008.com