Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

From Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

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

In our last post, we described six suggestions for personalizing homework so that children, parents, and teachers benefit. In this post, we offer three more. What’s different about these is that they ask parents to take an active role. But first, to proivde perspective to new readers, we begin with the opening of our last post.

Our Last Post

Homework can benefit good readers and writers. But for children who struggle with reading and writing and have difficulty working independently, traditional homework, homework assigned to whole classes and not personalized to match their skill and comfort level, can backfire. Parent reports and the limited research examining the homework problems of struggling learners, suggests that traditional homework often overwhelms, frustrates, and devastates them. As Lawrence Greene observed, the reasons are straightforward:

The prospect of doing homework can be intolerable to children who feel academically incompetent, frustrated, demoralized, and incapable of doing the assigned work. After having spent a miserable day in school, their teachers and parents now insist that they go home and spend an additional two or three hours being miserable. That many of these children try to evade their academic responsibilities is understandable. There is little incentive to children to record their assignments diligently when they believe that they will receive poor grades on their homework no matter how hard they try and that studying for tests is a futile exercise.

If your child struggles with homework, it’s critical that you meet with his teachers to modify his homework. If they don’t modify it to meet his skill and comfort level, if they don’t assign him homework that with moderate effort he can routinely succeed on, he may lose his motivation for school, get angry at the thought of homework, and despondent about his future. His stress and fear my well show itself as one or a combination of what researchers call the fight-flight-freeze response. To resist homework, he may start fights, fidget incessantly with his sneakers or pencils, look into space incessantly, scribble incorrect, irrelevant answers as he thoughtlessly rushes through the assignment, sit and cry. From his point of view, his behavior is rational. He’s reacting to an impossible, intolerable situation in which he can only lose—and he knows it.

To help you help your child’s teachers understand how to modify his homework to promote success, this and two future columns will describe what they can do. As a parent who has a good idea about what’s likely to work with your child, your role is to problem solve with them, and, if they’re unsure of how to help, make suggestions. These columns will offer suggestions you can discuss with your child’s teachers.

As you make suggestions, keep in mind that suggestions are just that—they’re not demands, they’re not orders. And even if your child’s teachers make suggestions with which you disagree, treat his teachers with respect—their job is a lot more complex and harder than most people think, and they, like all of us, need understanding and support. Work to understand their suggestions. See if they can be modified to improve the likelihood of success. If they might work, suggest a 10-day experimental period, with an evaluation meeting on the 11th day. If they’re unsuccessful, and his teachers found you highly knowledgeable and cooperative, you’ve probably increased their willingness to try your suggestions.

If however, they will not modify your child’s homework to foster his success, you need to gear up for formal advocacy, which probably means documenting everything and sharing your concerns with higher authorities. It may mean hiring an education advocate or attorney—it’s that important. To learn more about the education laws that might help you and strategies for advocating for your child, read chapters 7 through 13 of our book, Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds (www.reading2008.com).

Now, of course, comes the practical concern and question. First, the concern: “I don’t have a master’s degree in special education or reading disabilities. I know my child, but that’s it. I’ve never taught or studied the literature on homework.” Now the question: “What should I suggest?”

Below are three more suggestions for homework based on an article that Patrick McCabe and I published in the Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation. Some of these may work for you, your child, and his teachers. If homework destroys his motivation for school, angers him, or evokes despondence, some of these may reverse the course. If he’s on the verge of the flight-fight-freeze response, some of these may eliminate it.

Three Suggestions: Involving You

These suggestions involve you directly. They can easily take more than a half-hour. If you have the time, the patience, and you think your child will enjoy reading with you, you may want to suggest these to your child’s teachers. One easy way to do this is to give your child’s teachers a copy of the suggerstions below, which are addressed to teachers.

• Read aloud to your child. To become proficient readers, children with word recognition and word analysis difficulties require extensive exposure to many different and interesting reading activities and materials. Despite this need, the nature of their basic reading difficulties frequently makes it difficult to adequately involve these students in homework activities and materials they find highly interesting, curiosity provoking, and intriguing. By reading interesting, thought-provoking books to their children at a set time daily, parents can kindle excitement about reading, while helping their children develop needed background information and vocabulary. This helps to improve word recognition and comprehension abilities. By informing parents about upcoming topics that will soon be studied and recommending books to read to their children that will prepare them for these topics, teachers can maximize the potential benefits of reading aloud. Parents can acquire effective read-aloud strategies by observing read-aloud sessions at school or at local libraries.
• Engage in Paired Reading (Topping, 1987, 1989). To become proficient readers, children with reading disabilities need extensive practice reading connected text. They also require frequent task-specific, immediate, positive feedback.  Participating in 15 minutes of Paired Reading daily contributes significantly to both. In Paired Reading, child and parent simultaneously read aloud from a book selected by the child. Self-selection helps ensure that the child finds the chosen books interesting and experiences autonomy. Before reading, the child and parent agree on a prearranged signal (e.g., a hand signal) the child will use to inform the parent to switch to silent reading while the child continues reading aloud. Joint reading continues until the child signals the parent to read silently. If the child errs on a word or takes longer than 5 seconds to pronounce it, the parent immediately rejoins the child in reading aloud. A parent can further assist the child by verbally describing and praising desired behaviors, such as correct signaling and accurate decoding.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Paired-reading usually requires a little training. Topping (1995) stressed that schools should train parent-child pairs with other parent-child pairs. This is economical and fosters a positive group spirit. He also recommended frequent se1f-checking (e.g., daily monitoring forms) and data analysis with supportive professionals.

• Listen to your child orally read easy materials. As Allington and Cunningham (1996) asserted, “children need to read lots of easy stuff” (p. 53). This is how they develop sight vocabulary and fluency and gain confidence in their reading ability. Despite the need for abundant practice, children with reading disabilities often receive little opportunity to read easy materials. Teachers can help parents promote widespread reading by helping childen self-select easy, interesting reading materials (e.g., books, magazines, newspaper stories) to read to their parents and discussing with parents the importance of telling their children troublesome words rather than asking them to “sound it out.” By sharing daily home-school reading logs, describing what the student read and how well, teachers and parents can coordinate efforts and quickly resolve unexpected problems.

In our next post, we’ll discuss one way of assessing the competence of your child’s teacher. Why should you do this? Because he or she is key to your child’s success.

References

Allington, R. L., & Cunningham, P. M. (1996). Schools that work: Where all children read and write. New York: HarperCollins.

Greene, L. J. (2002). Roadblocks to Learning. New York: Warner Books, p. 109.

Margolis, H., & McCabe, P. P. (1997). Homework challenges for students with reading and writing problems: Suggestions for effective practice. Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, 8(1), 41-74.

Topping, K (1987). Paired reading: A powerful technique for parent use. The Reading Teacher, 40(7), 608-614.

Topping, K (1989). Peer tutoring and paired reading: Combining two powerful techniques. The Reading Teacher, 42(7), 488-494.

Topping, K. (1995). Effective tutoring systems for family literacy. Reading and Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 11, 285-295.

Howard Margolis, Ed.D. (c) Reading2008 & Beyond         www.reading2008.com