The author: Megan Phelps, former training assistant, Center for Research on Learning. A version of this article originally appeared in the August 2001 issue of Strategram, a newsletter for SIM teachers.
Joyce Russo is trying a new approach to strategic instruction: She's doing it in Braille.
Russo is supervisor of blind and deaf-blind programs for the Louisiana State Department of Education and is one of a group of new Louisiana trainers who are being certified in both learning strategies and content enhancement.
The Louisiana group is involved in an intensive effort to implement learning strategy instruction and content enhancement teaching routines in classrooms throughout the state.
Russo's role in the Louisiana initiative has included developing ways the Strategic Instruction Model can be adapted to reach visually impaired children.
"More and more of our Braille-reading students are in general education classrooms, and I wanted to make sure they had the opportunity to benefit from these strategies," Russo said.
She began by working with a group of four or five students, all Braille readers between the ages of 8 and 10. The students ranged from gifted to moderately disabled. She taught them the THINK Strategy and the Framing Routine.
With THINK, one of the programs in the Cooperative Thinking Strategies Series, the adaptations for visually impaired students were relatively simple.
The strategy teaches students how to work together in teams to systematically solve problems. THINK builds on lessons learned in the SCORE Skills program, a set of social skills that are fundamental to effective groups. Students learn to share ideas, compliment others, offer help or encouragement, recommend changes nicely, and exercise self-control.
Russo made sure that all the necessary information for THINK exercises was included in the students' notebooks, written in Braille.
With the Framing Routine, a teaching routine designed to help students learn content and develop literacy skills, another step was necessary: creating a tactile representation of the routine's visual device.
The Framing Routine uses a visual device called the Frame, which depicts information that is essential for all students to learn. It shows the organization or structure of concepts as well as the relationship among concepts.
To help visually impaired students understand the Frame device, Russo produced tangible examples that the students could feel to get an idea of what the structure looked like.
But the Frame is such a visual concept that she found students still had a hard time understanding the routine. All the students were writing the information linearly, with the exception of one boy who was not born blind and who still retains pinpoint vision. He was the only one writing the information in columns.
As the Louisiana initiative continues to grow, Russo is considering adaptations for more SIM materials. Other strategies and routines may be more difficult to adapt, she said.
"I'm thinking of the Sentence Writing Strategy. There are so many different kinds of markings. That may take a lot of looking at," Russo said.
However, in most cases, the only adaptation necessary will be getting the materials written in large print for large-print readers and in Braille for Braille readers.
"With VI (visually impaired) kids, it's just a matter of making sure they get the information that everyone else has," Russo said.
The response from the students she works with has been very positive.
"They loved it," she said. "They really got into working with SCORE Skills."
Russo said the exercises were especially important for visually impaired students because they needed the exposure to working in groups.
"They don't necessarily lack the cognitive skills, but they lack social skills," she said. "Their teacher said it helped them even in their room community, giving and taking constructive criticism."
Russo has been teaching the strategies and routines herself, but in the future her role will be to work with resource teachers and general education classroom teachers within a school district.
The goal is that general education teachers will have better ways to include visually impaired students when they teach the routines and that resource teachers will gain another tool to use in working with these students.
Russo spent 19 years as a classroom teacher, the last 11 of those working exclusively with visually impaired students.
"There was a real frustration there. A lot of the time you felt like you were just tutoring students instead of giving them skills they could take back to the classroom," she said. "This (SIM strategies and routines) is something to give to the resource teachers that could benefit the whole classroom."
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