Daemen College : Academics & Research : Division of Health & Human Services : Education : Graduate Programs : Masters in Special Education : Thomas Reynolds Center for Special Education and After-School Programs : Academies

Academies

The Thomas Reynolds Center Academies

Diverse Learner Academy

Coordinator - Mindy Schreiner (mschrein@daemen.edu)

The purpose of the Diverse Learner Academy is to support our Graduate Assistants in creating strength-based learning opportunities for students that incorporate their diverse learner profiles.

In the Diverse Learner Academy, Graduate Assistants create representations of their own learner profiles and examine how their profiles affect the way they teach. Throughout this process, Graduate Assistants learn to recognize differences in the learner profiles of their students. The academy explores the following factors as they relate to teaching and learning:  cognitive style (using the Theory of Multiple Intelligences), academic skills, environmental preferences, personality factors, motivational needs, external influences, sensory preferences, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, disabilities, and gender. 

The Diverse Learner Academy also emphasizes the importance of empowerment. What is empowerment? Simply stated, it is the act of equipping individuals with power to control their own learning. In the Diverse Learner Academy, Graduate Assistants use Dr. Ellen Arnold’s Five Keys to Empowerment as a basis for assessment, improvement, and self-reflection:

1.         Self-Knowledge: Graduate Assistants guide students in their self-discovery through the use of strength-based assessment, activities, and self-reflection. Students develop a sense of themselves as learners by systematically uncovering their own learner profiles. They begin to see themselves as active learners with many strengths rather than passive recipients of their challenges and disabilities.

2.         Strategies: A strategy is a process where a person thinks and acts planfully when completing a task. It can be a specific technique, principle or rule that will allow the student to be successful. Effective and efficient students have a plethora of strategies at the automatic level. They often refer to them as ‘tricks’ or ‘shortcuts.’ Students with learning disabilities, on the other hand, are typically strategy poor. They often use the same strategies over and over, even if they do not work, mostly because these students do not know what to do differently. Graduate Assistants help our students recognize strategies they currently use at the automatic level as well as teach them other strategies that tap their cognitive strengths. Graduate Assistants provide for students a strategy-rich environment that introduces, models, scaffolds and reinforces the use of these strategies.

3.         Involvement and Choice: Students feel empowered when they are involved and make choices in their own learning. Graduate Assistants lead students toward participation in their own learning by teaching students how to set goals, assess their own errors, and reflect on which strategies are working and which are not. Students then build on this awareness by making their own choices as to which strategies to use for which tasks.

 

During “homework time” at The Center, the use of ‘strategies’ is expected, honored, and rewarded. The goal is to help each student learn how to become an independent learner. We use homework assignments provided by the student’s public school classroom teacher as a basis to teach and reinforce these strategies. When homework is not assigned, we use the time to reinforce the principles of cognitive strategy instruction in material that supports and supplements the Common Core standards.

4.         Belief in Self: As students broaden and deepen their knowledge of themselves as learners and create a toolbox of strategies from which to choose, they feel more confident as students. Self-esteem naturally increases. Graduate Assistants also focus more directly on building belief in self through their purposeful interactions with the students.

5.         Assertive Language of Self-Advocacy: Once students understand how they learn best, are able to choose efficient and effective strategies, and believe in themselves as learners, they also need to know how to communicate the strategies that work best for them. Graduate Assistants help students learn how to appropriately communicate their learner profiles and ask for what they need.

Graduate Assistants also incorporate the 40 Developmental Assets in order to help students move toward academic success, appropriate student behavior, and reduction of school-related anxiety.

All materials and instruction within the Diverse Learner Academy serve as a foundation for work in a graduate-level course, SED 606:  Instructional Methods and Strategies for Students with Disabilities.  All Graduate Assistants participate in this course simultaneously during the first semester of their work in the Center.  The course builds on their knowledge of diverse learner profiles and applies it to such topics as lesson planning, differentiated instruction, assessment, classroom management, behavioral intervention, and individualized strategy instruction.  Graduate Assistants combine their work in the Academy and the course to create a culminating portfolio.

It is our belief that all of our students, with all of their diverse learner profiles, can be empowered to improve their own success in school. It is our hope that every student leaves the Academy with a stronger belief in his/her own ability, an understanding of exactly how his/her brain works, a wealth of ideas about strategies that can be used to solve any difficulty related to school, the opportunity to be involved in dialogue about what is working and why, choice about how to accomplish various tasks, and mastery of the language of self advocacy. Overall, we want our “graduates”—both our Graduate Assistants and the students in our Center--to be responsible for their own learning and have the skills and abilities to do it well.

Mindy Schreiner is a Learning Specialist who currently owns and operates Learnabilities--a consulting and tutoring service for individuals with learning disabilities, AD(H)D, and other diagnosed and undiagnosed learning difficulties--in Gasport, NY. She is working on her Ph.D. in Special Education at Syracuse University, including a dissertation that focuses on visual factors related to dyslexia. Schreiner also has an M.S. in Learning Disabilities, earned in 2003, an M.A. in English with a Certificate in Creative Writing, earned in 2001, and a B.A. in Biology and Psychology, earned in 1995. She has New York State provisional certification in Special Education K-12, and has experience teaching at the college level. Schreiner has over four years involvement in federally-funded early intervention reading research projects and has worked as a professional and private tutor for college and K-12 students with and without learning disabilities since 1997.

Coordinator - Catherine Fay

Our Graduate Assistants incorporate writing instruction to Center students utilizing the fully developed Step Up to Writing Program*. In addition to mastering Step Up to Writing accordion paragraphs, the Graduate Assistants are taught a multitude of reading/writing strategies to use for classroom instruction, such as CUPS, (Capitalization, Usage, Punctuation, Spelling) a strategy to assist with the cognitive writing process involving revision and editing and informal outlining.

Graduate Assistants meet bi-monthly for instructional sessions with Catherine.

Topics included during these learning enrichment sessions are as follows:

• Writing an accordion paragraph using common language and colors
• Using literature to improve reading comprehension and build background knowledge for the purpose of writing
• Organizing writing using an informal outline:
  • stars-main idea
  • dashes- sub-topics
  • dots- details, examples, explanations
• Developing topic sentences:
  • Occasion/Position
  • Power Statement
  • When or Where + What’s Happening
• Understanding the “Cycle of Instruction”:
  • Direct Instruction – I do
  • Guided Instruction – We do
  • Independent Instruction – You do
• Understanding and applying the CUPS strategy for revision and editing
• Understanding and applying what makes a “Great Short Response”
• Identifying informational web sites to aid in lesson design
• Administration and interpretation of assessment tool TOWL-3 (Test of Written Language)
• Using and creating manipulative strategies to reinforce Step Up to Writing
• Classroom teacher evaluations based on site observation

*Maureen E. Auman, founder and owner of the Read-Write Connection in Denver, CO, created the Step Up to Writing Program to empower educators to help all students meet or exceed state standards in reading and writing. Step Up to Writing is published by Sopris West Educational Services, a Cambrium Learning Company.

Catherine has a Master of Science Degree in Elementary Education from the State University College at Buffalo. She has taught in the Orchard Park School District for 31 years and is currently an Academic Intervention teacher at Windom Elementary. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, she is involved with many school support programs such as The Leadership Advisory Committee, Teacher Mentoring, Instructional Study Team, Curriculum Mapping Council, and the Professional Development Committee. Catherine oversees the Literacy Lab, where she meets with as many as 50 students, grades 3-5, 2 times weekly for 45 minute sessions to teach multi-developmental stages of learning in the areas of reading and writing.

 

Mathematics Academy

Coordinator – Nirmala Nutakki

Our students use the Investigations* curriculum to practice instructional techniques. This program relies on the use of manipulatives and real life applications.

The emphasis on mathematical thinking is at the center of the program:

• Children think for themselves about the mathematics they do, rather than simply applying learned procedures and definitions.
• Children develop multiple ways to enter a mathematical problem.
• Children learn to keep track of their mathematical strategies and communicate them in ways that make sense to themselves and others.
• Children’s strategies become more and more efficient with practice over time.

Research on the effects of Investigations is based on a variety of measures of student achievement and learning including state-mandated tests, research-based interview protocols, items from research studies published in peer-reviewed journals and specially constructed paper –and- pencil tests.

This body of research includes classroom studies, large-scale comparisons across schools, and small-scale comparisons between classrooms.

Together, the studies indicate that:

• Investigations students do as well as or better than students using other curricula in straight calculation problems involving basic facts and the whole number operations.
• Investigations students have a better understanding of number relationships than students working with more traditional programs.
• Investigations works equally well with students at different achievement levels in mathematics.
• Students who use Investigations achieve greater accuracy on word problems and on more complex calculations than students in comparison classrooms.
• Students in schools fully implementing Investigations outperform students in schools not using Investigations on a high stakes standardized test administered in Massachusetts.

*The Investigations curriculum was developed at TERC (formerly Technical Education Research Centers) in collaboration with Kent State University and the State University of New York at Buffalo. The work was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant No. ESI-9050210. TERC is a nonprofit company working to improve mathematics and science education. TERC is located at 2067 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02140. The Investigations curriculum is published by Scott Foresman, a division of Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, Inc.