This week, I finally cleaned up with final edits three of the four journal submissions I researched and created this semester. I also attended two professional learning communities, one hosted by the Council for Exceptional Children’s (CEC) Early Childhood Special Interest Group, and the other a book study hosted by CEC Teacher Educator Special Interest Group. After attending these two professional learning communities this week, I started to feel like I could integrate back into professional organizations in a meaningful way. It is nearing the end of my sabbatical and this is the first time since February 2020 that I have felt this way. Once COVID hit, I had to take a huge step back from the service I was doing both locally and nationally.  Back in 2020, I was on the National Board for the Learning Disabilities Association of America (LDA), was appointed chair of the education committee, was a state-chapter president, and was on two other local special education focused boards. I chose to either not run for re-election or step down from these roles because of how much I had to and/or was asked to do during the pandemic.

This week I feel like I was finally able to start integrating back into my discipline’s society. It was nice to have conversations about what we all learned, in terms of teacher preparation and the pandemic, and the current projects we were working on. Most of these projects were proactive rather than the reactive responses the pandemic required many to make. I waited so long to integrate back because I know myself well enough to know that I am not a passive participant—meaning I have a hard time giving between 0-100%. I am either actively involved and all-in, or non-existent. So, I have two meetings that I took part in last week, and two more coming up this week, and this is what my schedule will probably look like moving forward—and I am ready for it now.

I also spent time last week just reading the message boards of each organization and looking at up-coming conferences and submission dates. One for the Division of Autism and Intellectual Disabilities (DADD) is where I will work this week to submit a proposal for an upcoming project that I am looking to start with a colleague. I haven’t submitted conference proposals since before the pandemic either—so this is something I need to get back into the swing of things with, as well.
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My last two years have really been about helping my program and other university’s programs produce high quality online coursework. It was something I went and sought additional training and certification in before the pandemic, and I did this at the most opportune time as I was used by many as a resource throughout the pandemic. I am glad I have this training, and happy to help others but I am also ready to be involved in discipline specific activities and societies again. I am grateful to have had this sabbatical to let me get back into research again, get back into discipline specific professional learning communities, and do so in a way that I did not feel like I was neglecting my family or my teaching and other university “asks”. 

This week my head was spacey from being sick so instead of doing all the final edits (due to not being able to concentrate long enough in front of a screen), I started reading for the professional learning community book study that I will begin this upcoming week on UDL and Equity. I read through Chardin’s and Novak’s (2021) “Equity by Design: Delivering on the Power and Promise of UDL.” The book study will begin on Friday, and on my second read through with the group I will re-read the chapters assigned to go more in-depth. The book, itself, has some amazing links to bring UDL to life and some appendices that will help pre-service teacher candidates think about adding UDL into their lesson plans and their practice. I can bring some of these resources back to my classes and my department so that they can utilize them in their coursework.
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This week I also went through educational surrogate training in New Hampshire, where I live. An education surrogate is someone that makes educational decisions for an individual on an IEP who has a parent that is unknown or can’t be located, is in DCYF custody, or a judge issued a written order that an educational surrogate is needed for any reason. As an educational surrogate, I will be representing and speaking on behalf of the child and their best educational interests as I fulfill the role of the parent at the IEP (Individualized Education Program) meeting. When assigned a student to work with I will follow their entire educational career until they either graduate from the public school system, no longer need an IEP, or no longer need a surrogate due to adoption or some other reason.

This role will help me keep a different pulse on what is happening in K-12 schooling than I currently have so I think this will be beneficial to my position in teacher preparation. I also think it will be good to use my expertise in this way to help teach advocacy skills to individual students, and to partner with local districts through meaningful communication in IEP meetings. I really want to partner and not be “the know it all” because I have advanced degrees in special education so how I approach communication will be really important in this role. It is usually that teachers at IEP meetings are in a position of power over the parents, but I know that when I was in K-12, if a parent was coming into my district with an advanced understanding of special education I would have been intimidated.  I have to keep this “perceived power” in check and how I approach communication, I think, is the best way for me to do this.

The training, itself, talked about federal and New Hampshire special education laws, appropriate communication strategies, and broke down the IEP process. There were two other individuals in the training with me, a special education director and a high school math teacher—so it was good to be in the company of other educators who want to give back to the profession in this way. After the training, I had to take a test, and I am now officially certified to take on the role of an educational surrogate. The next step is to be assigned a student that lives in my county. I am excited about this opportunity to be in schools supporting a K-12 student and to be forming a collaborative partnership with districts in this new way, as well. 

When I have a working rough draft of a paper almost complete, I need to step away from it for a little while. This week I went back and looked at three papers that were nearing completion and started to make the final adjustments on them. The papers looked at different subject matters: pre-service elementary math teaching, academic questioning in pre-service teacher preparation, and the instruction of differentiation in pre-service teacher preparation. This week I worked on making sure the references were all accounted for and were written correctly in APA format—a tedious task, but one that needs to be done. In addition to this I read through all of the papers making sure to link the literature review with discussion points that emerged from the results of each of these studies. Next week, I will do one more read through, make some last-minute tweaks, and then send these papers off to the organization I worked with. They will get to read through them and ask any questions or seek clarity on anything contained within them. From here, publication will happen.

I will share one of the findings from the discussion for teaching elementary math to pre-service teachers here (just so this whole blog post isn’t solely procedural in nature):
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“All major components of math content and pedagogy need to be focused on. This needs to be done in a way where courses progressively develop knowledge and address all key content areas-numbers and operations, algebra and functions, geometry and measurement, and data analysis and probability. The grounding of this instruction should be in building conceptual knowledge and then procedural fluency should build on this knowledge. Math concepts need to be linked to operational skills, as interconnected units, so that students understand why and how algorithms work (Ambrose, 2004; Reid, 2013). Intertwining conceptual and procedural knowledge is important because it allows students to have a deep understanding of math and perform it fluently (Hiebert, 2013).  Without having a strong conceptual understanding of math, the procedural skills are not nimbly of effectively used by used students and therefore learning is “fragile” (Hiebert, Gallimore, Garnier, Givvin, Hollingsworth et al., 2003). Conversely, if there is only emphasis on conceptual knowledge then learners struggle with procedural competency (Kajander, 2010). This method for teaching math is often very different than what pre-service teachers encountered in their own K-12 experiences with math (Darling-Hammond, 2006). This cycle of teaching, focused on procedural knowledge, however needs to be challenged otherwise we will have another decade of stagnant performance in math performance (as measured by the PISA, TIMSS, and NAEP assessments) where students show basic procedural knowledge of math, but fail to advance to conceptually applying math to solve problems.”
 
Once these papers are sent off, then I have more data I can look at from these inspection reports or I may move to prepping for the fall research project—the pandemic’s effect on birth to five. I am a little more motivated by the second project right now because I have two kids under five; one who does not seem to be affected by the pandemic, while the other seems to be slightly impacted in her expressive communication (but her receptive communication is exceptionally strong). It may be nice not to sift through and code report data for a little while—given that these last three papers had me in these documents for the last six months. 

The last two weeks, I have not written my personal post because I have been easily jumping into writing and researching. This week I really started diving into the codes for differentiation which were muddier than the other coded reports that I did so because of this I had to organize the structure of results a little differently to paint the whole picture. This has been where I have spent the majority of time my week trying to frame these results in a way that is easily accessible to any reader. I think the goal of synthesizing these reports is to provide a clear-cut structured path that teacher preparation programs can use to strengthen the differentiation (or the other topics I selected to focus on, e.g. math in elementary, academic questioning, teaching observational skills) coursework and “asks” of their program.

To start this improvement, in the realm of differentiation, programs need to have an agreed upon research-based definition of what differentiation is, and this needs to be used by all faculty and consistently across the program. One interesting topic that has come up in some reports and even in some recent inspections I have been on is Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and how programs are using this term to synonymously mean differentiation. When I see this it’s usually not focused on the research-based definition for differentiation which focuses on process, product, environment, and content. When it is taught without this research-based definition in mind it has translated to lessons with choice, but not actually with what students need in order to progress their learning in a lesson. I think this may be due to instructor’s not having the research-based definition of differentiation driving their instruction of UDL.

With UDL, we are looking at a lesson through providing multiple means of representation (the way information is presented in a lesson), engagement (the ways learners are motivated in the lesson), and action and expression (the ways learners showcase what they know/learned in a lesson). When this is done without the research-based definition for differentiation driving it, I often see surface level changes that do not address students that are struggling and students that are high-achievers—it again teaches to the middle (the average on-grade-level students in the classroom). An example of what I mean by this is teacher candidates indicated they are using UDL (multiple means of representation) because they are presenting content auditorily and through the visual-means of a PowerPoint. Technically they are displaying information in multiple ways, but this content is often grade level content not taking into account those on either end of the learning continuum (those that still need pre-requisite skills to the content, and those that have mastered the content). If we are truly linking multiple means of representation to the research-based definition of differentiation, content and varied levels of students needs should be addressed. I bring up this example because this is the scenario that I see the most often.
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 I think our coursework in teacher preparation really needs to examine and tease this out—that if UDL is done at the surface level true differentiation is not happening. This really needs to begin with all faculty in a program understanding this and guiding students to think this way—and providing feedback on lesson plans, assignments, and teaching so that UDL goes beyond surface-level changes in the classroom. Surface-level is an entry point to start using UDL, but it needs to then be deeply rooted in differentiation so that all K-12 students can progress in their learning. 

This week I was at another inspection and this university is doing so many things well. There data management systems and processes were on-point, they had good content and teaching skills in coursework, and their candidates overall were doing well in the field. They have a number of amazing grant initiatives that faculty are involved in and have some amazing collaborations happening with each other and with their faculty-in-residence models which just began in their local school systems. One of these faculty-in-residence models is happening in the Orange County Public School Academic Center for Excellence (ACE).

The ACE school is the “true” model of a community school. It has everything that a family would need right on site. In education, when the term community school is used, people sometimes mean that the school serves the local community that lives there by providing their education. Some community schools extend a step further by serving the community by connecting families with community partners (dentists, doctors, and other needed services) they may need. This school, however, goes even beyond this and has all the services a family needs on site.
ACE has a preschool, hospital, food pantry, career training, and grade level classrooms (K-8) on-site. It also has extra-curricular activities and enrichment opportunities that extend before and after the school day. This school was built with the conception of this true community—where all services are at one location in permanent fixtures. This really separates it from other schools who retro-fit this partnership and services outreach for families.

While visiting the school and watching teacher candidates teach, I learned that anyone that graduates from high school from this school they are given free tuition to any Florida state university and if they decide to go to medical school in-state this is paid for, as well. This was only one of the activities I was a part of this week, so I did not get to dive as deep as I would have liked to into learning more about this school and its model—but it was one of the many “cool” things I saw this week. This school’s website offers more and I’ll probably spend some time learning more about this school and how the faculty-in-residence model supports their teacher candidates, teachers, students, district initiatives, and community partnerships as they use a wrap-around holistic approach to educating and supporting students. Here is their website: https://ocpsace.ocps.net/