Keystone Assignment: ELL Case Study

Brandy Blanchard

EDLI 636

Spring 2017

Dr. Hsu

Keystone assignment: ELL Case Study

Classroom and Student Background: For my observation this semester, I helped in a Special Education classroom for students with multiple disabilities at the Olean Intermediate Middle School in Olean, NY. The students in the school and in my cooperating teacher’s classroom range in age starting in 4^th grade through 7^th grade. This year, the class is a combination of a life skills class and a class for behavioral students. Because of the extremely wide variety of students learning levels and behavioral tendencies, the classroom teacher must have the ability to differentiate almost everything she does in the class. With so many differences in her class, the one type of student my cooperating teacher does not have in her class is an ELL. To complete my keystone assignment, Mrs. M suggested that I work with one of her nonverbal students we will call Emily.

Emily is a twelve-year-old Caucasian female in the 7^th grade at OIMS. She is an only child and her parents are divorced but she spends time with both parents who speak English as their primary and only language. Emily is diagnosed with autism disorder and does not speak at all. To communicate with family, peers, teachers, and therapists, Emily uses a type to speech device called a Dynavox which allows her to press buttons with words on them, or use a keyboard to type what she would like to say and the device speaks for her. Emily receives push in and pull out speech therapy services multiple times a week at 30 minutes a session to help her work with her device to communicate. Although she is proficient in navigating her device, she often becomes frustrated when she is asked to use it to answer questions. She would prefer to use sign language, but sign language is not used per her IEP so the push is really for her to use the device as much as possible to create a wider base of people who can understand and communicate with her. Besides becoming frustrated at times when being asked to use the device, she also becomes frustrated when she can’t navigate the device quickly enough to say what she is thinking. Although she is non-verbal, she is extremely bright and when given a task she likes to plunge ahead and get her work done quickly and as accurately as possible.

 SOLOM Matrix and English Language Learners Rubric: Because Emily is not an ELL in the typical sense, I had to do my best to perform the above assessments and fit her into the categories as best as I could. I performed the assessments with her Tobii Dynavox device and tried to categorize her using the speech assistance, with the help of my cooperating teacher. For the SOLOM scale, Emily scored a total of 11, which landed her on phase 1. For comprehension, she understands what is being said to her but sometimes needs things repeated and said as a slower rate, which landed her on the scale at a level 3. For fluency, she also scored a level 3 because of the disruption of her conversation and classroom discussion as she searches for the correct words to respond. For vocabulary, misuse of words and limited vocabulary make comprehension and conversation difficult. Pronunciation was also a level 2 for Emily because she must often repeat herself and change words on her device to help make herself understood. Lastly, Emily scored the lowest at a one on for grammar on the SOLOM scale. She will say words or use sentence fragments but almost never uses complete sentences unless her speech teacher steps in and makes he re-type what she was trying to say. What I gathered from the SOLOM is that Emily needs to work on putting together complete sentences so help others understand what she is trying to say. It is difficult to know how much she comprehends from a text without her using complete sentences and keeping calm when she is asked to use the device. I had a difficult time matching Emily to the categories provided by the ELL rubric. With the help of my cooperating teacher I placed Emily on the low intermediate scale in all categories (see attached ELL rubric). Again, her difficulties seem to be communicating fully what she is trying to say without getting frustrated. Emily can write, spell, and read (at a lower grade level), but it is difficult to tell how much she is comprehending because she often responds in short fragmented phrases.

Writing assignment and Lesson Plan: With the help of my cooperating teacher, based on the results of the assessments, we decided that the focus for Emily is two parts. First, Emily needs help with working on calming techniques that she can use when she becomes frustrated after being asked a question. The second thing we wanted to work on with her was putting together sentence strips, typing them into her device to speak, and re-writing the sentence while adding in an illustration to show her understanding.

Link to lesson plan: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12WvwTwnG7vAlAzoZrRP1vu5iMtH4_Xo2SbIlnGVaHZw/edit?usp=sharing

Summary of teacher interviews: Interviewing my cooperating teacher on ELL was a bit difficult. The school district doesn’t have any ELL currently, and at any given time they may have ONE at the most (and it is usually a foreign exchange student). With that being said, my cooperating teacher did her best to try and apply the questions to her experience with teaching special education. A connection I made between the guiding questions for this assignment and my cooperating teacher’s answers is that individualizing education is key when working with different types of learners. As we have learned through our courses at NYIT, differentiated instruction is necessary if we want all students to succeed. Collaboration among teachers, therapists, paraprofessionals, and others who have contact with the student along with ongoing professional development have helped my cooperating teacher learn how to assess student need, and creatively design instruction to meet individual needs.

Reflection: Overall, I had an extremely positive experience working with my cooperating teacher on identifying a student to work with for this keystone project. Although I was unable to work with an ELL, I was able to work with an interesting student who struggles with some of the same things ELL struggle with. This experience allowed me to see that patience, assessment, and designing instruction based on the assessment is necessary to make and reach student goals. I believe this assignment may have been easier to do using the SOLOM and ELL Rubric if I were actually working with an ELL, but I was able to relate what I was observing to the content we have been learning about. I have a new appreciation for teachers in the field of special education because as we see in general education classes, instruction must be highly individualized. In special education, not only must instruction be different for each student, but assessment, behavioral interventions, and even classroom procedures must be individualized. I was fortunate enough to observe an experience classroom teacher who was able to do all of that and more for her students. The only issue I had during field placement was fitting in the ten hours while still working. I would have to complete my hours during my off periods when I didn’t have to work with a student or during my lunch break. This made it difficult for me to be in the classroom for long periods of time, and also made it so that I had to observe the same type of lessons each time. 



SOLOM and ELL Rubric Documents: