Practice Perspectives
Talking Turkey about Concept Development - Jne N. Erin
JVIB - Print edition page number(s) 197-198 - April 2010
How many times in the last week have you heard the terms, "accountability," "documentation," "measurement," "evidence," "goals," or "objectives"? In both education and rehabilitation, our work increasingly follows a precise model of planning, instruction, and evaluation to verify effectiveness. Specific planning is vital in pinpointing success, but this precision sometimes restricts the value of the "teachable moment," especially with regard to understanding new concepts.
The article featured in this installment of Practice Perspectives,"Talking Turkey," describes a comprehensive teaching unit on wild turkeys that integrates spontaneous experience with planned outcomes. The authors not only adapt the experiences for students with visual impairments, but they also measure what the students have learned. The authors applied a simple pretest-posttest comparison that identified misconceptions about turkeys and confirmed factual knowledge. Before the unit began, one child thought that turkeys weigh a million pounds! The measurement of scientific thinking and decreased misconceptions was the criterion for improved learning, and the testing was strengthened by comparison with the responses of experts on wild turkeys.
Making concepts meaningful
Teachers of students with visual impairments become skilled in interpreting ideas in a way that makes concepts immediate, concrete, and meaningful to their students. As a teacher, I was often overwhelmed by the variety of concepts that were needed for my young students to understand a natural or scientific phenomenon. One of my blind students could imitate cows and pigs, but he had no idea whether they had tails. Another could discuss the causes of the drop in gasoline prices, but she did not know how many wheels were on a car. Their concepts were based on what they heard others discuss as well as what they had personally touched or heard. In providing the backdrop for this introduction to Practice Perspectives, I asked three experienced teachers to share some of their strategies for working with students like mine who were still developing concepts about the world around them.
Transforming concepts into complete experiences
Joy Coe, a teacher of visually impaired students at the California School for the Blind, remarked on the value of the teachable moment when concepts are introduced: an unexpected experience that captures the child's attention can be a powerful influence on learning. Joy mentioned an example of concept learning that could only come from Northern California, where earthquakes are a concern. She prepared a unit on volcanoes and earthquakes, which seemed to interest her students. She introduced her students to the duck-and-cover position that would help to protect them in an earthquake by teaching them to quickly duck under their desks with their hands pressed together behind their necks. Tables and chairs in the classroom were shaken to show what the real experience of an earthquake might be like. Before all of the teaching materials for the unit could be completed, a real earthquake occurred and students used what they had learned. Although a natural disaster is not the sort of teachable moment we hope for, the relevance and immediacy of learning was powerful for her students. Joy related other ways in which she translated incomplete concepts into complete experiences: growing a garden, because students did not understand that the food they ate came from the ground, or introducing maps by using three-dimensional models and then replacing them with flat symbols when the concept is mastered.
Using the senses to communicate concepts
Dana Daller, a resource teacher for young blind children in Phoenix, Arizona, noted the wide variety among her students in how they understand concepts. Although some of her students can memorize and apply facts, others need multiple concrete examples. She uses a variety of models and raised-line diagrams, both commercial and created. She also involves members of the school community: a visit to the nurse is arranged for lessons on anatomy and body parts. A tactile globe and a desk lamp that emanates heat have been useful in teaching about the rotation of the earth, with the heat from the lamp representing the light from the sun. Dana finds that many general classroom teachers seem to innately understand how a concept can be interpreted through senses other than vision. These are usually teachers who involve all students in experiments and activities with materials; they are likely to be more successful in communicating concepts to blind students as well as classmates with vision.
Yue-Ting Siu, who works as an itinerant teacher in the New York City school system, described some challenges that are especially faced by itinerant teachers, who are not present during most of their students' school day. Like many teachers, she searches for alternatives to highly visual classroom tasks, like cutting out pictures that are often used to illustrate concepts to typical learners. She sometimes teaches in the general classroom during group lessons to demonstrate simple adaptations; paraeducators are often eager to learn how to represent ideas to their students and welcome the guidance in how to adapt a visual lesson for a blind child. In one classroom, plastic fruit was being used to represent real fruit because staff had not considered how different the plastic versions were for blind students.
One concept that Ting's students found difficult was the meaning of "dirt" and "dirty." One student dropped a $20 bill into the sink and then tried to throw it into the wastebasket because he assumed that the water had made it dirty! Feeling variations in textures on surfaces and learning about how particles can be carried in the air were part of understanding what pollution is and what causes it. Especially with children who have multiple disabilities, conceptual learning must be connected directly to experiences.
Scientific processes involve multiple concepts and effects. Too often, science instruction for visually impaired children in public school classrooms includes only reading and writing, not experiencing. Professionals can be effective interpreters of new ideas, not only through the adaptations they make but also through facilitating the value of experience at every age. The authors of "Talking Turkey" have provided an effective reminder of the importance of hands-on instruction as well as of gathering data to confirm that learning has taken place.
Jane N. Erin, Ph.D.,associate editor for practice, JVIB, and professor, Department of Special Education, Rehabilitation, and School Psychology, College of Education, University of Arizona, P.O. Box 210069, Tucson, AZ 85721; e-mail: <jerin@u.arizona.edu>.
