Project ENABLE Webinar Transcript: School Librarians
Part 1: Project ENABLE School Librarians Present Their Experiences Serving Children with Disabilities
December 12, 2014
Myhill: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Project Enable School Librarians Present Their Experiences Serving Children with Disabilities webinar. My name is William Myhill, and I'll be facilitating today's webinar. This webinar is presented by Project Enable - a collaboration of Syracuse University's Center for Digital Literacy and the Burton Blatt Institute. It is funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
Just a few quick notes on the webinar system. We use Blackboard Collaborate, this system makes it possible for us to conduct workshops over the Internet from just about any computer with an Internet connection and web browser. Unfortunately, there may be computer issues inherent in your systems that are beyond our control, which is why it is important for you to check your systems prior to the session. During today's session, please mute all microphones. Also we advise you to close any applications you may have running on your computer because they may interfere with your successful experience. If your computer goes to sleep after sitting idle for a while, remember to periodically tap the spacebar just to let the webinar system know you are there.
Finally, if you have questions or comments during the presentation, you may raise your virtual hand, located above the list of participants or type in the chat room discussion below the list of participants.
We are now ready to begin.
Today, we are pleased to present Project Enable School Librarians Present Their Experiences Serving Children with Disabilities. The first of two free webinars for K-12 school librarians everywhere, to learn about creating inclusive library settings and programs to effectively serve all students with disabilities. This webinar, Project Enable School Librarians Present Their Experiences Serving Children with Disabilities, will address the issues of identifying the library needs of diverse students with disabilities, evaluating school library accessibility, developing inclusive library collections, applying Universal Design principles and Universal Design for Learning strategies for library programs and services, and providing innovative promising and model practices for school library inclusiveness.
Our panelists today are 2013 Project Enable workshop alumni, Kendra Allen, School Library Media Coordinator at Holly Grove Middle School in Holly Springs, North Carolina, Linda Houck, Teacher/Librarian for the Wilson School District in West Long, Pennsylvania, and Sean Fallon, the Library Media Specialist for the upper Deerfield school district in southern New Jersey.
We begin with Kendra.
Kendra L. Allen became the school Library Media Coordinator at Holly Grove Middle School in Holly Springs, North Carolina when it opened on July 2010. Before opening Holly Grove Middle, she began her library career as the School Library Media Coordinator at Holly Ridge Middle School. Her graduate research focus was on library services for students with disabilities. She has an article published in School Libraries Monthly published in 2010, co-authored with Sandra Hughes Hassel, and based on her Master’s paper, the school library media program and special education programs.
Welcome Kendra, you may begin.
Allen: Thank you, William.
Holly Grove Middle School is a large middle school. We're a year-round, calendar school, which means that our school operates from a July start to a June finish each year. We have grades sixth through eight, with approximately 1450 students right now. Twenty-three percent of those students qualify for free and reduced lunch programs. And our average class size is roughly 32 students - to try give you a picture of what we're looking like, here, in North Carolina.
Of those students that we have, 205 students have IEPs, (individualized education plans) and an additional 50 students have 504 plans, which also address accommodations and modifications, but without the formality of an individualized education plan. And so, we have a system set up in our school where we have the special students who have been identified with IEPs and 504 plans in both fully inclusive settings as well as two self-contained classes. Our fully included students are served within their classes with math and language arts by Special Education teachers who co-teach with the regular content area teachers. We also, with the self-contained classes, have one class that is set aside for students with intellectual disabilities of a moderate class rotation. We also have a self-contained class of students with autism, with a designation that doesn't allow them to be fully included in the regular classroom setting. So that gives you a picture of what we look like across the board in terms of students that we're serving.
Looking at slide number two, specifically one of the things I've chosen to focus on is Universal Design for Learning. First, you have to think about Universal Design, that being the concept that's coming out of architecture and design. For instance, if you have doors that have handicap accessibility, that you have buttons you can push and the door will open for you, they're designed according to ADA guidelines, however you have other individuals who equally benefit from the presence of those doors, including individuals with things in their hands and they're unable to turn a handle. You have someone pushing baby strollers or other carts of that nature.
But you have a variety of individuals who are not the specific target of the door design, but who also are benefiting from the door design. So what that is transferring to with UDL is that you may do something in your classroom that is targeted for specific students, specific group of students, however, all of the students in that classroom can benefit from that particular approach, not just the students for whom it was originally intended. And so, with that, you create a very inclusive environment and you are not setting students apart, rather, they're being included into what's happening in your programming.
There are three basic principles of UDL: multiple means of expression, multiple means of action and expression, and multiple means of engagement. And we’ll go further into those.
The first one is multiple means of representation. So looking at the what of a situation. Here in our media center and in professional development with some of our teachers, we’ve focused on simple solutions. For instance, signage in the media center. You have an ability to do things with large print– very clear, very distinct words. When I do signage in the media I also include images as well. So in the nonfiction section of the room, I have a sign that may say sports to indicate where in the 700s those sports books are and I have pictures of different sports balls, also on the sign.
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-- so that if the language barrier is the issue, that the identification of the object in the picture, the visual cue, is also accompanying it. I try to keep everything very clean with a white background, black text, very bold, very basic, not a lot of fancy curly Qs or anything like that to keep it clear.
With closed captioning, all of our teachers are instructed that any time they show any type of video, whether it's animated or live action, that they always, if there's a closed captioning feature, turn on the closed captioning feature. It's intended, obviously for an audience with hearing impairments, however, every student in the room can be benefitted by that reinforcement of both seeing the text and hearing it at the same time.
We also look at lesson design, visual versus verbal. For instance I'm a visual person. I like to see it. I can understand math problems if I see them as opposed to you trying to explain it to me with words. And so, trying to understand how our students are learning and making sure we're mashing it together, you're not focusing on one direction versus the other.
With regard to a variety of research resources when we look at designing projects for our students. Our ancient Egypt project, for example, we have different topics that I sat down and collaborated with the sixth-grade social studies teachers on. When we looked at what types of resources we wanted the students to be accessing for their research, we looked at a variety of websites. So we self-selected for these students, because it’s a first semester, sixth-grade project. We selected a variety of websites for them to use, we looked at the readability of those websites.
We also included, for all of the topics in that project, videos as well, that the student could watch, trying to mix up the types of sources that they were able to get their information from, that it wasn't just text-based, that they could watch a video and listen to something as well.
With regards to multiple formats in your collection, from graphic novels, to audio books, to large print, to adapted and abridged text. When I chose audio books for our collection, I looked at what the language arts teachers chose for their reading room and I selected audio book text because I had a limited budget and audio books are expensive. I chose audio books that matched up with what the language arts teach would be using in lit circles and whole-class novel sets. So that if you have a student that needs that reinforcement of the audio with their print text, that that's available for the teachers to check out. So, I do keep those separate for the teachers to only check out as opposed to student checkouts like playaways and objects of that nature. These are meant as reinforcement for those students that need both the audio as well as the print.
Moving on to action and expression. We think about how a lot of us talk about inquiry projects and our various design components, that the different ways that students can express themselves is very important. I have students who might be able to tell you about something, but they might not be able to write about it as well. So also with design and final products, when thinking about executive function, if it has to be very organized in a certain way, and very clear - it has to be very linear- this has to come first and this has to come second. Sometimes you have students that are struggling with the executive function of that order. For instance, when you have something like tablet where students can place things in random positions all over the screen or discovery, has their board builder, students have that power to locate where on their final product they'd like to put something and that is less about the organization than it is about the content. You're trying to get out what you're actually assessing and you're also giving them that freedom of expression.
Also understanding that with graphic organizers, we tier those as well. We don't necessarily have the same graphic organizer for every student and every class. We break the graphic organizers back and we say, this is what we want for this population of students given their needs. This is a different graphic organizer for our higher level thinking students. And so, noting that you can differentiate graphic organizers for research note-taking as well as everything else.
In one of my self-contained classes, I have students that are more or less nonverbal. We look at ways that they can communicate with me in response to a book that we may be reading, but it may not require speech. So for instance, I have colored [indiscernible]. You may not be able to tell me, when I ask you, what color is the wagon? You may not be able to vocalize the word red. However, I have large dots on a paper and you can touch the color red dot instead. So you're still getting the same information. I make sure that I have different ways of phrasing things, as well as different means of communicating. It may be a touch, it may be a movement, as opposed to a verbalization, in terms of how they are communicating with you.
Looking at the third principle of engagement, you have students who function very well with routine. For instance, I see my two self-contained classes, the same day, every week. They come on a very set schedule. This works very well for them. They know that one class comes on Tuesday, the other class comes on Friday. The class that comes on Friday does library, then lunch. That's my students with autism class, and those students, if you looked at how they might use their schedule boards, for instance, on how they move throughout their day, this reinforces that. That first we do library, then we do lunch. It becomes a routine for them that they know when they come, they generally sit in the same spots every time they come; I'm going to sit in the same spot when they arrive. They have a level of expectation that there is a routine to do what we do, that this is what's going to happen. And we function in that very routine way because that is what works for that particular class.
On the other side, I have complete open access. For some of my students that struggle with the large class setting where there are lots of students milling around and we're all looking for books at the same time, a lot of my students with special needs, who are fully inclusive students, will often return to me on passes to come for open access reasons so they can work independently or so I can work with them one-on-one outside of the bounds of a formal class visit. This allows them to create a sense of independence in the room as well as get that one-on-one attention that they might want but they might not want it with other students around. Also with recruiting interests - looking at how they can make decisions through their own choices - we do very open, very liberal, you can take as many books as you want. I don't say “you can only have three books at a time,” because if you're excited about this -- and I was looking at my top patrons earlier today – that some of my top ten patrons as far as their activity in checking out books this year, are students that would that would fill in that 250 students with either an IEP or 504. They're very active users because we give them open range to do what they want to do. I also seek a lot of student input as well. What do you want to see? What are we doing well? What do you want to see more of? I survey the students a lot to get their feedback.