A Jouney Through Alternative Education
by
Rob Creasy
Instructor: Middalia Carpio
IDS TA 96
M.Ed. Curriculum and Instruction
How I got here... I would like to think that I am the teacher that I needed when I was in school. Right now I don't think that I am there yet, but I think that just by trying to is half the battle.
When I was a forth grade student I was placed in an SLD program because of difficulties I was having in math. At that time in Lake County this meant that I would just be taught only the very basics (1+1=2, 2-1= 1, etc.) at the beginning of each year and expected to be on grade level by the end of the year. Surprise, surprise no one ever accomplished this, so the next year we all would start over from the start. As you can imagine this tended to teach us that no matter how hard we tried we were going to fail. In our minds we were failing because we were not as smart as the other kids. We didn't realize that we were being set up to fail. All we saw was that everyone else got to advance we never would.
One definition of insanity is when you do the same thing over and over and expecting different outcomes. For me that is exactly what school was, insanity. We were never taught other ways to do the problems, as a matter of fact we were actually not allowed to do things any other way than the standard. The teachers were not allowed to start the students off any were other than at the very basics. The rule was the student would start at the bottom and work through a series of worksheets and drills and once you did that you go to the next series of problems. The sheer volume of the work hampered advancement. The students could not test past any parts, they could not succeed. I had one good SLD teacher in 8th grade that finally told the school that the SLD program at the school was wasting the students time, because the teachers were not allowed to teach the students what they needed. She had all these crazy ideas like if the student knows how to do addition and subtraction but not multiplication then teach them to multiply, not continue to drill them on basic addition. She decided to ignore the curriculum and guidelines given to her and just teach each student as an individual and address their own unique needs allowing every one to progress at their own pace. The controversial idea seemed to be the progressing part. After all who did she think she was, a teacher. Eventually the school fired her for noncompliance. Proof that no good deed goes unpunished.
So here I am trying to keep that from happening to any more students. Trying to be half the teacher Ms. Ginann was. I think the first step to doing that would be to realize that the system is broken. Now thats not to say we should give up on it altogether just realize it does not work the way it is now. We as educators talk about such things as the multiple intelligences and how we should use them, but I ask you how many of us truly do? I know that at the beginning of the year we all set up our rooms with that in mind but how long does it take for those great ideas to go by the wayside? Sooner or later most of us slip back into the “old reliable tried and true” methods of the past that we all seem to slip into at times. I think that it is important to look at all the research into the multiple intelligences all and the brain based teaching. For more than thirty years research into such things as Brain Gym® and sensory motor exercises has shown that the human brain can be remapped by physical activity. This is technique used extensively with brain injury patients. In one instance a young child with a severe and rapidly progressing form of epilepsy was suffering from 300 to 400 painful seizures a day. The doctors felt that in the very near future the one of the seizures would kill her. In a radical operation the surgeons removed one half of her brain. It was believed that if the child survived she would be left severely disabled if not in a complete vegetative state. Not willing to give up on their daughter the parents and doctors chose to try and remap the girls brain with physical exercise. The human brain needs to control so many activities that the same areas of of the brain controls hundreds if not thousands of things. The theory is that anytime a person learns to do something any other action that uses the same section of the brain will be enhanced as well. Research has determined that the same area of the brain that controls reading also controls balance, so if you improve your balance you will also improve your reading ability. After 13 years of physical therapy the girl has been able to learn to walk, talk and even graduated from high school with regular diploma and is planning on going to college.
It would seem to reason that something different must be done to the current system. If such techniques can be used successfully with such an incredible case, then what could be done with your average student. That very question is why I sought out the school that I am at now. When I began the search I knew very little about the different alternative educational techniques that were being used I just knew that what we were doing now wasn't working. When I found Summit Charter School it seemed to be just what I was looking for. “Seemed “ being the operative word, as it turned out saying and doing really are two different things.
The curriculum at my school is a combination of many teaching styles and techniques. The belief is that there no, "one size fits all" program that will suit every child's needs. All of our students have one thing in common they all have various learning disabilities. We will continue to strive to improve on our program by developing new techniques and combining them with successful elements of educational teaching programs found to be effective with SLD students.
The basis of our program includes techniques as:
Auditory Processing Training
Character Development.
Dennison's Brain Gym®
EEG Neurofeedback
Eric Jensen's Brain-Based Learning
Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences including Art and Music with the Brain in Mind
Interactive Metronome
Montessori Reading and Math Manipulatives
Moving With Math" in conjunction with Edwin Lieberthal's Finger-math
Project Adventure's Experiential Learning/Adventure in the Classroom/Adaptive P.E.
Reading Research Foundation's Perceptual Motor Training in conjunction with the American Manual Alphabet and "Moving Out The Letters"
Sensory Motor Integration
Stevenson's Reading and Language Skills Program in conjunction with Encoding and Decoding The Phonics Game™ and The Math Game™
Visual Processing Training
Having explained the program it's easy to see why I was excited to be at this school. The reality of it is that the majority of those things never make it off the paper. Curriculum over cite is nearly nonexistent and incompetence is business as usual, and the only way to get fired is to complain. My experience at this school has greatly effected my opinions about the educational system as we know it. I think it is such a shame when so much work and thought has gone into a system and is wasted out of laziness. I think the old saying that goes “To get anything done right you must do it yourself.”
I plan to one day open a school where the alternative teaching styles are used on a daily basis. We would have curriculum specialists that would use the students IEP to create a specialized program of study for each student. The core curriculum would include extensive use of Brain Gym®, sensory motor and music therapy.
Brain Gym®:
For approximatly 30 years researchers have been looking into the connection between the mind and body. Preleminary observations noted tha many of the LD students also had coordination problems, a connection seemed obvios to Dr. Paul and Gail Dennison. In 1969 they noted that many of the students had the intelligence to succeed at the tasks. What many of the students had in common were a deficiet in their physical/perceptual abilities, that had often plagued the child's development, uncorrected, since infancy. This led to difficulties in spatial awareness, a concept of wholeness and closure. The ability to focus attention and perceive an organization or a structure, are requisite learning skills, seemingly easy to teach yet often not available to the children who need them.
The idea then became to look at seemingly easier task of improving their coordination as that is something readily visable. “Brain Gym® consists of simple movements similar to the movements that are natural in the first three years of life to accomplish important developmental steps for coordination of eyes, ears, hands and the whole body.” These are used to reinforce 3 diminsions of brain function. These are:
Laterality is the ability to coordinate one side of the brain with the other, especially in the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic midfield, the area where the two sides overlap. This skill is fundamental to the ability to read, write and communicate. It is also essential for fluid whole-body movement, and for the ability to move and think at the same me.
Focus is the ability to coordinate the back and front areas of the brain. It is related to comprehension, the ability to find meaning, and to the ability to experience details within their context. People without this basic skill are said to have attention disorders and difficulty in comprehending. At a deeper level, focus allows us to interpret a particular moment or experience in the greater context of our lives or to see ourselves as unique individuals within the larger framework of our society.
Centring is the ability to coordinate the top and bottom areas of the brain. This skill is related to organization, grounding, feeling and expressing one's emotions, a sense of personal space, and responding rationally rather than reacting from emotional overlay.
A recent study (Dr. Robert Eyestone, 1990) found that more than 95 percent of individuals in groups labeled as "at risk" (teen mothers, juvenile detention, ADD/ADHD, in learning disabilities classes, drug rehabilitation, alcohol support groups) were operating in a homo-lateral state, as compared to 8 to 13 percent in random groupings.
Sensory Motor:
Sensory motor programs are specifically designed to identify individual strengths and weaknesses needed for academic success. By determining "how students learn" rather than "what" they learn. Once the program finds sensory motor difficulties, the staff would develope exercises to help correct these problems. The latest available research shows that a childs brain becomes organized in a certain predefined sequence. Children with learning disabilities some of the sequencing has not occured. This often creates difficulties in learning such things as math and reading. Researchers have found that many of the same areas of the brain are used for balence as well as word decoding. If a students balence is improved, that students decoding ability is also improved. This produces improved reading skills in both speed and comprehension. By reprogramming the brain, children develop the necessary sensory motor and cognitive skills necessary to learn the content taught in school. The gains made are self-reinforcing, and should be for life! Adaptive physical education programs incorporate many of the key elements found in sensory integration and occupational therapy as well as traditional and experiential P.E. Programs.
Music Therapy:
This is a philosophy that is born out of my personal experience. As I child I was labeled as having having learning disabilities. These disabilities seemed to be corrected as I went through high school. At the time my parents and I thought that I had simply outgrown them. It wasn't untill I started doing research on alternative educational styles that I realized that what had happened was I had reprogramed my brain.
My freshman year of high school I began playing drums in the marching band. I first thought that the reprogramming was as a result of simply the brain gym sensory motor type movment that is involved in playing the drums. The speed of the change is what suprised me however. I made it out of the SLD program after my sophmore year. Something more must have been at work in my case. I began searching for information regarding music and more specifically rythem instuments, and their effect on learning disabilities. I found that there was a sizable body of research pointing to a correlation between rythmic sounds and mood / behavior modification. The research shows that rythemic sound releases several different chemicals in the body that in addition to relaxing the brain also prepare the brain to recieve information. There are many progams in use across the nation that involve the use of “drum circles” with at risk youth programs. In my case effects of playing drums accomplished more than 7 years of SLD class could.
I think that the school I want to open would be geared at helping to give the student the skills they need to thrive in the traditional educational environment. We would attempt to move the student back into the mainstream as soon as possible. I feel that the traditional school system would be best suited to handle the long term education of a student. Our students would be with us for between one and three years.
One has to wonder if alternative educational techniques will be the ultimate answer to the educational crisis that we are now facing.
Rob Creasy
Instructor: Middalia Carpio
IDS TA 96
M.Ed. Curriculum and Instruction
How I got here... I would like to think that I am the teacher that I needed when I was in school. Right now I don't think that I am there yet, but I think that just by trying to is half the battle.
When I was a forth grade student I was placed in an SLD program because of difficulties I was having in math. At that time in Lake County this meant that I would just be taught only the very basics (1+1=2, 2-1= 1, etc.) at the beginning of each year and expected to be on grade level by the end of the year. Surprise, surprise no one ever accomplished this, so the next year we all would start over from the start. As you can imagine this tended to teach us that no matter how hard we tried we were going to fail. In our minds we were failing because we were not as smart as the other kids. We didn't realize that we were being set up to fail. All we saw was that everyone else got to advance we never would.
One definition of insanity is when you do the same thing over and over and expecting different outcomes. For me that is exactly what school was, insanity. We were never taught other ways to do the problems, as a matter of fact we were actually not allowed to do things any other way than the standard. The teachers were not allowed to start the students off any were other than at the very basics. The rule was the student would start at the bottom and work through a series of worksheets and drills and once you did that you go to the next series of problems. The sheer volume of the work hampered advancement. The students could not test past any parts, they could not succeed. I had one good SLD teacher in 8th grade that finally told the school that the SLD program at the school was wasting the students time, because the teachers were not allowed to teach the students what they needed. She had all these crazy ideas like if the student knows how to do addition and subtraction but not multiplication then teach them to multiply, not continue to drill them on basic addition. She decided to ignore the curriculum and guidelines given to her and just teach each student as an individual and address their own unique needs allowing every one to progress at their own pace. The controversial idea seemed to be the progressing part. After all who did she think she was, a teacher. Eventually the school fired her for noncompliance. Proof that no good deed goes unpunished.
So here I am trying to keep that from happening to any more students. Trying to be half the teacher Ms. Ginann was. I think the first step to doing that would be to realize that the system is broken. Now thats not to say we should give up on it altogether just realize it does not work the way it is now. We as educators talk about such things as the multiple intelligences and how we should use them, but I ask you how many of us truly do? I know that at the beginning of the year we all set up our rooms with that in mind but how long does it take for those great ideas to go by the wayside? Sooner or later most of us slip back into the “old reliable tried and true” methods of the past that we all seem to slip into at times. I think that it is important to look at all the research into the multiple intelligences all and the brain based teaching. For more than thirty years research into such things as Brain Gym® and sensory motor exercises has shown that the human brain can be remapped by physical activity. This is technique used extensively with brain injury patients. In one instance a young child with a severe and rapidly progressing form of epilepsy was suffering from 300 to 400 painful seizures a day. The doctors felt that in the very near future the one of the seizures would kill her. In a radical operation the surgeons removed one half of her brain. It was believed that if the child survived she would be left severely disabled if not in a complete vegetative state. Not willing to give up on their daughter the parents and doctors chose to try and remap the girls brain with physical exercise. The human brain needs to control so many activities that the same areas of of the brain controls hundreds if not thousands of things. The theory is that anytime a person learns to do something any other action that uses the same section of the brain will be enhanced as well. Research has determined that the same area of the brain that controls reading also controls balance, so if you improve your balance you will also improve your reading ability. After 13 years of physical therapy the girl has been able to learn to walk, talk and even graduated from high school with regular diploma and is planning on going to college.
It would seem to reason that something different must be done to the current system. If such techniques can be used successfully with such an incredible case, then what could be done with your average student. That very question is why I sought out the school that I am at now. When I began the search I knew very little about the different alternative educational techniques that were being used I just knew that what we were doing now wasn't working. When I found Summit Charter School it seemed to be just what I was looking for. “Seemed “ being the operative word, as it turned out saying and doing really are two different things.
The curriculum at my school is a combination of many teaching styles and techniques. The belief is that there no, "one size fits all" program that will suit every child's needs. All of our students have one thing in common they all have various learning disabilities. We will continue to strive to improve on our program by developing new techniques and combining them with successful elements of educational teaching programs found to be effective with SLD students.
The basis of our program includes techniques as:
Auditory Processing Training
Character Development.
Dennison's Brain Gym®
EEG Neurofeedback
Eric Jensen's Brain-Based Learning
Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences including Art and Music with the Brain in Mind
Interactive Metronome
Montessori Reading and Math Manipulatives
Moving With Math" in conjunction with Edwin Lieberthal's Finger-math
Project Adventure's Experiential Learning/Adventure in the Classroom/Adaptive P.E.
Reading Research Foundation's Perceptual Motor Training in conjunction with the American Manual Alphabet and "Moving Out The Letters"
Sensory Motor Integration
Stevenson's Reading and Language Skills Program in conjunction with Encoding and Decoding The Phonics Game™ and The Math Game™
Visual Processing Training
Having explained the program it's easy to see why I was excited to be at this school. The reality of it is that the majority of those things never make it off the paper. Curriculum over cite is nearly nonexistent and incompetence is business as usual, and the only way to get fired is to complain. My experience at this school has greatly effected my opinions about the educational system as we know it. I think it is such a shame when so much work and thought has gone into a system and is wasted out of laziness. I think the old saying that goes “To get anything done right you must do it yourself.”
I plan to one day open a school where the alternative teaching styles are used on a daily basis. We would have curriculum specialists that would use the students IEP to create a specialized program of study for each student. The core curriculum would include extensive use of Brain Gym®, sensory motor and music therapy.
Brain Gym®:
For approximatly 30 years researchers have been looking into the connection between the mind and body. Preleminary observations noted tha many of the LD students also had coordination problems, a connection seemed obvios to Dr. Paul and Gail Dennison. In 1969 they noted that many of the students had the intelligence to succeed at the tasks. What many of the students had in common were a deficiet in their physical/perceptual abilities, that had often plagued the child's development, uncorrected, since infancy. This led to difficulties in spatial awareness, a concept of wholeness and closure. The ability to focus attention and perceive an organization or a structure, are requisite learning skills, seemingly easy to teach yet often not available to the children who need them.
The idea then became to look at seemingly easier task of improving their coordination as that is something readily visable. “Brain Gym® consists of simple movements similar to the movements that are natural in the first three years of life to accomplish important developmental steps for coordination of eyes, ears, hands and the whole body.” These are used to reinforce 3 diminsions of brain function. These are:
Laterality is the ability to coordinate one side of the brain with the other, especially in the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic midfield, the area where the two sides overlap. This skill is fundamental to the ability to read, write and communicate. It is also essential for fluid whole-body movement, and for the ability to move and think at the same me.
Focus is the ability to coordinate the back and front areas of the brain. It is related to comprehension, the ability to find meaning, and to the ability to experience details within their context. People without this basic skill are said to have attention disorders and difficulty in comprehending. At a deeper level, focus allows us to interpret a particular moment or experience in the greater context of our lives or to see ourselves as unique individuals within the larger framework of our society.
Centring is the ability to coordinate the top and bottom areas of the brain. This skill is related to organization, grounding, feeling and expressing one's emotions, a sense of personal space, and responding rationally rather than reacting from emotional overlay.
A recent study (Dr. Robert Eyestone, 1990) found that more than 95 percent of individuals in groups labeled as "at risk" (teen mothers, juvenile detention, ADD/ADHD, in learning disabilities classes, drug rehabilitation, alcohol support groups) were operating in a homo-lateral state, as compared to 8 to 13 percent in random groupings.
Sensory Motor:
Sensory motor programs are specifically designed to identify individual strengths and weaknesses needed for academic success. By determining "how students learn" rather than "what" they learn. Once the program finds sensory motor difficulties, the staff would develope exercises to help correct these problems. The latest available research shows that a childs brain becomes organized in a certain predefined sequence. Children with learning disabilities some of the sequencing has not occured. This often creates difficulties in learning such things as math and reading. Researchers have found that many of the same areas of the brain are used for balence as well as word decoding. If a students balence is improved, that students decoding ability is also improved. This produces improved reading skills in both speed and comprehension. By reprogramming the brain, children develop the necessary sensory motor and cognitive skills necessary to learn the content taught in school. The gains made are self-reinforcing, and should be for life! Adaptive physical education programs incorporate many of the key elements found in sensory integration and occupational therapy as well as traditional and experiential P.E. Programs.
Music Therapy:
This is a philosophy that is born out of my personal experience. As I child I was labeled as having having learning disabilities. These disabilities seemed to be corrected as I went through high school. At the time my parents and I thought that I had simply outgrown them. It wasn't untill I started doing research on alternative educational styles that I realized that what had happened was I had reprogramed my brain.
My freshman year of high school I began playing drums in the marching band. I first thought that the reprogramming was as a result of simply the brain gym sensory motor type movment that is involved in playing the drums. The speed of the change is what suprised me however. I made it out of the SLD program after my sophmore year. Something more must have been at work in my case. I began searching for information regarding music and more specifically rythem instuments, and their effect on learning disabilities. I found that there was a sizable body of research pointing to a correlation between rythmic sounds and mood / behavior modification. The research shows that rythemic sound releases several different chemicals in the body that in addition to relaxing the brain also prepare the brain to recieve information. There are many progams in use across the nation that involve the use of “drum circles” with at risk youth programs. In my case effects of playing drums accomplished more than 7 years of SLD class could.
I think that the school I want to open would be geared at helping to give the student the skills they need to thrive in the traditional educational environment. We would attempt to move the student back into the mainstream as soon as possible. I feel that the traditional school system would be best suited to handle the long term education of a student. Our students would be with us for between one and three years.
One has to wonder if alternative educational techniques will be the ultimate answer to the educational crisis that we are now facing.
posted by rob @ Thursday, March 23, 2006
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