Am I making a difference?  Is there anything more I can be doing?

When I left teaching to go into school psychology I (perhaps naively) thought that it would put me in a position to do a greater amount of good for a greater number of students than working as a teacher.  Now, almost two years later, it seems to me that my scope of influence has actually diminished from my classroom days.

So what’s a natural-born do-gooder to do?  I try to compensate in a few ways.  I co-advise my high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, not only because I think it’s a righteous cause, but also to increase the face-to-face time I spend with young folks.  I also volunteer to conduct professional development sessions at work and help teachers get comfortable using tools like wikis and podcasts to develop more student-centered, authentic projects.  Of course, there’s also the consultative role I play as part of my job, which I guess (I hope) is beneficial, too.

Reading up on education reform and going to conferences like EduCon and Constructing Modern Knowledge (if I can get away for three days!), although not directly related to my responsibilities as a school psychologist, are important to me because they prevent me from becoming too isolated in my practice and, more importantly, keep me engaged as a visible stakeholder and participant in the discussions I think we need to be having about education right now (many of which, I’m finding out through my reading, have been going on for decades, to little avail).

At EduCon two weeks ago, as much as I enjoyed it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was the only one (psychologist) in the room at any given time.  As many of the conversations at EduCon focused around what teachers can do differently and how teachers can improve their practice, I continually wondered, “What can I do differently?  How can I contribute to some of these changes given the limited interactions I have with students?”  The teachers and administrators and techie folks all had at least a few kindred professional spirits to bounce ideas off of; I was not so lucky (this is probably fodder for another post).

I asked in a blog post almost two years ago what, if any, place psychologists have in the School 2.0/Unschool framework.  Let me expand that somewhat narrow question to YOUR vision of what school could/should be, free of movements or labels.

Maybe a better question for you progressive educators out there is this: what could I, given my skill set, do to support your efforts if I worked in your building?  Sky’s the limit; just put it out there.

So why have I stopped the program just over a third of the way through?

It’s not that journaling was ineffective; in fact, I don’t know if I would have lasted as long were it not for the added guilt incentive my blog gave me to keep going – after all, I couldn’t punk out after having stated my intentions so boldly, could I?  I think I put my finger on the issue in my 27 December post:

Update: I took my “recovery week” as a real rest week – took about 4-6 days off completely. I did more days than I’ve blogged about here, but I’m finding I’m burning out – I’m a fit guy, and have run and lifted for years, but I’m having a real hard time finding 60-90 minutes a day where I can follow the program without other stuff interfering. I’m going to pick it up again today in Week 5 of the program and see where it takes me.

The problem was not with the supports; it was with the ultimate goal.  In the back of my mind, I knew that this was going to be time-consuming, but it wasn’t until I got into it that I realized I was effectively having to choose between exercise and my family (long story, not interesting, just trust me).  I have since switched to a different workout routine that is still challenging, but more compatible with my schedule.

So why whine about my workout on an education blog?  Simple: it was a stark reminder to me to keep goals attainable, behavioral, academic, or otherwise.  In hindsight, even though I was able to keep up physically with the workouts, the specifics of my work and family’s schedules made this an unrealistic undertaking for me.  I kind of knew this in the back of my head, and had a Plan B to go to just in case, but that’s not always the case, especially with our students who are attempting to meet goals that we set for them, either via behavioral expectations, grades, or IEPs.

The same may be true of your students.  If Johnny (why are these hypothetical example students always named Johnny?) picks his nose for 80% of the class period, it may be unrealistic to expect to extinguish that behavior right away.  If, after, say, two weeks of behavior interventions, he’s picking his nose during 40% of the class, that’s not bad at all – you’ve cut the frequency of nasal spelunking in your classroom in half.  Of course, you’ll eventually want to kill that off entirely, but in a case like this, it’s important to a) recognize his progress, and b) understand that behavior is complex, and can take time to change.  The same is true of improving study skills, academic performance, reading fluency… some improvements come quickly, but others take time, and don’t always come as easily as we’d like.

As educators, we often like to set the bar high and challenge our students, and that’s admirable.  We just have to remember that setting the bar too high too soon can sometimes do more harm than good – set up some smaller bars first, for them and for yourself.  The confidence boost they (and you) get from meeting those short-term goals (“Hey, I can do this after all!”) could be just what they need to get them to that ultimate goal.

Please feel free to either subscribe to my Delicious RSS feed or just bookmark my page; have a look at the tag list on the right-hand side of the screen for categories that may interest you (e.g., Organization, Reading, Math, ADHD, etc.).  I hope you and your colleagues can find something useful there, for yourselves or your students.

So every member of my new Child Study Team has some ‘pet project’ that they contribute to the department, and along those lines, I’ve been approached to put together a website for the department (not sure if it’s just for CST or Special Services in general; will get more details in the summer).

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Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments here – parents, what info can we make readily available to you?  Special ed teachers/service providers, what “frequently asked questions” or topics would you put on a site for the community?

Although this project is still in the very early stages, I have some thoughts as to what I think needs to go on this site at minimum:

• “plain English” description of the NJ special ed determination process
• downloadable PDFs of NJAC 6:14 (special education code), PRISE (Parental Rights in Special Education), and similar documents
• little blurbs about each of the CST members (4 psychologists, 2 LDTCs, 1 social worker) and our supervisor, along with contact information (phone, email, fax)
• information on transition services and options
• links to useful external sources

I’m not quite at the point of creating a Twitter account for our Child Study Team, but I would like to do something a little more personalized than a static website, like maybe have a monthly blog post from a different CST member (a la a newsletter).  I did create a wiki for the Special Services dept. at my last school as part of my grad school internship project, so I do have a basic blueprint, but given the additional year and a half or so of technical experience I’ve gained since putting that up (plus the fact that I’ll be using locally hosted WordPress as my canvas), I think I can kick this site up a notch.

So what do YOU think needs to feature on this website?  Sky’s the limit, at least as we kick ideas around in this space.

Social stories (for those of us too lazy to click a link!) are short illustrated stories designed to teach social skills to students with autism (and similar developmental disabilities).  In a social story, the student will see specific behaviors depicted in concrete terms and learn why they are or are not appropriate (e.g., “hitting other people can hurt them”; “we raise our hand when we need to ask a question”).  I was generally familiar with the concept of social stories, but creating my own gave me a new appreciation for the tool, as well as raised more questions than I was able to answer.

At the suggestion of our CST secretary, I decided to illustrate this social story with pictures taken on our campus.  I don’t know if this holds any water, but I’m hopeful that seeing familiar, local images in the social story will make the message a little more tangible to this young man than clip art or random pictures off the Internet.  The story itself is 8 pages long (including cover) and contains 9 images, of which 3 were obtained from the Internet (1 public domain, 2 licensed under Creative Commons).  The remaining 6 I snapped myself over the course of yesterday and today.

In the spirit of Dan’s repeated calls for critique amongst bloggers, I submit to you my first attempt at a social story.  Because I’m a big sensitive crybaby interested in sharing my thought process with you, here are some issues that are yet unresolved in my mind:

• I had a hard time nailing the language.  Some pages I think are too easy; others, too complex.  I guess appropriateness varies by student, but what little text you see is the result of a number of re-writes, and I’m still not sure I’m entirely happy with the final version.
• Don’t know if the pictures are concrete enough.  Are they too symbolic, especially the last one?
• I wanted to keep the tone positive, but also make sure the student understood the consequences of pulling false alarms.  Like the point above, it’s a fine line to walk between not sugarcoating the issue and not making it too scary.
• The administrative offices picture.  I don’t want the student to think that principal = trouble, but…
• I don’t know if the last page is so contradictory as to be confusing to the target audience.
• I didn’t feel the need to include a page of photo credits in the version I’m giving to the student, nor did I black out the face of the administrator who graciously agreed to pose for me.  This is the “public” version of the document, so I can attribute my photos properly and not put someone’s face on the Internet who never agreed to it.

OK, without further avoidance ado, I present:

Fire Alarms in School – Apace of Change

Feed Me

If you don’t have enough feeds in your RSS reader (and really, who ever has enough?), you can check my Google Reader shared items feed.  This is the same feed or stories that you see in the sidebar at DamianBariexca.net, but you can subscribe to this in your reader of choice.  I try to limit my feed’s focus to psychology, special education, or technology that I think has potential for use in the special ed classroom (and Ira Socol’s SpeEd Change features regularly in my shared items).

Tech Geekery

I spent much of this past weekend playing with my new toy, the Asus EeePC 1000HE.  A few cons, mostly pros, and I will likely be putting up a “Tools of the Trade” post on this machine before the end of the school year.  Bottom line: best $400 I’ve spent recently.

Stop By & Say Hi

If you happen to be in the Jamesburg, NJ area on Friday, May 1, why not attend the NJASP Spring Conference?  Jim Wright, founder of Intervention Central, will be presenting on “Strategies for Working with the Unmotivated, Non-Compliant, Disorganized, Struggling Student” (link to PDF).  I’ll be there, and am considering liveblogging, if I can.  If you’re interested, see the linked PDF above for registration information.

Call for Advice

So every member of my new Child Study Team has some ‘pet project’ that they contribute to the department, and along those lines, I’ve been approached to put together a website for the department (not sure if it’s just for CST or Special Services in general; will get more details in the summer).

My supervisor and I both have some ideas as to what should go on the site, but here’s where I reach out to you: I want to make this site more than just pictures and contact info; at the very least, I want to make it an information repository for students and parents.  What information do you think would be most valuable on a high school CST/Special Services site?  Transition information?  Laws in “plain English”?  Flowcharts of legal processes?  Biographical information about the team/teachers?  A blogroll?  Monthly blog posts/articles?

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments here – parents, what info can we make readily available to you?  Special ed teachers/service providers, what “frequently asked questions” or topics would you put on a site for the community?

Fast forward to September 2008: I’m now a school psychologist, responsible for a case management load of over 70 students.  I started using one of my first “Web 2.0″ loves, Tiddlywiki, to help keep my notes on each student organized.  As much as I liked it for maintaining plain text notes, that’s really all it could do without further tinkering.  Linking to local files was too time-consuming, and God forbid I move a file – broken & useless link.

When I switched schools in January, I also switched note-keeping tools.  Looking for something a little more robust than Tiddlywiki, I dusted off my Evernote install, updated to the latest version, and began to play.  My trial period turned into a love affair.

How We Roll

Within a given account, Evernote allows you to create “notebooks”, and within each notebook, you have “notes” – think of them as a neverending stack of index cards.  Like Tiddlywiki, these notes can accommodate plain text, hyperlinks, bullets, number lists, etc., but Evernote also allows you to drag and drop files into your “index cards”.  Users with free accounts are restricted to dragging and dropping images, audio, ink, and PDF files, but if you are a paying user ($5/mo or $45/yr), you can drag any kind of file AND have Evernote synchronize so that your files are accessible from any computer with Evernote installed, the Evernote website, or your mobile phone (via either a mobile site, Windows Mobile app, or iPhone app).

In my quest to go as paperless as possible at work, I scan a lot of documents to PDF.  When I drag them into Evernote, I can view the document directly in Evernote via their baked-in PDF viewer (courtesy the good folks at Foxit, maker of my PDF viewer of choice).

Relevance to School Psychology

Ours is a profession that depends greatly on paper trails and written documentation.  Evernote is a convenient, paper-free method of storing information in just about any medium you may use.  From an organizational standpoint, here’s an example of how I’ve set up some notebooks on general topics:

This screenshot is from my home computer.  The notebooks with greyed-out icons are local-only; the green icons indicated synchronized folders (I access these from my computer at work, too). As you can see, I’ve set up separate notebooks for business cards, documentation regarding my certification status in both NJ and PA, information on doctoral programs, our local Polytech program, and even a repository of research articles I have encountered over the years.

Beneath these notebooks are individual notebooks for each student on my caseload.  Any time I need to record pertinent information for or about a student, it goes directly into Evernote.  I have a clipboard & pen that saves my written notes as PDFs, so even when I am without my computer (e.g., a classroom observation), I can still write down what I need to, save it to PDF, and drop it from the clipboard’s SD card right into Evernote.

I have even been able to digitally record important information, compress the wav file, and archive it here.  Who needs a stack of cassette tapes lying around when you can keep it all here?

Even if you don’t wish to set up several notebooks, you can use Evernote as a “brain dump” and use their search function to find what you need when you need it.  Their OCR technology even allows you to search the text in PDFs and photographs.

Of course, privacy and confidentiality are also important.  Evernote blogged about this here, and they also post their privacy policy online.  As an additional security precaution, information within notes is encryptable.

Denouement

Evernote has been a great organizational tool for this psychologist over the two months I’ve been using it.  It’s essentially a digital file cabinet that I’ll never even get close to filling – I’m a paid member, and even after syncing a ton of PDFs and quite a few zipped .wav files, I still only used 160 MB of my 500 MB monthly limit this month (free members get 40 MB/mo).  Maybe a good analogy is to think of Evernote as an iTunes for your notes and documents – sure, you could open up separate folders and click on individual mp3s to listen to music, but isn’t it easier to manage them all in one central location?

As an English teacher, I taught many sections of our tenth-grade English II course that were designated as In-Class Support (ICS).  In these classes, we would have as many as 10 students with learning disabilities along with another 10-15 students who did not have learning disabilities.  The goal of the ICS model is to allow special education to be as inclusive as possible by assigning two teachers to a classroom, one content area teacher and one special education teacher.    The course content is identical to that of non-ICS general education courses.

Given the high co-morbidity rate of ADHD and other learning disabilities, it’s not uncommon to have students in these classes who comprehend the material well enough, but have serious trouble organizing their thoughts in writing.  This can be difficult enough for 15-year-olds without any other influences, but when you throw ADHD and other SLDs into the mix, the writing process can become incredibly frustrating for both student and teacher.

About five years ago, I had a student who was experiencing great difficulty writing a research paper.  He knew what he wanted to say, but told me he just couldn’t make sense of what was in his head to get it on paper.  Rough drafts were due that week, so I told him to bring in a rough draft and I’d work with him after school to try to help him.

When we sat down together to look at his draft, I saw exactly what he meant.  The paragraphs themselves were more or less focused on a single topic, but reading the paper as a whole, the topics shifted from this to that back to this again.  It was incredibly difficult to follow his train of thought and the defense of his thesis.

I tried explaining why the paragraphs didn’t make sense in the order they were in, but the student wasn’t getting me.  I don’t know how I got the idea, but I eventually got up, walked over to the teacher’s desk, grabbed a pair of scissors, and returned to the student.  After getting his permission, I proceeded to cut his essay up by paragraph.  I then asked him to put all the paragraphs that deal with Topic A in a pile (whatever Topic A was), all the Topic B paragraphs in another pile, and all the Topic C paragraphs in a third pile.

I will never forget the look in his eyes and the widening “O” his mouth made as he uttered he magic words: “Ohhh, I GET it now!  Thanks, Mr. B!”  He reorganized his paper that weekend and, if I remember correctly, received an A or B on the final draft.

Cliff’s Notes Version: Physical manipulatives can be great for getting kids (and teachers!) to grasp abstract concepts like writing or mathematics, and they can be found (or made) in the least likely places.