Last week, I started talking about ways to target our Speech-Language Impaired (SLI) or Specific Learning Disability (SLD) students who struggle to comprehend auditory language presented to them in their general education classes. These students are expected to take notes on what the teacher is saying and too often they resort to only copying what they see on the Powerpoint or on the board. Last week I went over the foundations for understanding what we're targeting when we look at auditory processing and critical listening skills in addition to some goals we might write for students that fit this profile.
This week, let's dive into the nitty gritty of therapy and how to target the development of these very important skills! Depending on the group's size, needs, and skill level, my lessons on critical listening have lasted anywhere from 2 - 4 weeks. For the purpose of the blog, I've broken the lessons down into 3 weekly sessions; however, as with everything, these lessons should be modified and extended/shortened depending on the level of the students!
~15 Minutes – IEP Accommodation Worksheet
1) Provide students with copies of their
accommodations page and an IEP Accommodation Worksheet
2) Work with your students to identify what
each accommodation means in plain language. Ask each student to select (or you
select if you know that they have certain accommodations for a specific class) a
class and complete the graphic organizer (maybe even laminate it, as I have
done for some students). Make sure you make a copy or take a picture of it
because some students may lose it and it will be used in future activities!
3) Explain to your students that they must
explain their graphic organizers and take ownership of their needs. They are in
high school now and they must advocate for what they need to be successful.
~10 Minutes – Practicing the IEP Accommodation Worksheet Script
1) Discuss what the most important information is on their worksheet. Is it their extended time on tests? Is it copies of notes? Prompt the students to come up with what is most important to them. Make a list of the most important accommodations in ranked order; I believe that students should focus on explaining their most pressing needs instead of trying to go through the entire worksheet with their teachers. Give a model for how you would explain a set of hypothetical accommodations.
2) Time to role play! You now take on the role of their classroom teacher - it helps to physically move away from the group and sit at your desk like their teachers would. Have them practice walking up to you, gaining your attention appropriately (a weakness for so many of my students!), waiting if necessary, and then explaining their key, most important accommodations. This is a a great opportunity to employ video modeling if students are struggling with this. It's also a good tool to go back and watch their explanation and identify areas of weakness.
3) Practice, practice, practice! Have each student take as many turns as time allows so they can get multiple opportunities at explaining their needs. Depending on the level of student need, I might take another week to review video models and gain more practice with this skill. We might even go on a field-trip to another classroom to try approaching a teacher who is on their prep period to practice.
Lesson 2: Let's Apply Critical Listening in the Classroom
~5 Minutes – The Bus Riddle
1) Provide students with paper and pens and
tell them to take notes without further guidance or prompting. Show the “Bus Riddle” and read it aloud or just read it if technology access is limited.
2) Elicit
answers to the riddle. Prompt as needed to elicit the correct answer.
3) Discuss
why coming to the correct answer was difficult and make connections to their
classroom note-taking expectations.
~5 Minutes – Accommodations
Tie-in
1) Have your students pull out their
Classroom Organization graphic organizers that were completed the week before.
Specifically highlight the “note-taking section” and ask your students to
identify if having a copy of the bus notes would have been helpful (or having a
scribe, etc). Discuss why actively utilizing their accommodations will help
them earn better grades. Also ask your students if any of them have tried to explain their accommodations to a teacher and reward those who have,
~5 Minutes – Teacher Signals
1) Generate a list of things that teachers do
to indicate that what they are saying is important, such as:
a. Saying
“This will be on the test!”
b.
Raising
their voice
c. Asking
questions of the students
d. Writing information on the board
2) At this point I solicit information from the class regarding which of their teachers they believe lectures instead of just reading off a PowerPoint. Sometimes the students are under the impression that their teachers don't really lecture (when I know for a fact from classroom observations that they do). It's often hard for our students to realize that the information that the teacher is providing verbally may not actually be what's on the slides!
~10 Minutes – Practice Lecture
1) By this point, I can tell that the students are only barely grasping this concept. Perhaps in theory they get it, but it reality... not so much. Time for a real world example! I pull up this PowerPoint that I found on-line that is a companion to a US History textbook. I ask my students to take notes like they do in class. There will be a quiz on this material next week, so take the best notes they can.
I skip down to slide #25 and begin to lecture on this slide as if I was their US History teacher. The information is fairly basic, but instead of merely reading off the slide, I provide real-world examples for each vocabulary word, and my own definitions. I talk about Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream Speech" - would it be a primary or secondary source? Is it authentic? Reliable? Biased? How would we know? What does interpreting evidence mean? I talk about crime scenes and detectives and how historians are, in a sense, detectives. Essentially what I'm doing is providing them with a wealth of information that is not provided on their slides - information that will be helpful when they take their "quiz" the following week. At the end, I collect their "notes" to ensure I have them for the next week.
Lesson 3: Critical Listening Wrap-Up
~5 minutes - Time for a Quiz!
1) I hand out the notes the students took on the history PowerPoint. For nearly all my students, these notes are just the PowerPoint they copied down while I was talking without any additional examples or commentary from what I spoke on. I put 7 minutes on my timer and then give them a "quiz" with these questions:
a) What is a primary source? (They can answer this one with the information from the ppt)
b) What is an example of a primary source? (They would have this answer in their notes if they were critically listening and documenting my examples during the lecture... but since they merely copied, many have struggled with this question)
d) How might historians be biased? (I gave them this answer in my lecture
but not the notes!)
~5 minutes - Quiz Discussion
1) Next, we discuss how it felt to take that quiz and we review the correct answers. Which questions could they answer easily? Which questions were harder? Which questions required rote memorization? Which questions required critical thinking? Were all the answers in the notes? If not, how could you have gotten that information (Answer: critical listening!). Have you felt this way on other tests before? What can be done differently to ensure more success in the classroom? This is also a time where you can discuss asking Closed and Open questions (if you've already talked about this concept) and how teachers might provide open question answers vs. closed question answers found in the notes. I also take this time to model how to generate questions that you think might be on a test based upon notes.
~10 minutes Model Notes
1) Now in order to help cement this process, the students have to practice. I return to the PowerPoint used previously and go on to slide 26. I lecture just as I did on slide 25, adding information, examples, and my own definitions to augment the information included on the slide. But this time, I assist the students in their note taking and model what key elements should be written down and how to structure it on a page to make it easy to follow for later review. This process alone may be extended into another session if I feel the students need even more practice.
~5 minutes - What next?
1) I ask all my students to select one class where the teacher lectures and make that their "focus" class. This class will be their test run in critical listening - can they focus on taking good notes while paying attention and documenting what the teacher is saying? A good choice for this focus class might be a class where they are given copies of the notes or where the notes can be accessed later on a teacher's website. In the future weeks, I check in with these students about how this focus class is going and whether or not their quiz/test grades have improved.
I hope this two-part series on addressing the need to develop critical listening skills has helped you to examine the goals of your students, develop some news lessons, and think critically about how as SLPs we can are in a great position to set them up for success in their academic classes (and in the future!).
As always, it doesn't
have to be fancy, just keep it fun and functional!
- Jillian,
the No-Frills SLP
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