Higher-Level Language: Developing Critical Listening and Self-Advocacy Skills Part 2

Welcome back everyone! If you haven't checked out last week's blog, please do so before reading this post! You can find it here.

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!

Lesson 1: What is Self-Advocacy?

    ~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)

                 c) What does it mean to be biased? (Another answer found in the notes)

                 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

Social Thinking: Video Modeling With Adolescents

Ahh, don’t you just love working with our social thinking students? You know the ones...
- The student whose conversation topics consist of silverfish and skeletons,
- The constant “blurter” who insists he’s always right,
- The girl who constantly picks at her ear and then smells her ear wax for sensory feedback,
- The kid who will stare at you for five minutes before realizing you’ve been waiting for him to ask “How was your weekend?” back to you,
- The 14-year-old who crawls under his desk when he’s bored.

These students often provide us with the best stories to share after work because they’re just such unique individuals! But as therapists, we don't seek to remove or kill that individuality; rather we want give them some skills that they can use to navigate the real world and understand how they can be more successful when interacting with peers, teachers, and adults. But, that's easier said than done, of course! In this blog, I'm going to highlight one strategy I have used with social thinking groups, but please comment what strategies you have used that work for your students!

Sally, Please Don’t Smell Your Ear Wax

Back during my internship in a middle school, I began working with the first 3 students I described above. Once a week, they’d come somewhat hesitantly: either they believed they had no problems and did not belong in my social thinking group or they were so acutely aware of their “weird” status that talking about it made them uncomfortable. A typical session consisted of the group (attempting) to discuss a social thinking worksheet while…

• The silverfish student insisted on discussing silverfish while he drew skeletons in the margins of the worksheet.
• The lone girl in the group quickly pointed out the others’ “weird behaviors” but failed to recognize that smelling her ear wax is a prime example of oddity and social faux pas.

• The “blurter” interrupted everyone, all the time, to make a “more intellectual” comment and remind the group of why he didn't need to be there.

I quickly realized that these students were PROS at picking out the “weird” behavior in others. Identifying strange behaviors in a Mr. Bean video? Nailed it. Recognizing that Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory is being self-centered and not thinking of others? No problem! How could these students be so observant when watching other people but be totally incapable of identifying their own unexpected behaviors? I decided that the strategy of video modeling had to be attempted to incorporate real-life examples.

Ms. Hall, Are You Going to Put Us On YouTube?

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with premise of video modeling, I'm not going to go in-depth with the concept of video modeling here, because that could easily cover several posts! If the concept is new to you, I highly encourage you to make a free account with Autism Internet Modules and check out their module on video modeling (as well as all their other great modules!).

As an aside, you should double-check with your school about their policy on recording students before you engage in video modeling. At the 4 schools I've worked at in two different districts, all required parents to sign a release stating that they consent to photos and videos of their students being taken for "school purposes." I don't think you should have an issue with video modeling at most public schools, especially since you will be deleting the video after watching it with the students!

So, here’s what happened with my group when we tried video modeling...

I had only an iPad at my discretion to use as a recording device, so I set it up discreetly on a back table in a manner that would still record all three students. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked. I called for my students to come from their classes and hit record. We carried out a typical session and, as usual, each of the students engaged in some pretty unexpected behaviors.

For the next session, we watched the video I had recorded in secret the week before. I knew ahead of time that watching and discussing the video alone would not be enough - inevitably we'd get off track and it would turn into a session of each student trying to label the others as "weirder." In order to create structure for the session and access information through multiple modalities, I decided that I needed to develop a worksheet that each student could complete as the group worked through watching the video. 

You can find that worksheet available for a free download here at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

 

 I found the session to be fairly impactful. Although the students were already aware that they engaged in unexpected behaviors once in awhile, watching how frequently they did something unexpected on the video seemed to really surprise them. For example, the female student who smelled her ear wax has no clue how frequently she engaged in the behavior. While completing her worksheet, she came to the conclusion on her own that she needed to rely more on her scented erasers to meet her sensory needs. She had been trying to phase out using her scented erasers because she was "too old for that now;" but upon realizing that her ear wax smelling habit was far more unexpected, she conceded that the scented erasers weren't actually so bad!

For the student who couldn't help but blurt, we kept a tally of every time he cut off another person from speaking and we analyzed the facial expressions and body language of those he had cut off. While not entirely convinced that his blurting had been unexpected, he did identify on his worksheet that it was clear that his blurting hurt others and made them feel unimportant. With some subtle suggestions, he decided that his replacement behavior would be to write down what he wanted to say on a piece of paper and at the end of the session he could state one thing that he had been unable to say during the session.

Overall, the students seemed to enjoy watching themselves and realizing just what they looked like when engaging in unexpected behaviors. I did have to very firmly steer the conversation away from comments like "But he's weirder," so be ready to jump in and have a firm hand to guide the conversation. We ideally want students to come up with their own solutions, but the amount of cueing and conversational steering needed will definitely vary from student to student.

Finally, don't forget to delete your video as soon as you watch it with the students! Discretion with recorded materials is always best - you don't want to accidentally upload your students onto a cloud service! 

I hope this explanation of how I have used video modeling has been helpful. There are lots of ways to incorporate video modeling into your sessions (e.g. with fluency students to demonstrate hard stuttering versus easy stuttering), so get creative and let me know how it goes in the comments!

As always, it doesn't have to be fancy, just keep it fun and functional!

• Jillian, the No-Frills SLP

Higher-Level Language: Asking Open and Closed Questions

How many of you have inherited those Speech-Language Impairment (SLI) students who are really “language only” students? They may be in a Mild/Mod or RSP program, or perhaps they’re just a lower-performing general education student. In elementary and middle school, their therapists probably drilled grammar, gave them opportunities to practice using more complex expressive language, and hammered story grammar structure.

Then, they reach high school, and you watch the real-life consequences as they receive Fs in their ELA, history, science and math classes. You call them in for their weekly sessions (because you haven’t yet had an IEP to reduce their hours!) and you wonder what on earth you’re going to target. Maybe they have a main idea goal, maybe they have an expressive grammar goal, who knows. What you do know is that this student has no study skills and is going to flunk all of 9th grade if you don't so something. What can you do to target their academic skills while still operating within a language framework?

Metacognitive Processes! What? Why?

In my opinion, one of the best ways we can help students who fit this profile is by being a teacher of “how to think about your thinking” (or in technical terms, “metacognitive skills,”). There are lots of reasons to teach metacognitive skills - the biggest one in my book being that our students don’t naturally learn these skills in the way neurotypical students naturally pick up on them. But our higher-level students certainly have the ability to use metacognitive skills when explicitly taught. And who else will teach them these skills but us? It’s certainly not something I’ve seen tackled in my school’s freshman curriculum.

One metacognitive process I like to start with it the concept of “asking yourself questions.” You probably do it all the time often without noticing. People who are “good at learning” ask themselves things like, “What did I just read?,” “Do I agree with that?,” “Why is this important?,” and “Why should I trust this author?”  

But did you notice something? Were any of those questions “closed questions?” As in, could they be answered with a short, factual statement? No, good learners with high language skills tend to ask themselves “open questions” - questions that require a decent amount of thinking and language in order to answer correctly. And in asking open questions, our comprehension of the material is confirmed, our misunderstandings are brought to light, and new interpretations of the material takes place.

When we teach students the difference between open and closed questions, they are learning the cognitive skill of thinking about their own thinking. They are forced to think, “Am I asking comprehension questions?,” (Probably not).  “If I am, am I asking basic closed questions or am I stretching myself and asking open questions that require me to come up with a more complex, deep answer?” We want them to go through this process in order to better engage with the material they are reading or listening to!!

When all is said and done, I wish every student at my entire high school could be given this lesson. The importance of understanding your own thinking cannot be understated at this age in development!

So… How do I Teach The Open/Closed Question Strategy?

I was first introduced to this metacognitive skill when I read Claudia Dunaway’s fabulous book “Think and Speak Successfully.” Sometime in the future, I’ll write a blog post on my favorite mass-produced products (hint: there aren’t many) and Claudia’s book will be at the top of my list. It’s a must-have for any SLPs that work with adolescents with higher-level language processing deficits. I won’t go into the specifics of her strategy here, but I did create a tool to augment the teaching of this concept.

This tool functions like a flowchart. At the top, it helps students identify what kinds of question they’re asking based on the language they’re using. As the flow chart moves down, it helps remind them why practicing each type of question is most effective in a certain situation (e.g. answering a multiple-choice test or a free response).

Over several sessions, we then practice applying this flowchart and the principles to real life examples in several situations. I typically provide the students with a short article and we discuss how we would approach one of the following scenarios in regards to what we’ve just read:

• Preparing for a multiple-choice exam (i.e. practice asking closed questions to double-check that you know the answers!)
• Preparing for free response essay questions (i.e. practice asking open questions to make sure that you can interpret the material correctly)
• Preparing to complete book reports, essays, and other writing assignments (i.e. practice asking open questions to make sure that you can interpret the material correctly)
• Participating in classroom-based academic conversations where students are expected to ask each other questions about a topic

You can download this tool here at my TPT Store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Metacognitive-Language-Strategy-OpenClosed-Question-Flowchart-2544952

What About Carryover?

Carryover with metacognitive strategies is tough. You can’t follow the student around to all their classes to ensure that in class they are engaging in asking themselves open questions, after all! I have distributed copies of this flowchart to some of my general education ELA teachers in order for them to make copies available to students when they are engaging in academic conversations. It would also be possible to shrink down the flowchart in order to make a small copy that could be affixed to a student’s planner, journal, binder, etc. In the end, what we want is for our students to use this strategy as often as possible so it becomes like second nature!

If you have any ideas on how to ensure that your students actually use this strategy in the “real world,” I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

As always, it doesn't have to be fancy, just keep it fun and functional!

• Jillian, the No-Frills SLP