Chapter 15 lays out many of the distinct difficulties that special needs students can have with writing. First, students with LD know less about the recursive nature of the writing process, less about the features of good writing, different genres, the role of audience and the purpose of writing. They may fail to plan and organize their writing and they make more spelling, capitalization and punctuation errors. Students with LD also struggle with revising more than students without special needs.
So, how do we focus instruction for special needs students in the mainstream classroom? The first step is proper assessment. Curriculum Based Assessment, short probes administered to the entire class weekly or biweekly, will help the teacher to identify students who are at risk or who are not progressing at the same rate and level as the class average, monitor each student’s progress, identify a student’s specific strengths and weaknesses and plan instructional changes accordingly.
Dynamic Assessment will measure how students respond to instruction. In this kind of assessment, the student is given an opportunity to rehearse what he or she plans to write and is prompted to make notes before writing; after composing a draft, the student is asked to identify problems and suggest changes. Measuring growth only in terms of what the child can do independently does not provide a full picture. Measuring what a child can do with mediation provides  an estimate of the child’s developing abilities and gives a better look at the child’s potential.
The elements of successful writing programs for special needs students don’t necessarily differ from those that succeed in improving the writing of any other student. The difference is that special needs students often require more practice to gain mastery. Successful elements include:
Direct Instruction. In comparison to peers without disabilities, students with special needs require more intense and more explicit instruction. Perhaps mini-lessons presented to selected groups within the classroom, while other groups work on other aspects of writing, would be a way to offer additional review to students with special needs.
Self-regulated strategy instruction. Self-regulation techniques are successful for all students, but students with disabilities often need more scaffolding. The PLAN and WRITE mnemonics help students remember strategy steps.
Pay attention to the prompt
List main ideas
Add supporting ideas
Number your ideas
Work from your plan to develop your thesis statement
Remember your goals
Include transition words for each paragraph
Try to use different kinds of sentences
Exciting, interesting, million-dollar words.
The author contends that these mnemonics garnered positive results for students with LD and for students at all levels.
Other techniques for improving writing in special needs students are connecting reading and writing instructions, leveraging technology and utilizing speech recognition software. For many special needs students, word processing can improve writing by removing the need to write by hand and copy revisions. Spell check can also improve spelling. But some additional challenges, such as the need to learn how to type effectively, can become additional burdens.
Speech recognition software can be a great help to special needs students as can dictation. This chapter provides the details of a study of high school students in which students with and without LD wrote a series of essays using handwriting, dictation to a person and dictation to a computer using speech recognition software. Although students without LD scored similarly using all three methods, students with LD scored higher using both forms of dictation. The highest scores were seen when dictating to another person. This method can be used to help measure content knowledge in certain special needs students.
These are all great ideas, but I have spent some time in an actual classroom as part of the field work requirement in ED 466 Methods, and differentiated instruction seems a great deal easier in theory. In real world classrooms it is often simply a matter of slowing the entire class down to a pace that meets the needs of the LD students. The teachers do not like it, but they often feel they have little choice, given their resources and time frames. I admit my experience is extremely limited, but what I have seen so far is cause for concern and dismay.
I strongly agree, that special needs students have distinct difficulties in learning how to write. Lee Ann poses an interesting question: “how do we focus instruction for special needs students in the mainstream classroom?” This chapter points out that children with special needs clearly differ from their more capable peers in terms of writing, and the chapter also addresses the teaching of writing to children with special needs through three forms of assessment: curriculum-based measurement, dynamic assessment, and informal assessment. The chapter also points out that we know more about how children and adolescents with learning disabilities (LD) fair in their writing development than any other group of students with special needs. This is important information to consider when thinking about how, as teachers, we will approach the teaching of writing to children with special needs. In light of this, Lee Ann asserts the point that, “The elements of successful writing programs for special needs students don’t necessarily differ from those that succeed in improving the writing of any other student. The difference is that special needs students often require more practice to gain mastery.” This is an optimistic view, and I respect it. But, without having any experience in this area, I would be more inclined to believe just the opposite–that the elements of successful writing programs for students with special needs would have to differ from writing programs geared towards mainstreamed students in order to meet the many different challenges that students with special needs face in learning how to write. As a teacher of writing, I will be more informed and prepared to tackle the elements involved in a writing program for students with special needs in helping students in this category to become more effective writers.
I think the term “more capable” as in “more capable peers” is exactly the problem. What makes a person more capable? More capable for what? What exactly is the purpose of educating special needs students? What is the purpose of educating students in general? Are we simply trying to bestow some pre-determined knowledge on them like some kind of magic spell? Are we ,as teachers, some kind of all-knowing beings who know which student is more capable than another? Who decides what kind of talents are most “capable?” We as a culture—as a country—have decided that every single student has a right to a public education. This is the law. What does that mean? I know “special needs” individuals who have a level of insight about life and a character that make me feel like a piece of meaningless dust. Do we want to separate these kids from their so-called “more capable peers” just because it makes our lives as teachers easier? What challenges are we really giving to our most gifted students when we surround them by nothing but other gifted students who are just like them? What about compassion? What about empathy? Isn’t there more to life than academic achievement? These are complicated questions, but I believe there is more to education than academic disciplines. There is ethics…call it morality is you will…but when you don’t agonize about the prospect of separating human beings from other human beings based on intellectually ability—or perceived intellectual ability—you have lost something essentially and beautifully human. I know inclusion makes life more complicated, but let’s face it…life is complicated. It always has been. It always will be. In the past we simple shut out those kids who made our lives more complicated because they couldn’t conform to what the majority considered normal. Now, we open ourselves up to those kids…and it’s really hard. And there are no easy answers. That’s life.
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