Marisha

Wow. I cannot believe we are already wrapping up this month of curriculum-based therapy content. It's been really fun to dive into all of the things. This is definitely not the last time we'll talk about curriculum-based therapy and how we can use it with literacy-based therapy and all of that good stuff. Like I've been saying throughout all of these episodes, this is something that I think is incredibly important and I'm consistently trying to learn more and grow more in this area when it comes to like least restrictive environment, providing services in the classroom, alternative service delivery models. There is so much to dive into, but it's been a journey for me and I'm sure you're on a journey too. So I think it's still helpful to share, in of where I am at this point. And I'll continue to share what I'm learning and we have some exciting stuff coming up.
So it won't just be my perspective. So super, super excited about all of that. But this week we are working with some secondary students and the sample goals that I pulled for this group are, identifying facts versus opinions, identifying the main idea and key details, summarizing and producing sentences with three or more clauses, and then determining the meaning of words using affixes. So lots of good stuff here. And the curriculum-based activity that I chose to support was writing a persuasive essay. So this is something that I know I had to do as a freshman in high school. And it continued on throughout high school. And I remember doing all of these activities where we had to identify what was a fact and what was an opinion. I had ... I remember my sophomore year, one of my English teachers completely tore apart my essay and made me highlight all the parts.
So I've had a lot of practice with this and I've seen students work on this as well. So I thought it would be a really nice way, and I've done this with like one group in particular comes to mind. They had to write an essay and when they're writing these essays, they have to pull a lot of different texts to support their arguments. And a lot of our students have a hard time breaking down the texts, which makes writing the essay feel nearly impossible. So for this example, they, the students had to write an essay, a persuasive essay, and they got to pick the topic. So for this hypothetical group, they're writing an essay about whether college athletes should be paid and there are some really cool sites out there. One example is ProCon and so that's the example that I'm using today. So there's an article called, Paying College Athletes – Top 3 Pros and Cons.
And so that'll give us a really, it'll just be, like I'm not teaching the students how to write the persuasive essay, but I'm helping them. I'm implementing literacy-based therapy and giving them the strategies that they need while supporting their speech and language goals so that they can learn how to break apart the article, identify the information that they need, and then that'll get them closer to being able to write that essay. And just given our limited time with the students, this is just one example. And then I would try and coordinate with the other teachers and everything to make sure that all of the aspects are being covered. But I think this is where I felt like I was uniquely skilled and able to really support students. And it ended up working out really well with their goals. So, that's just how I decided to approach this.
So, diving into Ukranatist literacy-based therapy framework. If you want to follow along and jot down any notes or ideas, or if you want to start kind of planning your own unit, using this as some inspiration, you can head to slpnow.com/planner. But for step one, we can take an article walk in that we look at the article, we look at the title, we look at the picture, we look at the headings to get an idea of what it'll be about. And typically like with these persuasive essay topics, the students pick something that they are familiar with and that they already have an opinion on.
So hopefully we don't need to do a bunch of pre-story knowledge activation activities, but I think a KWL chart would be super interesting because the students likely know a lot about the topic, because they are likely very excited about sports and college sports and maybe they want to be a college athlete. Maybe they have an older sibling, who knows. So, they probably have a lot that they know, and they likely, because they know a lot, they probably have a lot of questions about the topic too, so we can fill in that KWL chart. And then as we read through the article, we can add in additional things that we've learned.
So I think that's a really great way to work through that. And then for step two, we'll just read through the article. And again, just my main goal is to make sure that students are engaged in attending to the article. And then for step three, we'll do some comprehension. So, because the students that I ... like in the hypothetical group don't have explicit comprehension goals. I assume that this is a relative strength for them. So I would just go through some literal and inferential questions to make sure that they're comprehending the text, but we would probably pretty quickly jump into summarizing.
So we would identify ... we would use the same strategies that we talked about last week and then also last month to help them summarize the text. And so we would identify who, where, what it's about and what's most important. And then we would identify the key details. This is also a great opportunity, because I feel like summarizing helps us move from step three to step four. So typically we would start filling in the summarizing graphic organizer and then we would transition to step four and we would do some practice. Maybe because the students are working on clauses, we would do some teaching of that, do some structured practice and then move into some like expanding sentences drill. And then we could use that to expand our summary, potentially, or just have some discussion around the article and practice expanding our sentences in that discussion. We could also do some teaching around fact versus opinion.
And if students are still struggling with that, we can back things up and take some very personal facts and opinions related to the group and do some practice there. And they could even play a little game like, is it fact or opinion, and they can make a statement and then the other members in the group have to determine whether that's a fact or an opinion, and they have to tell why. We could use a visual to support that, all of that good stuff. And then yeah. So, and then we would work through, once they get a good grasp of that, we can work on identifying the facts and opinions in the article. And this is a really important skill if they're being required to write a persuasive essay. A lot ... when I had to write them and when I've worked with students, they typically require them to like state an opinion and then support that with evidence.
So state their opinion and then list different facts. And if they have a really hard time differentiating, what's a fact versus an opinion. That is a very, very challenging exercise. And I found that taking some time to break that down makes that task much easier for our students. And then we would kind of continue working on their summary. And if they have the graphic organizer, they could pretty easily use that when it comes to writing their paper, I could give them ... if we don't have time to go through all of their articles, I could give them the graphic organizer and teach them how to do it. Maybe they could fill that in for homework and then they could use that. They could bring that to, like if they are working with a special education teacher, or whatnot, we could collaborate to make sure that they're continuing to use those strategies as they work through and start putting together their final persuasive essay.
So those are just some activity ideas to break that down. And I hope this is a helpful example, because our goal is not to complete the assignment. Just because I'm helping the ELA teacher and supporting that with the use of the persuasive essay, I'm not teaching them how to write a persuasive essay. I'm supporting the language underpinnings that they need to do that successfully. So I'm still very much staying in the speech and language zone and using my unique skills and perspective to set students up for success. And ultimately the goal is to have the students be independent with these underpinnings so that they have the tools and skills that they need to do this on their own. So, that's what that would look like. Hopefully that gives you lots of ideas and inspiration. I would absolutely love to see how you're applying this, where, what your journey is like with the framework. And yeah, I think that's a wrap. We'll see you next time.

I have a group of sixth graders, hypothetically, who are working on answering questions, defining multiple meaning words, and summarizing texts. And we're continuing to follow the curriculum-based therapy theme and using content from the curriculum, or just chatting about ways to be more curriculum-based using a literacy-based therapy framework.
And I absolutely love the literacy-based therapy framework because it makes it really easy to implement contextualized intervention in a very meaningful way. And once we get the hang of the strategies, it's really easy to find ways to connect to the curriculum because it is so contextualized. It makes it really easy to pull pretty much any texts from the classroom and provide support in or outside of the classroom. I will admit that I have a little bit of experience providing intervention in the classroom, so a lot of the examples that I've been giving this month include work kind of outside of the classroom, and that's definitely something that I'm challenging myself with to figure out ways to work a little bit smarter there.
But this is my step in the journey of implementing, just connecting with the curriculum, collaborating with teachers, and pulling meaningful content, and then also sharing strategies and doing some lessons here and there. But I've been seeing some really, really cool articles about complete interventions in the classroom. That's something we're diving into and we'll have more content on soon. But this, I thought, it would still be helpful to share my journey and my progression towards curriculum-based therapy and the LRE and all of that.
For this particular group of students, they were doing a reading A to Z article in the classroom, and it was called Seeing the Evidence: Forensic Scientists at Work. Such a cool text. It was so much fun. I'm really excited to dive into this. And then if you want to follow along, and if you have a group that might be learning about forensic science in the classroom, or if you're wanting to use another text for a group of students using similar strategies, then head to SLPnow.com/planner, and you'll get a free copy of my one-page planner, so you can fill in your own text and goals as we go along. And hopefully these ideas will give you some strategies.
The forensic science article is an expository text. It's not story grammar, which is what I typically use with my younger students. And I find that a lot of times students still benefit from... They don't quite have a strong grasp of narratives in the very beginning, but this particular group of students was... it made sense to dive into the expository text at this point.
Yeah, so this gives us an opportunity to really focus in on summarizing and finding the main idea. And again, there's external evidence to support this as a strategy to improve comprehension. And last month we talked about a variety of strategies to work on summarizing and identifying the main idea. It was in the secondary episode. So, it was the fourth episode posted, but that will give you some... If you're wanting a refresher on some of those ideas, I'd really recommend checking out that episode. But it's basically just giving the students different self-monitoring tools, providing explicit instruction as always, and some scaffolding strategies.
Then, in terms of what we're actually going to do, I'll pull up my planner now, too. And then just to recap, we're using the article Forensic Scientists at Work. This is from reading A to Z. It is a paid subscription, but the goal of this is to use something from the classroom. So, if your teacher is using a Reading A to Z article, or you could apply this to any texts that they're using in the classroom. And the goals were targeting or answering questions, multiple meaning words, and summarizing.
For step one, our pre-story knowledge, we'd start off with an article walk and I would likely pull out a KWL chart as well. So, what they know about the topic already, what they want to know, and then later on, we can fill in what they learned.
With one particular group that I'm thinking about, they didn't have any background knowledge about forensic science, and it seemed like vocabulary was the biggest barrier for them. So, I did some pre-teaching where we identified some of the most important words, and we broke them down and we did a variety of activities. And if I'm being honest, when I used this text, I wasn't as familiar with the framework, and I actually just dove into reading the article. I completely skipped step one. Then we started doing story comprehension, and they weren't able to answer any of the questions.
So, that made me pause, and I realized that I actually needed to do the pre-teaching. I've definitely had my own literacy-based therapy and curriculum-based therapy fails. So, hopefully these podcasts episodes can help you learn from my mistakes. But I definitely had some internal evidence there that what I was doing was not working. That's why I'm super grateful for this framework, because I see my students making much more progress. And of course, that's just my internal evidence, but we also have... I do my best to share the external evidence, like data from the research that supports the use of these various approaches as well.
Back to the plan. We just did some pre-teaching of the vocabulary targets. They've got a good idea, a good grasp on what a victim and a suspect and all of that. And we've used our different vocabulary strategies to work on that. And then the next step we would dive into is shared reading. We would read through the text, and I keep this pretty simple. We just read through and make sure that students are staying engaged, but I don't do a lot beyond that. Like I said, I keep it pretty simple.
And that leads us to step three, where we dive into the story comprehension. This particular group was working on literal and inferential questions. So, I just started with the literal questions, and we did some comprehension there. That went well, which was exciting, so we continue to work on inferential questions. And then we started diving into summarizing as well, because that was one of their goals.
We used the strategies that I mentioned in the last episode from the Stevens et al. Articles, just different ways to scaffold. And some of the highlights were identifying sections of the text and then asking, "Who or what is the section about?" And then, "What is the most important idea about the who or what?" And then I would scaffold and support to students to write the gist.
Another way to do that is just make it shorter. Express it in a shorter form. If they struggle with that, we can, again, refer back to the text, or if we've done teaching of text structure, we can have them look at the text structure. And then of course, I want to make sure that I actually taught them how to do that, initially. So, sometimes I just dive into those strategies, but it's also really important to give them some explicit instruction before we expect them to start summarizing.
So, some ways to do that are to provide models of generating a summary. Maybe I would identify the main idea and just have a small section, and I would kind of talk through asking myself those questions. And then I would just kind of model my thinking out loud. Then I would give that students opportunities to practice and give them very specific feedback. Like, "Oh, I loved how you asked yourself the question about who or what is this section about. You did a great job identifying that, but you forgot to ask yourself what's the most important idea?" Or, "You just copied the text. Can you tell it in your own words? Write the gist. Make it in a shortened form, whatever makes the most sense." Hopefully those are some helpful examples in how to navigate that when it comes to summarizing.
And then we're at step four now. In this unit, we've already gotten to work on answering questions and summarizing and multiple meaning words, so we would just continue those in step four. I would take additional time to teach, as needed. I would have the students work on a vocabulary journal, and then this would be an opportunity to work on the other language skills as well. So, if they're working on answering questions, we can fill in the vocabulary journal, have discussion around that.
That benefits all of the students. It gives the students who have vocabulary goals, an opportunity to get more meaningful exposures. And it gives the students who are working on questions, also a meaningful... an opportunity to get more meaningful practice with those questions. And so, it just is a win-win all around. As long as we're choosing language, rich activities, we are golden and we can provide really amazing therapy.
Then I would also take some time to continue refining the students' summary. After we work on the comprehension and the vocabulary, we would revisit that summary and see if we can incorporate some of that vocabulary, and practice generating that summary. And that would give them, again, more meaningful opportunities to use their vocabulary in a meaningful context, all of that good stuff.
And then, step five of the framework is a parallel story. This is a little bit different if we're using a non-fiction text. I might have the students, maybe if we still need to work on narratives, if that's still one of the goals, they can make up a story and generate a story related to forensic science, or they can convince... Maybe they decide they want to become a forensic scientist. So, they write a persuasive, like a mini-persuasive essay about why they should be admitted to the forensic science program, or why it's important for us to have forensic scientists that can...
There's different ways to get creative and give students additional opportunities to use their target structures to embed their goals in meaningful contexts. Those are just some ideas. Hopefully that was a helpful framework. And then, next week we are diving into a curriculum-based therapy activity for our secondary students.