In the attempt to close the chapter on my Schools as Ecosystems blog and move into more thinking and writing on language and literacy, I posted two very long posts, on the influence of acoustics and greenery on learning, respectively, which once were slated to be part of a book that I just couldn’t scrounge the time together to complete. One of the chapters-to-be was on the importance of air quality in learning — and damn, how timely it would have been if I could have pulled that all together pre-COVID-19?!

While I most likely won’t ever write that book, I’d still like to highlight the critical importance of air quality in schools and learning, which has become all the more apparent during a time of a respiratory virus, but which is important at all times. And since I don’t have the time to write it all up in full, I’ll post links to the threads that I had laying about in a document instead, and let you, dear reader, complete the thoughts:

The Health Impacts of Air Pollution

• 92% of the world’s population lives in places where air quality levels exceed WHO limits
• Where a child lives and the air quality in that location can affect how a child’s brain develops
• Air pollution kills vast numbers across the globe each year: 5.5 million deaths worldwide, 800,000 premature deaths in Europe (with each life cut by an average of more than 2 years), while in the U.S., 200,000 are felled annually.
• Air pollution is linked to increased mental illness in children
• Care about social justice? Start caring about air pollution: The Racial Politics of Asthma

Roth and his team looked at students taking exams on different days – and also measured how much pollution was in the air on those given days. All other variables remained the same: The exams were taken by students of similar levels of education, in the same place, but over multiple days.

He found that the variation in average results were staggeringly different. The most polluted days correlated with the worst test scores. On days where the air quality was cleanest, students performed better.

To determine the long-term effects, Roth followed up to see what impact this had eight to 10 years later. Those who performed worst on the most polluted days were more likely to end up in a lower-ranked university and were also earning less, because the exam in question was so important for future education. —HOW AIR POLLUTION IS DOING MORE THAN KILLING US” BY MELISSA HOGENBOOM IN BBC FUTURE

The Impact of Indoor Air Quality on Learning

• EPA paper on air quality and student performance
• As Pollen Counts Rise, Test Scores Fall
• More Fresh Air in Classrooms Means Fewer Absences
• Healthier air quality (in the form of low CO2 levels) can double cognitive scores
• In a study of the effect of indoor air quality on chess tournament decision-making, “we find that an increase in fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) of ten micrograms per cubic meter (10 µg/m3), about three quarters of a standard deviation in the sample, leads to a 2.1 percentage point increase in the probability of making a meaningful error.”
• Indoor air quality in inner-city schools and its associations with building characteristics and environmental factors

When the level of fresh air in the classrooms was increased, the students performed up to seven per cent better than when they were working on the tests in their usual indoor climates. The study also revealed that the students did not themselves notice that they were not quite as astute in the poorer climate. —“BAD AIR QUALITY MAKES CHILDREN PERFORM WORSE IN SCHOOLS” BY JONAS SALOMONSEN IN SCIENCENORDIC

• Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits
• A long and really important investigation on the health impacts of air pollution on schools situated near busy roads by The Center for Public Integrity that has not gotten the attention it deserves. Read the entire thing. Read it again. And then reflect on the following:

Southern California’s air agency, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, earmarked settlements from polluting companies and other funds to cover the cost of such filtration at about 80 schools near freeways or other pollution sources. Nothing’s preventing other states from following the same model. “The technology is well established, the installation is straightforward and the maintenance is simple,” said district spokesman Sam Atwood, who doesn’t recall officials from other states getting in touch to learn from his agency’s experience. —“THE INVISIBLE HAZARD AFFLICTING THOUSANDS OF SCHOOLS” BY JAMIE SMITH HOPKINS FOR THE CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY

The Relationship of Air Pollution to COVID-19

• New Research Links Air Pollution to Higher Coronavirus Death Rates
• Installing HEPA filters to fight COVID-19
• Most scientists think it is very likely that air pollution increases the number and severity of Covid-19 cases

#ecosystems #schools #learning #airquality #pollution #environment #health

Discuss...

In another post, I wrote about the riches of Speech-Language Pathology and what this domain of research and practice has to offer for all educators.

I'd also like to highlight that relatedly, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and it's publications has a lot to offer to those of us getting into the Science of Reading.

Let me just give you a recent example: the “JSLHR Research Symposium Forum: Advances in Specific Language Impairment Research and Intervention” offers some really interesting and useful open access research. Here's some tidbits:

• There's a useful overview of dyslexia and DLD/SLI from Suzanne Adlof that stresses the need to screen and diagnose language for students who have demonstrated word reading problems because DLD and dyslexia often co-occur

“Considering the frequent comorbidity of dyslexia and SLI, all school-aged children who are identified with word reading problems should receive a thorough language evaluation.” —Suzanne Adlof

• Spaced retrieval practice has gotten a lot of attention from ResearchEd type folks over the last few years (as it should), and so this piece on its benefits to word learning for students with SLI will be further reaffirming.

• I found this one by Pamela Hadley on “Exploring Sentence Diversity at the Boundary of Typical and Impaired Language Abilities” especially useful, as while I am fully invested in explicit sentence-level instruction, I sometimes struggle to know exactly what to investigate and unpack in a sentence beyond the basics. In this paper, Hadley provides a neat way to think of linguistic development at the sentence-level:

”...as a series of four developmental steps: words, verbs, childlike sentences, and adult sentences.”

What she also highlights is how important verbs are as a developmental stage, given the complexity of the function of verbs in a sentence:

“Verbs carry information about the number of participants in an event and the semantic roles of those participants.”

And much more in there to think about!

#ASHA #speech #language #literacy #DLD #dyslexia #learning #children #multilingualism #research

When I was a special education teacher, I also coordinated the IEPs (Individualized Education Programs) for my school, and served as the district representative at our IEP meetings, meaning that I had some part in most of the IEPs written in my building, whether I coordinated the gathering of information or facilitated the meeting with parents.

We served some children identified with speech language impairment (SLI), and I worked pretty closely with the speech-language pathologist in my school in the sense that I always ensured that IEPs were written with her review and meaningful input, and she was invited to IEP meetings for the children she worked with. We talked when we could about the children we serviced, and I solicited her advice on many occasions.

Yet I don’t know if I ever fully understood what she really did in speech-language therapy sessions. She did her thing, and I did my thing as a co-teacher in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade ELA classrooms. We were both pretty busy.

As I’ve been learning much more about reading, literacy, and language, I’ve increasingly become drawn into the research and expertise of the speech-language pathology realm (SLP) (we do love our tripartite acronyms in ed, don’t we), and discovered a wealth of knowledge that I really wish I had understood more of when I was in the classroom and coordinating the development of IEPs.

Also, as I’ve been struggling to bridge what I’ve been learning about the “science of reading” with my newer focus on the interconnections between language development and literacy development, I’ve found SLPs to be an incredibly useful resource to building that bridge.

You see, if you know all about the Simple View of Reading framework (SVR), you then know that language comprehension at large, alongside of decoding and word-level recognition, is a huge component of reading ability—the one that is there from the beginning, but then takes on an outsized importance once fluency with decoding is achieved.

And Speech Language Pathology is all about the subcomponents of language comprehension, from explicit training in the articulation of speech sounds, to explicit intervention to target needed language skills, such as knowledge of story grammar, making inferences, or the talk moves that are needed to have discourse about a text.

It was only recently that I became aware of the term Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), and discovered that there’s a wealth of developing knowledge about DLD that could further inform our assessment, instruction, and intervention of children who need more intensive supports in any of those subcomponents of language.

If we refer back to the SVR, we can think of three main patterns of students who are having trouble learning to read: students who have difficulty with language comprehension, students who have difficulty decoding, or students have difficulty with both:

Students may have difficulty reading due to either language comprehension, decoding, or both.

Awareness of dyslexic patterns have grown quite a bit, to the point that legislation addressing it has arisen in multiple states. But awareness of patterns of DLD remains low in comparison.

It may seem strange that I present DLD and dyslexia as defining student profiles to guide overall education assessment and instruction — but as someone who comes from a SPED stance, I’ve always seen the way we typically think of instruction in schools as backward. As a cornerstone, we should center our focus on the students who may struggle with language and literacy the most and plan forward from there, rather than as an afterthought. We would then be able to improve outcomes for many more children who may not struggle as significantly, yet who also require more explicit support or more opportunities for practice. Instead, we design schools to center students who already have academic language and literacy skills in place, and we widen inequitable outcomes.

So with that in mind, speech-language pathology is an undervalued domain that has much to offer in considering the language needs of our students and what we need to do to screen, diagnose, and intervene to address those needs. Rather than relegating speech-language pathologists to the people who do that esoteric intervention thing in the room over there 3x a week with some children, we should be elevating their expertise and knowledge and seeking to disseminate that knowledge to general education teachers, most especially in earlier grades, so that we can seek to prevent language issues from arising.

I feel fortunate to have discovered many SLPs and researchers are active on social media and other venues beyond research papers, and though I hesitate to call any out by name because I know I will be missing way too many in any listing I give, just a few to get you started in your own journey of learning on language:

• Tiffany Hogan: check out her co-authored paper with Suzanne Adlof on the intersections of dyslexia and DLD, and she has a podcast! A great list of ones on DLD related issues here
• Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan is a bilingual SLP who brings a structured literacy lens to supporting English learners with foundational skills in reading and writing, in ways that honor and leverage their home language. Check out her book and her website. Her paper on Cross-Language Connections for ELs is a solid resource I keep coming back to.
• Trina Spencer: one of the co-authors of the CUBED assessments, which is now one of my go-to recommendations for a screener/diagnostic for foundational skills related to listening comprehension. If you’re wondering what SLP might be able to offer in our teaching of narratives, check out her co-authored paper on narrative interventions. Also check out her website with a ton of resources for instruction and intervention.
• Elizabeth D. Peña and Habla Lab: understanding the intersections of bilingual and multilingualism with DLD is a critical area of need. Check out the blog (NOTE: it may not be updated anymore). I learned a lot about the concept of “dynamic assessment” from them.
• Julie Washington: leading the charge to bring explicit attention to African American English and how the use of the vernacular relates to literacy development and instructional opportunity. Check out the article on her in The Atantic and her co-authored paper with Mark Seidenberg on teaching reading to African American children in American Educator
• Cate Crowley: she leads the LEADERSproject at Columbia — lots of resources are on hand regarding evaluation and intervention for culturally and linguistically diverse children. I am a big fan of the freely available SLAM cards she has made available for language sampling and have been testing these out with some of my own sampling methods — but you can go right ahead and leverage the already made SLAM Guidelines for Analysis for each SLAM card
• Lisa Archibald: Dr. Archibald goes deep into cognition and memory and their intersections with language. Whenever I've put out some questions into the Twitterverse (before Musk trashed it), she has offered guidance and food for thought.

There’s so many more SLPs out there to list here, so please view just view this as a place to get started if you're interested in these topics …

Dig in! Speech-language pathology has a lot to offer those of us who are just beginning on our journeys to understanding language and literacy.

#SLPs #speech #language #literacy #DLD #bidialectalism #multilingualism #learning #research #SVR

Well, so now–if you are one of the 4 people that has happened to read the earlier blogs–you are probably muttering unto yourself, “Manderson, what in the hell are you talking about? A school as an ecosystem doesn’t really make any much more sense than foundational systems of interconnectivity! Come off it already!”

But I feel I must persist, regardless, as this is one of the few avenues I have in which to ponder semi-abstract thoughts in regards to the systems in which I am currently embedded as a public school teacher. Let’s be honest: not many teachers in my school would care to sit down over whiskey and discuss the public school system as a whole, unless it accounts for a preponderance of venting and complaining. So I continue brazenly–or perhaps snoozingly–on the aforementioned topic: school culture.

School Culture

In my last job in retail management, our company would talk about the “intangibles” in leadership training sessions. What they were referring to were things such as how a customer feels when they leave a store, the interactions that were had through conversations between customers and staff, and the overall sense of happiness or adventure that a customer might feel in the store. Another way of stating the idea of intangibles when we are discussing business is “anything that you can’t gauge by a dollar sign.” But the fact is, that company is extremely savvy because they explicitly recognized that their bottom line would be enhanced by paying attention to things that might not be immediately quantifiable. And believe me, that company is doing pretty darn good when it comes to their bottom line. Because they pay attention to something that many businesses (and as I will now begin to examine–schools) do not take into consideration: the culture of their everyday business.

Similarly, in schools across the nation, children and adults every day enter buildings where they may succumb to a sense of drudgery, fear, paranoia, and even just plain chaos. The reasons for this reality are myriad, but one of the things you will hear frequently referred to when you talk about problems in education is the whole test-taking and accountability thing. You’ll hear horror stories from teachers about having to “teach to the test”. In public education, the tests are to schools what the bottom line is to a business. All decisions are made based on the tests, more or less. Such is the nature of things, currently. I’m a centrist on such matters, and believe that at some point you have to measure something.

But as the teachers and their unions oft so angrily point out, there is much more to teaching and to students than what shows up on a singular data point from a test. And one could argue that what does show up on a test has as much to do with factors that are contextual, not merely a matter of an individual teacher nor an individual student. Just as the company I mentioned previously enhanced their bottom line and profited from addressing “intangibles” directly, so too could a school raise the test scores of their students if they spent more attention to factors within the school that have nothing to do directly with the test.

Now let’s be careful here. We all know that there are things going on in students’ lives that may affect their academic performance that are beyond the purview of any school. But what we’re talking about here are the intangibles that are under a school’s control.

We’re talking about the feeling that you get before you even walk in the front door. And we’re not just talking about the signs, the display cases, the bulletin boards, the colors–-although all of those things factor into it. We’re not just talking about whether the school follows some program of anti-bullying or anti-drugs or a social skills or life skills program.

We’re talking about how students talk to each other. How adults talk to each other. How adults talk to students.

The everyday interactions, relationships, and rituals that foster and nurture a community. These are things that are perhaps largely intangible and not easily quantified (unless one is trained to quantify such things), but certainly worth investing attention and care in.

I would be willing to place a bet that if research were conducted that attempted to quantify the presence of a school culture, they would discover that school culture correlates highly with student performance on tests. In other words, they would find that something so fuzzy as how happy or accepted students and adults feel overall would result in stronger performance on state tests. It would also most likely correlate with greater retention of effective teachers.

#relationships #ecosystems #schools #schoolculture #interconnectivity #environment #learning