How do teachers meet the academic needs of youth in juvenile corrections settings?
Page 8: Incorporate Additional Instructional Practices
A number of EBPs have been shown to be effective in teaching average students, struggling students, and students with disabilities in public schools. Although no research has been done to validate these practices in a JC setting, experts hypothesize that these strategies are likely to also prove effective in those settings. Some of these practices are briefly described in the subsequent sections.
Scaffolding
Instructional scaffolding is a process through which a teacher adds supports for students in order to enhance learning and aid in the mastery of tasks. The teacher does this by systematically building on students’ experiences and knowledge as they are learning new skills. Just like a scaffold used to construct buildings, these supports are temporary and adjustable. As students master the assigned tasks, the supports are gradually removed. For example, when teaching a new strategy, the teacher can use the scaffolding technique below.
Study Skills Instruction
Students with learning difficulties, particularly those with LD and ADHD, often do not approach academic tasks in a planful, strategic manner. They might lack knowledge of an appropriate strategy, or they might make use of inappropriate or ineffective ones. Whatever the case, the result is that they often perform poorly on academic tasks or fail to complete them in a timely manner, if at all. Therefore, these students need to be explicitly taught how to strategically approach academic tasks in order to gain and use information effectively. In other words, they need to be taught effective study strategies, often referred to as study skills. The table below lists several study skills strategies that can help students be more successful in the classroom.
| Activities Related to Learning | Study Skills Strategies |
| Processing information |
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| Retaining and recalling information |
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| Organizing materials and managing time |
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| Selecting, monitoring, and using strategies |
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Reading Instruction in the Content Areas
Successful performance in subject areas depends on strong reading skills. As you learned earlier, many students in JC settings read far below grade level. Many of those who can read still have difficulty with the types of complex text found in content-area materials. Therefore, the majority of students in JC settings would benefit from explicit content-area reading instruction. Teachers can integrate reading instruction into content instruction by using the specific vocabulary and comprehension strategies and described in the table below.
| Vocabulary | Comprehension |
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Providing effective vocabulary instruction by:
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Improving students’ comprehension skills by explicitly teaching strategies to help them:
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In the video below, educational consultant Anita Archer demonstrates how to explicitly define and contextualize a vocabulary word (time: 4:23).
Transcript: Demonstrating Teacher-Led Vocabulary Instruction
Teacher: Some of them, we’re going to go over the meanings because they are in our part. And the first word here is what, everyone?
Class and teacher: Elude.
Teacher: Don’t write anything down. Pencils down, and read the definition and…go
Class and teacher: If you elude someone, you avoid them or escape from them.
Teacher: So if you elude someone, you avoid them or escape from them. Read the first example sentence and…go
Class and teacher: The runaway slaves eluded the patrollers who were hunting them.
Teacher: Okay, and so they might hide somewhere, go into a barn, go into the woods, go into the back of a cart, but they want to avoid those patrollers that are hunting them down. They eluded them. Read the next example.
Class and teacher: The convict…
Teacher: Uh-oh, teacher mistake. Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard a teacher make a mistake. Isn’t it pathetic? So let’s go back and try it again. Go.
Class and teacher: The convict eluded the police for ten years.
Teacher: So the convict hid out, stayed away from the police, never was identified by the police. Eluded the what, everyone?
Class and teacher: Police.
Teacher: Last example. Go.
Class and teacher: When playing hide and seek, Jose eluded all of the other players.
Teacher: So was Jose found? Yes or no?
Class: No.
Teacher: Because to elude is to avoid or escape them. Get ready to tell me if you would elude. So you are coming to this school, and you don’t want anybody to notice you, and so you sort of walk down the halls and when people come you go down another hall. Did he elude people? Yes or no, everyone?
Class: Yes.
Teacher: Yes, okay. So he’s walking down the hall, and he waves to people. Hi, how you doing, Jose? Hi, Maria. Did he elude people? Yes or no?
Class: No.
Teacher: No. So the principal has called you to the office. I don’t want to go see the principal. I think I’ll go to the boys’ room. Did he elude the principal? Yes or no?
Class: Yes.
Teacher: And then the principal comes into the bathroom and says… Did he elude the principal at that moment, yes or no?
Class: No
Teacher: No. Okay and so elude. So this you can see how it might have a part of this story. And, two’s, I want you to tell your partner your best guess about how the word elude might be used in the story about Harriett Tubman, a slave in a slave state. So tell your partner how the word elude might be used in the story we’re going to read.
Student: Elude might be used in the story when Harriett Tubman eludes the guards and the slavery.
Teacher: Yes, so the people that want to take her back into slavery, she might try to elude them.
Student: How they had…how she helped people escape.
Teacher: Oh, so it could be used that way. Excellent! Okay, fall silent. So here’s what I heard. First, when she’s trying to escape, and the patrollers are after her with their hound dogs, she might try to what, everyone?
Class and teacher: Elude them.
Teacher: And then you’re talking about later in her life when she became a part of the Underground Railroad. She might help other people what?
Class and teacher: Elude.
Teacher: The people that were looking for them. So I say to myself, in my vocabulary book, I’m going to record this word, which is a what, everyone? A…
Class and teacher: A verb.
Teacher: And I don’t have to copy this. I want to put it in my own words and make it shorter. So I might write down something like elude, and then I’m going to indent under it and maybe say, you know, avoid others. Okay, that is one of the meanings of elude. So in your book you’re going to write down the vocabulary term and then in your own words the definition. When you’ve done that, put your pencil down. I’ll be looking at your vocabulary logs. Go.
For Your Information
Many youth in JC settings have low levels of literacy. In addition to providing reading instruction in the content areas, it is critical that teachers incorporate individual or small-group explicit instruction of reading skills for these youth.
Mathematics Instruction
Two major objectives of high-quality mathematics instruction are to move away from primarily teaching computational procedures and to move toward helping students achieve a deeper understanding of mathematic concepts. A related objective is to assist students in making connections between mathematical concepts. Teachers can implement, either independently or in combination, a number of classroom practices designed to increase their students’ mathematical understanding. For example:
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- Using manipulatives—concrete objects that represent a mathematical idea—to help students make the connection between the concrete object and the abstract concept being taught
- Using assessment data (e.g., formative assessment, error analysis) to guide instruction
x
error analysis
The process by which instructors identify the types of errors made by students when working mathematical problems.
- Presenting and comparing multiple solutions to develop an understanding that a problem may be solved accurately using different procedures
Example: Comparing Multiple Solutions
Problem:34
+ 28Solution 1:Solution 2:Step 1.30
+ 20
50Step 1.1
34
+ 28
2Step 2.4
+ 8
12Step 2.1
34
+ 28
62Step 3.50
+ 12
62Guidelines for Supporting Comparison
- Present examples side-by-side.
- Use common labels (e.g., ones, tens columns) to draw attention to similarities.
- Prompt for specific comparisons tailored to your learning goals.
- Be sure that students, not just the teacher, are comparing and explaining.
- Include a summary of the main idea from the comparison, highlighting key points of the comparison.
Rittle-Johnson & Star (2010), p. 26
- Encouraging students to describe the strategies and mathematical procedures they used to solve a problem (time: 3:07)
This video is part of the Modeling Middle School Mathematics (MMM) project. If you want to order the DVD MMM series, contact [email protected].
Transcript: Patterns
Teacher:Does anybody see any pattern that’s happening here? What seems to be happening? Oh, everybody seems to be seeing something. Ayesha?
Ayesha: Two is adding to every one.
Teacher: Two is adding to every one? What do you mean by that?
Ayesha: One plus two is three.
Teacher: So how does it go to the second one?
Ayesha: Two times two is four, plus one.
Teacher: And where are you getting that plus one from?
Ayesha: The middle.
Teacher: What do you mean? Can you show us? What do you mean by the middle? Josh, can you help her out?
Josh: The two on the side. The two on the one side, two on the other side, that’s four, plus the one on the bottom.
Teacher: Does anybody see another pattern?
Sulanette: I see that they’re all odd numbers.
Teacher: Why do you think they’re all odd numbers?
Sulanette: Because it starts off with the V1, right? It shows 3. Well, 3 is an odd number. If it was an even number, I don’t know where it should go in the V pattern, so they’re all odd numbers.
Teacher: I think Sulanette was saying something pretty interesting. She was saying that she didn’t know if it could be an even number. Can there be an even number? Can I say if there were 84 birds, what V pattern would that be? Could there be 84 birds?
Ashley: I think that it can never be an even number because as in the V pattern of number 1, that is actually a complete V, and an even number couldn’t make that.
Teacher: Why not?
Ashley: Because the V is made up of three birds.
Teacher: Okay, the V is made up of three birds, yeah?
Ashley: And if you keep going and adding two, it’s made up of all odd number of birds, the V patterns.
Teacher: So here’s the first one right here. And then you say that two more birds come in like that, and so it’s going to be odd. Why?
Ashley: It’s going to be odd because if you add two more birds to three, that’ll make five, and five’s an odd number.
Teacher: Can someone tell me the number of geese that would be in the V number 10, the 10th pattern along?
Oscar: I got 21.
Teacher: And how did you find that information?
Oscar: I multiplied 10 by 2
Teacher: Why did you do that?
Oscar: Because I was thinking that every time the two extra birds come, they come and then they have a group. Then I multiplied it by 2 and it comes out to 20, and then I added a 1, the one in the middle, then it came out to 21.
Jenny: What they are saying is that there are two geese in a pair and there are 10 pairs, so he would try and multiply it by 2 times 10 and then add the leader would be 21.
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This toolbox lists and describes additional resources related to the information presented on this page. These resources are provided for informational purposes only for those who wish to learn more about the topic(s). It is not necessary for those viewing this module to read or refer to all of these additional resources to understand the content. The resources are organized by the page section/topics to which they apply. Scaffolding
Study Skills Instruction
Reading Instruction in the Content Areas
Mathematics Instruction
Revisit NDTAC’s resources about Teaching and Learning, including including an issue brief on FAPE. To access these materials, visit the NDTAC website and select Teaching and Learning from the Topic Areas menu at the top of the page. |
