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Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice
A Conference for Teachers of Students with Learning Disabilities
23 and 24 October 2009
Catamaran Hotel
San Diego California
 DLD is pleased to report that its 10th annual fall conference,
Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice, held in San Diego in
October of 2009 was a great professional learning opportunity. Here
are a few photos (with special thanks to Elizabeth Kasdan, one of the
conference attendees, for some of them) and a few quotes from others
who participated in the conference. Following that you can read about
the sessions we included.
What attendees said:
|  Two of the presenters, Lucinda S. Spaulding & Jenny Sue Flannagan
• Very useful and effective activities and strategies
• Great information to make me a better educator for my students with
special needs
• Well organized, hands-on :)
• 1st conference and enjoyed it. Thank!
• Very informative--this session provided me with more information. I
was able to understand RTI a bit more. Hopefully I will be able to bring all of this back to my district. Thank you!
• Very applicable content!
 Presenter Maureen Lovett answering a question from the audience
• Content was insightful, practical and relevant. Concepts were based
in current research/development.
• Superlative content--very current, comprehensive research, very
specific to attention and working memory and kids
• Made complex information accessible for non-psychologist and related
it to classroom needs
• The theory/foundation of presenting problem-solving skills was
excellent it got me thinking of how I can present math calculation
skills in a more interactive and functional manner.
• Current, helpful, practical information--the presenters were
obviously knowledgeable and able to communicate content
Some of the fabulous food from the evening reception—Who needed dinner?
• Great information. Will be very helpful in my classroom and inclusion
• Useful material will use in class
• Appropriate background information was included. Thank you!
• Everyone who teaches anything should hear this--extremely relevant
to many of our students
|
Ylaria DeLeon, recognized for her outstanding contributions to the education of English-language learners who have learning disabilities, with José Luis Alvarado of the DLD Executive Board
Participants in the science workshop testing one of the teaching activities they learned
Kristen McMaster, DLD Executive Board member, with Douglas Dexter, recipient of a Roads Scholarship
 President Linda Siegel presenting the Jeannette Fleischner Award to Barbara Keogh
| Session |
Presenter |
Title |
Description |
Info |
| Friday Morning Sessions: |
| (FM1) |
Presenter: David F. Bateman |
How to Prepare for and Survive a Due Process Hearing |
Many educators fear due process hearings. They are contentious, time-consuming, emotional, and can be humiliating for some. This session will highlight effective strategies for preventing a due process hearing, preparing for one, and then surviving after it is over. The presenter has been a hearing officer on over 500 hearings. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Beginning
Materials: Provided |
| (FM2) |
Presenters: Jenny Sue Flannagan & Lucinda S. Spaulding |
Best Practices for Inclusive Science Instruction |
Grab your goggles and get ready to participate in experiments and activities that will get you excited about teaching science and engaging all students in active, inquiry based learning. The purpose of this session is to provide an overview of evidence based best practices for inclusive science instruction and to equip teachers with applicable strategies for scaffolding instruction and responding to learner needs based on research in special education and science instruction. As a result of this session, participants will learn strategies and methods for helping students learn to independently design experiments, use the scientific process, and develop critical thinking skills. There will also be an emphasis on effective co-teaching practices and employing instructional strategies for reinforcing skills and content knowledge across the curriculum, providing more time for instruction and additional opportunities for reinforcement and review of science and reading/writing skills. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Beginning
Materials: Provided |
| (FM3) |
Presenters: Steve Graham & Sharlene Kiuhara |
SESSION FULL
Writing Problems and Writing Solutions |
Students with learning disabilities have considerable difficulties with writing. This presentation will explore five factors that contribute to writing problems of these students. This includes strategic problems, skill problems, motivational problems, knowledge problems, and teaching problems. Evidenced-based practices for addressing these problems are presented, including the presenter modeling how to apply a number of different procedures. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
Materials: Provided |
| (FM4) |
Presenter: Paige C. Pullen |
Phonological Awareness Assessment and Instruction: A Sound Beginning |
This workshop provides participants with an in-depth examination of phonological awareness research, guidance for examining their own PA instruction, and demonstration and practice evidence-based strategies for assessment and instruction that they can use in their own classroom. Participants will be provided background knowledge on phonological awareness and early reading development as well as strategies for designing instruction based on assessment data and making materials teachers can use in their classrooms for phonological awareness instruction. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Beginning
Materials: Provided |
| (FM5) |
Presenter: Naomi Zigmond |
SESSION CANCELLED
Preparing Students with LD for Statewide Accountability Assessments |
This will focus on strategies that prepare students with learning disabilities to be more successful on their annual statewide assessment; on instructional practices that will more likely lead to proficiency; the logic and logistics of providing appropriate, individualized accommodations; and motivational tactics to increase student investment in the assessment activity.
|
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Beginning
Materials: Provided |
| Friday Afternoon Sessions: |
| (FA1) |
Presenters: Karen R Harris, Karin Sandmel, & Mary Brindle, |
"The Magna Carta Provided That No Free Man Should be Hanged Twice for the Same Offense": Self-Regulated Strategy Development for Writing |
Children with disabilities face challenges and difficulties in composing even beyond those common to all children. They need support not only in the development of skills, but also in developing composition strategies, understandings about the writing process, and positive attitudes about themselves as writers. Two decades of classroom research shows that Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) meaningfully improves what and how children write, and their beliefs about themselves as writers. We illustrate SRSD instruction with writing to persuade from elementary to high school; examples from other genres will also be given. Learn how to use this approach to support writing development within a larger writing program, and how some teachers have used SRSD to help students succeed on state writing competency tests. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Beginning
Materials: Provided |
| (FA2) |
Presenter: Charles A. Hughes |
Two Recent SIM Writing Strategies: The Essay Test-Taking Strategy and the Editing Strategy |
In this session, participants will learn to teach two recent evidence-based writing strategies developed by the presenter in conjunction with the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. The first strategy, The Essay Test-Taking Strategy, is designed to help adolescents with LD respond to essay questions and prompts. The second strategy, The Editing Strategy, helps these students revise their written work composed on word processors and focuses on detecting and correcting spelling, capitalization, and punctuation errors as well as content revision. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Beginning
Materials: $35.00 |
| (FA3) |
Presenters: Erica Lembke & Todd Busch |
Using Curriculum-Based Measurement for Data-Based Decision Making within a Response to Intervention System |
This session will provide information on Curriculum-Based Measurement as an essential element for screening and progress monitoring within a Response to Intervention model. An overview of measures will be provided along with suggestions for data-decision rules. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Beginning
Materials: Provided |
| (FA4) |
Presenter: Maureen W. Lovett
| Multiple Component Intervention to Improve the Outcomes of Struggling Readers: Remediating Reading Skill Deficits and Misguided Beliefs About Effort and Achievement at the Same Time
| The focus will be on understanding why children with reading disabilities often fail to acquire basic word identification, decoding, and reading comprehension skills, and what can be done to teach them. Phonological, meta-cognitive, and combined approaches to word identification, fluency, and reading comprehension programming will be described and demonstrated. Remediation includes explicit retraining of the struggling readerís unproductive attributions and beliefs about effort and achievement. Emphasis is placed on transforming struggling readers into independent capable readers. Results from intervention research with more than 4000 reading disabled children and adolescents will be summarized, and implications of the results discussed with respect to optimizing outcomes for individual children in remedial and classroom settings. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
Materials: Provided |
| (FA5) |
Presenter: Marjorie Montague |
Improving Mathematical Problem Solving of Middle School Students with LD |
This workshop will present Solve It!, a research-based intervention for improving mathematical problem solving for middle school students with LD. Solve It! uses explicit instruction to teach students essential cognitive processes and meta-cognitive strategies for solving math problems. The content and teaching methodology of Solve It! will be described and demonstrated. Participants will engage in a variety of activities for implementing the program. Results from an ongoing federally funded research project to further validate the efficacy of Solve It! will also be presented. Participants will be able to: 1. Describe the components of Solve It!, an intervention for improving mathematical problem solving for middle school students with LD. 2. Implement Solve It! and monitor student progress over time. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Beginning
Materials: $20.00 |
| Session |
Presenter |
Title |
Description |
Info |
| Saturday Morning Sessions: |
| (SM1) |
Presenter: Brian Bottge |
Teaching Mathematics to Adolescents with LD in Rich Problem-Solving Contexts |
Special educators face the challenge of structuring math lessons that provide opportunities for adolescents with learning disabilities to improve their basic skills and strengthen their ability to solve important problems. The purpose of this presentation is to describe an instructional approach called Enhanced Anchored Instruction (EAI), which has helped low-achieving students develop their computation and problem-solving skills in authentic learning contexts. One important advantage of EAI is its ability to directly immerse students in problem contexts, thus helping to eliminate the comprehension difficulties students with low skills in math and reading often experience with text-based problems. Workshop participants will have opportunities to use the instructional modules and to watch video of students solving these problems in classroom settings. At the end of the session, participants will be able to describe the instructional elements of EAI, how they are supported by Doing What Works, and how students might profit from them. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Beginning
Materials: Provided |
| (SM2) |
Presenter: Rosemary Tannock |
Understanding and Engaging Childrenís Wandering Minds |
This session will first provide an overview of the insidious and long-term effects of childrenís inattentive behaviour in the classroom and explain how working memory is linked to both inattention and poor academic achievement. The rest of the session will describe and report the results of controlled study on the effects of a sustained teacher professional development program on inattention and working memory. Participants will learn to recognize signs of working memory problems in the classroom, as well as be informed of key instructional features to effectively accommodate working memory problems and actively engage the students in learningóto rein-in their wandering minds. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
Materials: Provided |
| (SM3) |
Presenter: Karen J. Rooney |
Adolescent Literacy: Putting Research into Practice to Develop the Literacy Skills of Older Students |
Karen will present research findings related to adolescent literacy and discuss their implications for helping students at the secondary level develop stronger literacy skills. The importance of teaching the underlying constructs related to literacy and the concept of 21st century literacies will be discussed. Instruction that helps students understand genre, audience and purpose will be integrated with strategies that span the continuum of skills from the word level(decoding, spelling), the sentence level (grammar, syntax) and the text level. Participants will learn specific strategies to improve decoding, encoding (spelling), reading comprehension and written expression, and will increase their appreciation of 21st century literacies. The use of technology will be discussed and participants will receive a software program that includes strategies for vocabulary development, reading comprehension and written expression. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Beginning
Materials: Provided |
| (SM4) |
Presenter: Deborah C. Simmons |
SESSION CANCELLED
Integrating Vocabulary Strategies into Social Studies Instruction |
Content area text poses particular challenges for students who have difficulty accessing and understanding vocabulary. In this session, we will address the following questions: a) What are the particular challenges of social studies text for students with reading difficulties? b) What evidence-based vocabulary strategies can be integrated into social studies instruction? c)What tools can teachers use to enhance vocabulary development? d) What are the results of an experimental study on 4th grade students vocabulary development? This presentation will share several tools that can assist participants in addressing the challenges of content-area vocabulary. Through demonstration and video-taped examples of classroom teachers, the Presenters will introduce procedures for the following strategies: anticipation guides, vocabulary maps, unit and chapter overviews, and vocabulary word walls. Additionally, suggestions for using peer tutoring during vocabulary instruction will be shared. At the end of the presentation, participants will have materials and strategies to implement evidence-based vocabulary strategies during social studies instruction. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
Materials: Provided |
| (SM5) |
Presenter: David Scanlon |
The ORDER Routine: For Comprehending Content-Area Concepts |
The ORDER Routine aligns higher order skills with systematic procedures. It is appropriate for inclusive content-area classrooms. To check and summarize studentsí learning of discrete facts and overall comprehension, the teacher guides the students in identifying key lesson content and its expository relationships. They learn to graphically represent what they know. The products of the routine include improved comprehension and a device useful for reference and further studying. The routine is integrated with content-area teaching but may be adapted into a personal learning strategy students can use independently. The session will include an overview of the philosophy and essential components of content enhancement instruction. |
Grade Level: K-3
Knowledge Level: Beginning
Materials: $12.00 |
| Saturday Afternoon Sessions: |
| (SA1) |
Presenters: José Luis Alvarado & Anne Graves
| RTI for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners: Supporting Teachers to Implement Tier I and Tier II Literacy Instruction for Older Struggling
| Students with learning disabilities (LD) who are culturally and linguistically diverse, including those identified as English Learners (EL) present a unique challenge to local school districts. As districts proceed to implement Response to Intervention (RTI) for students who may be identified as LD and who are also EL, the question remains if the process effectively addresses both the language acquisition and the unique learning needs of these students. This session will present research findings from a series of studies that focus on general education teachersí implementation of Tier I interventions as well as Tier II literacy instruction for middle school struggling readers. Participants will learn strategies for working with partner general education teachers in implementing research-based practices and will learn about a model to implement Tier II literacy instruction with struggling older readers. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
Materials: Provided |
| (SA2) |
Presenter: Susan P. Miller
| Building a Strong Numbers and Operations Foundation to Enhance Mathematics Success
| The purpose of this session is to describe, model, and practice evidence-based interventions designed to build competence within the Numbers and Operations domain of mathematics curricula. During this interactive session, participants will identify common mathematical error patterns found among students with learning disabilities and subsequently learn ways to address these patterns with effectiveness and efficiency. Participants will refine their knowledge and skills related to the integration of conceptually-based and strategy-based instruction using explicit teaching methodology. Opportunities to experience mathematics instruction from both teacher and student perspectives will be provided. Finally, participants will engage in several activities designed to enhance student motivation related to mathematics learning. |
Grade Level: K-3
Knowledge Level: Beginning
Materials: Provided |
| (SA3) |
Presenter: Nicole Ofiesh |
"Got
Accommodations?" Implications for Planning Instruction and Transition from Secondary to Postsecondary Settings |
This presentation will provide audience members with ways to support their students in the process of acquiring accommodations on standardized tests. Specifically the presentation will include: how services change from IDEA to Section 504 and the ADA, considerations at the secondary level in order to prepare students to receive test accommodations, the relationship between LD and test accommodations, what test agencies look for in order to make decisions about test accommodations under the law, and how to document requests for accommodations when formal documentation is not available. Group activities will involve case studies and application. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
Materials: Provided |
| (SA4) |
Presenter: Rollanda E. OíConnor |
Successful Tier 2 Interventions in Reading: Grades K-4 |
When students fail to thrive with good reading instruction in Tier 1, what are their most likely difficulties? What should Tier 2 instruction look like? In this session, we will focus on the most successful strategies for improving studentsí responsiveness to small group, Tier 2 intervention. We will examine each potential roadblock to reading and learn how to implement instructional activities that open these roads to improved responsiveness and reading growth. With this individualized approach, the instruction modeled and discussed in this session has strong success rates in the studies and schools that have decreased the incidence and severity of learning disabilities in reading in Grades K-4. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
Materials: Provided |
| (SA5) |
Presenters: Kimberly Bright & Paul Riccomini |
I THINK: A Real-Life Problem-solving Strategy for secondary students with Learning Disabilities |
I THINK is a real life problem solving strategy for secondary students with learning disabilities. In addition to learning how to teach this simple but important strategy; participants will learn how to easily incorporate the strategy into their existing curriculum without sacrificing essential academic areas. The workshop is interactive and individualized participant situations. A notebook of materials will be provided. |
Grade Level: All
Knowledge Level: Beginning
Materials: Provided |
Our Presenters
José Luis Alvarado Associate Professor, Department of Special Education, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA
David F. Bateman Professor, Educational Leadership & Special Education, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA
Brian Bottge Professor & William T. Bryan Endowed Chair in Special Education, Special Education and Rehabilitation Counseling, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Mary Brindle Doctoral Student, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
Kimberly Bright Associate Professor, Educational Leadership & Special Education, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA
Todd Busch Associate Professor, College of Education, University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN
Jenny Sue Flannagan Assistant Professor & Director, Martinson Center for Mathematics and Science, Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA
Steve Graham Professor and Currey Ingram Chair In Special Education, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
Anne Graves Professor and Chair of Department of Special Education at San Diego State University, San Diego, CA
Angela Hairrell Meadows Fellow, University of Texas, Austin, TX
Karen R Harris Professor and Currey Ingram Chair In Special Education, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
Charles A. Hughes Professor, Department of Educational Psychology, School Psychology, and Special Education, College of Education, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
Sharlene Kiuhara Post-Doctoral Fellow, Special Education, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
Erica Lembke Associate Professor, Department of Special Education, College of Education, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO
Maureen W. Lovett Director of the Learning Disabilities Research Program and Professor Department of Pediatrics & Psychology, The Hospital For Sick Children and the University, Toronto, ON
Susan P. Miller Professor, Special Education, College of Education, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV
Marjorie Montague Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, School of Education, University of Miami, Miami, FL
Rollanda E. OíConnor Professor, Special Education, College of Education, University of California at Riverside, Riverside, CA
Nicole Ofiesh Professor of Education, School of Education and Leadership, Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, CA
Paige C. Pullen Associate Professor, Curriculum, Instruction, & Special Education; Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
Paul Riccomini Associate Professor, Eugene T. Moore School of Education, Clemson University, Clemson, SC
Karen J. Rooney President, Educational Enterprises, Inc., Richmond, VA
Karin Sandmel Doctoral Student, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
David Scanlon Associate Professor, Teacher Education/Special Education, Curriculum & Instruction, Lynch School of Education, Boston College, Boston, MA
Deborah C. Simmons Professor of Special Education in the Department of Educational Psychology Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
Lucinda S. Spaulding Doctoral Fellow, School of Education, Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA
Rosemary Tannock Canada Research Chair in Special Education and Adaptive Technology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of Toronto & Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON
Naomi Zigmond Professor, Department of Instruction and Learning, College of Education, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA |
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