Last spring I had the opportunity to present on a panel at CEC with my colleague Ted Hasselbring from the University of Kentucky. Our panel's topic has become an increasingly common one in special education: how to help students with learning disabilities achieve more rigorous academic outcomes. Ted began his presentation by encouraging the audience to read a recent book from the National Research Council, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. I couldn't have agreed more with his recommendation, and coincidentally, I had planned to use a quote from the book as part of my presentation. Ted went on to describe the anchored instruction research that he was so much a part of while he was a member of the Learning and Technology Center at Vanderbilt University.Ted framed his presentation with what has now become one of the central mantras of cognitively guided instruction: "more is less." Near the end of his talk, he showed a brief video of a student's anchored instruction project. An African-American teenager had composed a sensitive interpretation of the civil rights movement using various multimedia tools, and the video moved back and forth from her reflections on the project to segments of the project itself. At the end of our panel's presentation, many in the audience eagerly returned to Ted's example during the question period. "How long did it take for her to put all of that together?" "Did it really take two weeks?" "What else did she do in class during those two weeks?" These reactions to Ted's presentation are telling. As long as some prescriptions for classroom instruction are couched in the right terms, albeit abstractly at times, many innovative ideas can be made to sound compelling. After all, "more is less" has a certain intuitive appeal. Ted had gone beyond that and clearly linked his theoretical position to a tangible and substantive example. Questions about "how long it took," and implicitly, "at expense of what" are powerful reminders of how many in the field think about teaching students with learning disabilities.
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