Malone-Cannella, Helen I., Konrad, Moira, and Pennington, Robert C. (2015). ACCESS! teaching
writing skills to students with intellectual disability. Teaching Exceptional Children, 47(5), 272-
280. Retrieved from
http://ezproxy.trnty.edu:2553/10.1177/0040059915580032
This article discusses how teachers can help students with intellectual disabilities be better writers. In the abstract it explains how a teacher focused mainly on a life skills curriculum but realized that she needed to include some academic skills as well. Specifically, this article focuses on ACCESS: accommodations and assistive technologies, concrete topics, critical skills, explicit instruction, strategy instruction, systematic evaluation. Teaching these components of ACCESS, will help students become better writers when they need to write to communicate outside of the classroom such as a work place.
Often in this article certain supports are used in the components of ACCESS that could benefit students without intellectual disabilities. The use of graphic organizers was mentioned several times. As a regular education teacher, I have used graphic organizers in my classroom to help students during the writing process to organize their thoughts before they start writing. The article also talked about "breaking down writing assignments into manageable chunks". This is definitely true with students who do not have intellectual disabilities. As teachers we generally don't give a prompt and tell students to hand in a final draft in a couple of days. There are steps that should be taken. Organize thoughts, maybe by using an organizer, use the information from the graphic to make an outline, rough draft and then the final copy. In the lower grades, this can take several days, if not a couple of weeks. Many of the accommodations made a lot of sense. Rather than giving an abstract topic to write on which is a struggle for students with intellectual disabilities, make the topic more concrete. This was a great suggestion that I would not have thought about. The article even gave some great examples on how to take an abstract topic and make it a concrete one. I always love examples to help me "see" how to do something. Another important thing to remember when teaching writing to students with intellectual disabilities is to make sure the assignment can be applied outside the classroom.
I think this is a great article that mentions many supports that teachers are already using. There are many more components to ACCESS that seem easy to implement when teaching those with intellectual disabilities. There are also components that may be very time consuming to use but, effective none the less. I thought this was a great article with helpful information and again much can be used in a general education classroom.
I love reading anything that has to do with teaching reading or teaching writing! I will admit to a little favoritism when it comes to L.A/Lit. I actually remember learning about ACCESS teaching in my teaching writing class in undergrad. I agree with you that it could be used in a gen ed classroom as well; and I think it's something that could work in an inclusion classroom. The skills that are practiced in ACCESS are skills that all people learning how to write could benefit from. I agree that sometimes this could be very time consuming, but I feel that it's more important to take the time to teach these important skills, skills that will be used long after they are out of our classrooms. I feel we would all agree that we would prefer to take the time attempting to have a student to master something rather than trying to get them a few points higher on a standardized test.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a great strategy! I love the acronym because it can help teachers of all types and grade levels of students to keep these main points in mind, and alter the details of the strategy accordingly.
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