This two-day Webinar is designed for school practitioners who want to make their language assessment and intervention practices more relevant to their students’ most pressing needs. Methods include using curriculum-relevant and curriculum-based assessment to measure skills integrated across language levels (sound, word, sentence, discourse) and modalities (listening, speaking, reading, writing); working within the general education curriculum; and collaborating with teachers and others to provide intervention, both virtually and in person. Satisfaction comes when we watch our students, from Kindergarten through high school age, achieve recognizable turning points—taking on a communicative challenge, trying something new, or exhibiting a new skill in a curricular context. To recognize these turning points, we need to monitor progress in a way that reveals meaningful changes. It is not an overstatement to say that our work has the power to change lives, but to do so, we need a strong, evidence-based framework for organizing our approach to problem solving and for working collaboratively within family- and school-systems. Identifying and prioritizing goal areas may seem overwhelming when children are struggling with many things. This 2-day course will show you how to organize your assessment practices to identify language/literacy disorders using standardized curriculum-relevant assessment, interpreting results with evidence-based practices, and using input from parents and teachers to identify major goal areas; then, using criterion-referenced and curriculum-based language assessments, interventions, and progress monitoring, tied to the TEKS standards, to target individualized objectives and measure change.The target audience for this Webinar is speech-language pathologists who work with students across the K-12 years. This includes students with a variety of special needs, ranging from speech/language impaired (SI) “only,” to students with co-occurring disabilities and complex communication needs, with implications for students who are second language learners, with and without developmental language disorders.
Day one will focus on assessment, including practical strategies for sorting out basic profiles of language/literacy disorders and designing progress monitoring strategies tied to student needs. A quadrant model will be used to show how students with different strengths and needs benefit from different intervention approaches depending on relative skills with sound/word-level and sentence/discourse-level knowledge. This section includes introduction to standardized assessment tools the presenter has co-authored [as will be disclosed], including the Test of Integrated Language and Literacy Skills (TILLS) and the Student Language Scale (SLS).
Day two will build on topics introduced in Day one to focus further on how intervention should differ depending on divergent student needs. This will include learning how to help the educational team design a structured approach for teaching relationships between spoken and written language for students with dyslexia and other oral-written language problems. It also will include strategies for setting up collaborative relationships with teachers and classroom- and curriculum-based language intervention approaches, including sessions that are delivered on-line, for addressing problems of language comprehension and expression, spoken or written. Methods for helping students gain ownership for their goals and progress will illustrate the how to, and the rewards for providing language/literacy assessment and intervention services that can lead to turning points in students’ lives.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: After attending this two-day Webinar, participants should be able to:
- Describe how components of sound/word structure and sentence/discourse knowledge differ, how they relate to the simple view of reading and differentiation of pure dyslexia from other forms of language disorder, and how they require different forms of intervention.
- Differentiate between curriculum-relevant and curriculum-based language assessment and describe purposes for each, including how they might differ for students learning English as a second language.
- Develop a concrete plan to ensure that students with sound/word structure difficulties get the explicit instruction they need for developing phonological and morphological awareness to support reading decoding and spelling
- Develop a concrete plan to conduct curriculum-based language assessment and intervention with a student on the caseload with problems of language comprehension and expression.
This program has been approved for 6 clock hours of continuing education credit by the Texas Speech-Language-Hearing-Association (TSHA). TSHA approval does not imply endorsement of course content, specific products, or clinical procedures.
Presenter: Nickola Wolf Nelson, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, BCS-CL