Read about the top 5 challenges ASQ Online helps programs solve, check out our free resources to learn more, and get a free demo!

Challenge 1: Difficulty engaging busy families in screening

Families are stressed, pressed for time, and may be wary of the screening process. ASQ Online makes questionnaire completion and family engagement easier than ever. With ASQ Family Access (part of ASQ Online), the families in your program can complete questionnaires electronically anytime and anywhere, on their phone, computer, or tablet. And the parent engagement materials and learning activities in ASQ Online make it easy to communicate and collaborate effectively with families throughout the whole process.

“Most of our parents are digitally minded. Without the online screening option, we would have much fewer parents engaged in our program.”—Kali Ottesen, director of Help Me Grow Utah

• FREE DOWNLOAD: How to Engage Parents and Increase Accuracy Using ASQ Online

Challenge 2: Cumbersome, time-intensive paperwork

The paperwork around any kind of screening system can be a time-sucking headache. With ASQ Online, scoring and reporting are all automated. No photocopying, no reams of paper, no scanning in paper questionnaires or hand-calculating results. You get the data you need right at your fingertips, whenever you need it.

“ASQ Online has allowed me to stay on top of screenings by saving me time and giving me easier access to screening data.”—Emily Dolbeare, assistant director of child development for Scribbles Center for Learning, Inc., in Illinois.

• FREE DOWNLOAD: ASQ Online Reports Guide

Challenge 3: Mistakes that lead to misleading or incomplete ASQ results

Human error happens: parents may accidentally skip an ASQ question or two, and hand-scoring the questionnaires always leaves room for mistakes. ASQ Online helps ensure that all your questionnaires are fully completed and accurately scored. The online questionnaire interface prevents parents from skipping questions by accident, and automated scoring gives you accurate results you can use to plan the most effective next steps.

The post 5 Big Challenges ASQ Online Helps Your Program Solve appeared first on Brookes Blog.

Aligned with ASQ^® and CDC developmental milestones, the new edition of this extensive, research-supported curriculum includes more than 350 photocopiable, easy-to-use activity sheets (called Experiences) that target eight developmental areas important to school readiness:

• Communication
• Gross Motor
• Fine Motor
• Intellectual
• Discovery
• Social-Emotional
• Self-Help
• Pretend

Beautiful Beginnings can enhance any infant-toddler program—whether the focus is home visiting, child care, or parenting more generally—in many ways. Here are 8 big things this curriculum can do for your program:

1. Beautiful Beginnings encourages parents and child-care providers to observe children’s development and encourages them to watch more carefully for new developments.
2. Beautiful Beginnings leads the parent, teacher, or home visitor who may not be familiar with all of the stages of child development through early development, providing the adult with hands-on opportunities. One longtime user of the first edition of Beautiful Beginnings said, “It was my child development teacher.”
3. Beautiful Beginnings provides a mechanism for infant-toddler child-care programs to focus on development rather than solely caregiving, which could lack an intentional developmental component.
4. Beautiful Beginnings provides a formalized way for parents, teachers, and home visitors to work together. Although it takes some planning and coordination for everyone to provide input in regular goal setting and follow through, the opportunities on behalf of the child are tremendous.
5. Beautiful Beginnings can provide a record of a child’s early development through the use of a portfolio or notebook where teachers, home visitors, and parents enter Experiences on a Goals Sheet and record the child’s responses. The portfolio can be personalized and embellished with photos, children’s artwork, and more, creating a beautiful memento of early development that families can keep.
6. Beautiful Beginnings provides a way to create a safety net for children who may need more support and stimulation in a particular area of development (e.g., children who may not be developing optimally in some areas).
7. Beautiful Beginnings can assist teachers in both individual and group planning of Experiences for individuals and activities for groups. If used in a group setting, Beautiful Beginnings can help create a well-equipped infant-toddler setting. Materials for nearly all of the Experi­ences included in Beautiful Beginnings for children 18 months and older can be organized into learning centers and made continuously available in a toddler child-care center.
8. Most importantly, Beautiful Beginnings can help teachers, home visitors, and parents provide children with Experiences that match their emerging developments, give them well-timed opportunities, and gently offer stimulation and engaging, fun activities in all areas of devel­opment. Successful matching by teachers, home visitors, and parents is further rewarded by children’s positive energy, focus, and motivation.

Invest in Beautiful Beginnings today! It’s one of the best ways to build on each child’s strengths and interests and encourage progress in the developmental areas that are key to school readiness.

The post 8 Ways Beautiful Beginnings Enhances Early Childhood Programs appeared first on Brookes Blog.

This guest post is by Joan Sedita, author of the Brookes books The Writing Rope and The Essentials of Adolescent Literacy. The post originally appeared on the Keys to Literacy blog.

Executive functions are the mental processes that students and adults use to manage tasks and achieve goals. These include goal setting, organization, cognitive flexibility, working memory, self-monitoring, attention, and inhibition. Executive functions play an important role in supporting proficient reading and writing across all grades. By Grade 5, however, students’ success in reading and writing becomes increasing dependent on their ability to apply these executive function processes (Meltzer, 2010; Cartwright, 2015).

Each executive function is described below, along with examples of how it impacts reading and writing.

Goal Setting

What is it?

• Setting a goal or purpose for a task
• Determining which tasks are necessary to achieve a goal and identifying which are most critical to success
• Formulating an organized, strategic, and efficient approach
• Planning the sequence in which tasks should be completed

Impact on Reading:

• Identifying whether the reading purpose requires surface-level comprehension (e.g., for enjoyment) or deeper comprehension (e.g., for assessment)
• Establishing goals for before, during, and after reading
• Keeping the reading purpose and goals in mind while reading
• Choosing actions in an appropriate order to meet reading goals, such as:
• Deciding how much time to spend on each section of text
• Selecting comprehension strategies (e.g., highlighting, note-taking, summarizing)

Impact on Writing:

• Identifying the writing topic and gathering relevant ideas and information
• Determining how the task, audience, and purpose will influence the writing

Organizing

What is it?

• The ability to impose order on information and materials
• Creating systems to manage information or tasks
• Recognizing and using patterns or systems effectively
• Organization is foundational; without it, goal setting, planning, and other executive functions are more difficult to manage

Impact on Reading:

• Recognizing text organization and structure (narrative, informational, argumentative)
• Identifying patterns of organization (e.g., sequence, compare/contrast, cause/effect) and the transitions that signal them
• Building a schema to connect related topics and ideas
• Organizing information extracted from text

Impact on Writing:

• Using graphic organizers to plan written work
• Adhering to a writing plan
• Applying knowledge of text structures (e.g., introductions, body paragraphs, conclusions) and text features (e.g., headings, table of contents)
• Keeping track of notes and source citations

Cognitive Flexibility

What is it?

• The ability to consider multiple pieces of information or tasks simultaneously and shift focus when needed, when engaging in a task
• Requires attentional control to shift focus from one aspect of a task to another

Impact on Reading:

• Switching between decoding words and understanding their meaning
• Shifting focus from a character’s perspective to the author’s purpose
• Alternating between attention to text features and comprehension of the main text

Impact on Writing:

• Managing multiple ideas at once
• Shifting among sentence structure, paragraph development, spelling, and handwriting or keyboarding
• Exploring multiple ways to express ideas
• Focusing on multiple areas when revising and editing – spelling, grammar & punctuation, organization of ideas, and content

Working Memory

What is it?

• The ability to hold and manipulate information in the mind while performing a task, and storing information while processing it.

Impact on Reading:

• Remembering word meanings
• Storing information across sentences and paragraphs
• Retaining and comparing text segments to locate information
• Holding details in mind to build a coherent understanding of the text while continuing to add new details

Impact on Writing:

• Managing multiple pieces of information and processes during all stages of writing (thinking, planning, drafting, revising)

Self Monitoring

What is it?

• The ability to reflect on one’s own thoughts, behaviors, and strategies to assess their effectiveness
• A key aspect of metacognition—thinking about one’s thinking
• Involves editing and correcting one’s own work and behavior

Impact on Reading:

• Monitoring comprehension while reading
• Recognizing when understanding breaks down and applying “fix-it” strategies

Impact on Writing:

• Following all stages of the writing process
• Being aware of when and how to apply writing strategies
• Staying focused while revising and editing
• Using self-talk to remain on task and persevere through challenges

Attention and Inhibition

What is it?

• The ability to resist distractions and stay focused on a task
• Involves inhibiting habitual responses and ignoring irrelevant, distracting information
• Also referred to as impulse control

Impact on Reading and Writing:

• Sustaining focus during reading and writing tasks despite environmental distractions
• Avoiding unrelated thoughts and focusing on relevant text or ideas
• Ignoring irrelevant meanings or associations that could interfere with comprehension or writing

Instructional Interventions for Executive Functions

Reading comprehension is often affected by executive function deficits. Instruction should aim to strengthen the cognitive skills and strategies students need to regulate their thinking while reading. Effective supports include explicit instruction in comprehension strategies (Katzir et al., 2018; Meltzer, 2018; Cartwright, 2015).

Here are some suggestions for supporting reading:

• Metacognitive Awareness: Help students understand how they think and learn. Support self-awareness of learning profiles, strengths, and areas for growth. Increased metacognition improves motivation and strategy use.
• Reading Goals: Provide clear purposes and goals for reading tasks.
• Organizing Strategies: Teach strategies for organizing ideas, including the use of templates, thinking maps, and graphic organizers.
• Connecting to Prior Knowledge: Help students activate background knowledge before reading. Use graphic organizers to visually present key topics and concepts.
• Predicting: Pose questions before and during reading to help students make predictions about a text’s content based on clues from the text.
• Text Structure: Teach students to identify and use text structures in both narrative and informational texts. Preview structure before reading.
• Self-Questioning: Teach students how to generate questions before, during, and after reading to stay focused and engaged as they seek answers to the questions.
• Visualizing: Encourage students to create mental images to support memory and understanding.
• Summarizing: Teach students to retell and summarize key ideas to identify essential information.

Every stage of the writing process is also impacted by executive function deficits. Interventions should focus on helping students develop strategies to plan text structure, integrate multiple skills while writing a draft, revise for both content and conventions, and self-regulate throughout.

Here are some suggestions for supporting writing:

• Writing Process: Teach students to follow all stages: think, plan, write, revise.
• Writing Strategies: Explicitly teach strategies for each stage, such as annotation, note-taking, summarizing, and revising.
• Graphic Organizers: Provide graphic organizers and writing templates as scaffolds to support the planning and writing stages.
• Clear Product Goals: Be specific about writing expectations, including task, audience, purpose, length, content requirements, and grading criteria.
• Mentor Models: Provide mentor models of text for students to emulate.
• Lists: Offer lists of precise and engaging words, transition words and phrases, and question terms.
• Feedback: Use checklists and rubrics for both teacher and peer feedback, as well as for student self-assessment.

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Learn more about evidence-based reading and writing instruction: Get Joan Sedita’s bestselling, widely acclaimed books, The Writing Rope and The Essentials of Adolescent Literacy, available from Brookes!

References
Cartwright, K. B. (2015). Executive skills and reading comprehension. The Guilford Press.
Katzir, T., Markovich, V., Tesler, E., & Shany, M. (2018). Self-regulation and reading comprehension: Self-perceptions, self-evaluations, and effective strategies for intervention. In L. Meltzer (Ed.), Executive function in education: From theory to practice (pp. 125–140). The Guilford Press.
Meltzer, L. (2010). Executive function in the classroom. The Guilford Press.
Meltzer, L. (2018). Creating strategic classrooms and schools: Embedding executive function strategies in the curriculum. In L. Meltzer (Ed.), Executive function in education: From theory to practice (pp. 193–206). The Guilford Press.

The post How 6 Executive Function Skills Affect Reading and Writing appeared first on Brookes Blog.

PICCOLO: Measuring developmental parenting for effective home visits

Monday, November 2-Monday, November 30  •  Starts at 11 AM EST

About PICCOLO:  

PICCOLO is a quick, reliable observational tool designed to help home visitors assess and monitor the quality of parent–child interactions. Developed for use with parents of children 10–47 months, the PICCOLO checklist measures 29 supportive developmental parenting behaviors in 4 domains: affection, responsiveness, encouragement, and teaching. Get it from Brookes Publishing>>

About the Training:

Put PICCOLO into practice with this series of two-hour webinars held on Thursdays over five consecutive weeks. Presented by experienced PICCOLO trainers and researchers Tasha Olson and Shannon Mitchell, this webinar series will teach you how to observe and use PICCOLO in your home visiting program to more effectively engage parents, build on their strengths to support their child’s development, improve visit quality, and increase positive parent-child interactions.

HOVRS: Measuring quality in home visit practices & engagement

Thursday, September 24-Thursday, October 22  •  Starts at 9:30 AM MDT

About HOVRS:

The Home Visit Rating Scales (HOVRS) is an observation tool with rating scales that allow practitioners and supervisors to assess the quality of home visits from direct observation. The tool includes seven rating scales, four for the actual home visit process and three for the engagement and interaction of parents and children during home visits. HOVRS is included in the book Developmental Parenting by Lori A. Roggman, Lisa K. Boyce, & Mark S. Innocenti, a practical guide to building a developmental parenting program that puts parents and caregivers confidently in charge of supporting their young children’s development. Get it from Brookes Publishing>>

About the Training:

Find out how to use HOVRS effectively in this in-depth 5-webinar workshop, starting on Thursday, September 24 and continuing weekly. Presented by experienced HOVRS trainers and researchers Tasha Olson, Meaghan Ursetta, and Cristina Gonzalez del Riego, this training will teach you how to observe and use HOVRS in your home visiting program to improve both visit quality and family engagement.

The post Virtual Training on Home Visiting Tools: PICCOLO and HOVRS appeared first on Brookes Blog.

Unstuck is an innovative program that’s been gaining lots of traction in schools since the first version came out in 2011. Through catchy scripts, visuals, role-plays, and positive reinforcement, the small-group Unstuck lessons keep students engaged as they learn important skills. Lessons and scripts build on each other, and students get lots of opportunities to practice and generalize their new skills to school, home, and community settings.

As we celebrate the recent release of the newest version of Unstuck (this one for teens and young adults ages 14-22), here are five great reasons your school or district should invest in this bestselling curriculum.

Unstuck dismantles obstacles to long-term success.

Problems with flexibility and goal-directed behavior can be a major obstacle to success in school and in life. Unstuck directly addresses executive functioning at school, so kids can be more flexible, well-regulated problem-solvers in the classroom and beyond. With Unstuck, your school can:

• Improve executive functioning skills such as cognitive flexibility, organization, and planning abilities, so that students can more easily shift from topic to topic and task to task, and consider new ideas or another person’s point of view.
• Address executive functioning problems, including trouble with transitioning and completing multiple-step tasks. Providing intervention for these common issues will allow teachers to spend more time focusing on teaching and less time on managing behavior.

There’s no doubt about it: Unstuck really works.

The authors tested Unstuck in Title I elementary schools with racially, ethnically, and language diverse families and compared it to an empowering behavior management program (Contingency Behavior Management, or CBM). They found that:

• Students and parents liked Unstuck more than CBM.
• Unstuck worked well for students on the autism spectrum and for students with ADHD in improving classroom behaviors (social reciprocity, transitioning, rule abidance, participation, getting unstuck, and being less negative). These improvements were maintained one year later!
• Unstuck and CBM worked well for everyone, no matter how old they were, what race they were, the family’s income, or what language was spoken in the home. Also, any educational team member, regardless of their discipline or expertise, can lead the groups.

In interviews, students spoke highly about the changes Unstuck has helped them implement. One student cited the benefits of “being able to have multiple plans because if I don’t have multiple plans I get stuck. If I have multiple plans I can get a little of what I want, rather than not at all. In most situations that’s better.” Another student said this after learning the Unstuck approaches: “When I get really mad at a teacher or friend, I try to think about is it really necessary to get mad. I try to stay calm and be flexible and cope with what is going on.”

Busy teachers love how easy and flexible it is.

The Unstuck developers have worked hard to make this curriculum as flexible and easy to implement as possible. Unstuck and On Target!:

• Can be implemented in a variety of settings—in class, pull-out groups, or a lunch bunch. The frequency (one time a week, multiple times a week) is up to each teacher.
• Can be used with any class, by any teacher.Each lesson comes with clear and explicit instructions, materials lists, and helpful tips for teachers.
• Uses items you likely have in your classroom already (glue, scissors, etc.). Very few of the lessons require additional materials outside of what’s included in the manual.
• Gives you simple classroom and home practice guides to make each lesson easy to implement.
• Includes visual supports and posters to help students grasp abstract concepts.

The benefits are well worth the initial time investment.

“Stressed” and “overwhelmed” doesn’t even begin to cover what many teachers are feeling these days. Most teachers can’t imagine adding something else to their school day, unless it’s proven to help students and the benefits are really worth it.

The Unstuck developers point to the solid research base behind their intervention and its proven impact on students: “If we dedicate the time to teaching Unstuck, not only will our students learn valuable life skills that will positively impact their academics and social interactions, we will gain back a good portion of the time that was being dedicated to redirecting and managing behavior throughout the school day.”

The impact of Unstuck will also continue far beyond the brief lessons: “The power will come from not only the explicit lesson instruction, but also how you use the language and concepts to support instruction and interactions across the school day.” 

Unstuck gets parents more involved in strengthening their child’s skills.

Unstuck also makes it easy to keep the home-school connection strong. Every lesson has a “home extension” that summarizes what the student learned and gives ideas for how the parents can use the ideas at home. Parents love these handouts! They give families concrete ideas for how to use the strategies their children are learning in the Unstuck sessions, which leads to more positive interactions with their children—and better outcomes for the kids.

LEARN MORE about Unstuck and On Target!

• GET A FREE SAMPLE LESSON
  Fill out this quick form to get free access to a sample Unstuck lesson!
  DOWNLOAD NOW >>
• WATCH THE WEBINAR
  Get more details about Unstuck in this webinar presented by co-developers Lynn Cannon, M.Ed., Social Learning Specialist; and Lauren Kenworthy, Ph.D., Pediatric Neuropsychologist.
  VIEW RECORDING >>
• GET THE CURRICULUM
  Invest in Unstuck and start improving outcomes for your students!
  SHOP NOW>>
• CONTACT US
  Looking to adopt Unstuck across a whole state or district? Contact your sales rep and we’ll help you put a package together!
  FIND YOUR REP >>

The post 5 Reasons to Get Your Students Unstuck and On Target! appeared first on Brookes Blog.

Brookes author Jennifer Mahdavi is with us today to talk about progress monitoring and why it’s such a vital part of improving outcomes for all children. We asked Dr. Mahdavi some questions about her book, A Teacher’s Guide to Progress Monitoring; her advice for busy teachers concerned about the time investment; how to engage students in their own progress monitoring, and more.

Your book, A Teacher’s Guide to Progress Monitoring, is such a great introduction to a complex topic. Why, in your opinion, is this book urgently needed right now?

When I was an elementary school teacher, more than 25 years ago, I worked for a principal who urged us to use assessment to focus our instruction on the skills that students needed rather than to scatter our instruction and hope that something would work. That idea, which came with some rudimentary professional development, sparked my further exploration of aligning instruction with specific student needs. At the time, I did not have the tools to systematically monitor the progress of students and use those data to refine instruction.

The tools and knowledge that I did not have then are widely available now, they are evidence-based, and they are not terribly difficult to use. Children who are struggling to learn, whether academically, socially, behaviorally, or functionally, need and deserve to have their needs met by their teachers. Progress monitoring (PM) can empower the instructional strategies that teachers select, which will supercharge the growth that their students make. The small investment that teachers make in learning and using PM procedures will pay tremendous dividends in the growth and development of children with disabilities or those who struggle.

What feature (or features) sets your book apart from other books on progress monitoring?

Most books about progress monitoring maintain a focus on academic learning. These books are relevant for struggling readers or children who have trouble in math, as well as students who have mild disabilities that affect their academic performance. My book expands the notion of progress monitoring to non-academic skills, particularly functional life skills that contribute to independence. For students with more severe disabilities, areas of focus may include self-feeding, choice-making, using public transit, or even independent toileting. We can use task analysis to create methods of monitoring independence in each step of the process of any functional skill. As such, my book is relevant to teachers of students of a wide variety of ages and ability levels.

Further, the methods described in the book are illustrated with 5 case studies, written by special educators, describing PM procedures that were designed, implemented, and evaluated with students with disabilities in classrooms. These real-life examples candidly reveal how teachers approached progress monitoring, the obstacles they encountered, and the successes they realized. The case studies represent the broad notion of PM that I was mentioning above, from an elementary school English learner with a learning disability increasing reading fluency, to a 12-year-old girl learning to make appropriate choices, to a high school junior developing his executive functioning to organize how he completed schoolwork.

What are some of the practical applications of progress monitoring? What are the biggest classroom challenges it can help teachers solve?

Not every student needs to be the subject of a progress monitoring procedure. Those who are not learning at an expected pace are the ones on whom teachers need to focus. When a child’s oral reading fluency is not advancing, or their ability to solve long division problems is lagging, implementing PM for that individual is called for.

It’s the same for individuals with more significant disabilities; some will readily learn to perform functional activities such as making a sandwich or sorting items at a worksite. Those who do not will need to have the extra attention that comes with PM procedures. Progress monitoring is best implemented for individual students who present the most intractable learning needs.

For many teachers, working with a student over a period of time without seeing growth is a very frustrating experience. We work diligently to teach each student using evidence-based practices, yet some students do not respond to the interventions. PM helps us break through the obstacles to learning by showing us whether interventions are effective. Rather than teaching and teaching and hoping that students are learning, progress monitoring alerts us that the selected intervention is not of benefit to a student so we must choose another. This allows teachers to be nimbler in making changes to instruction in a timely fashion, which can accelerate progress.

You include a chapter in your book on engaging students in monitoring their own progress. What are the benefits of that approach, for both teachers and students?

There is no greater benefit of education to students than that of independence. Teachers’ major priority must be to increase each student’s future ability to live, think, and work without external supports. We want to create independent readers, to turn students into adults who can think critically, and to help individuals with disabilities develop the skills they need to have agency over their own lives and choices.

Inviting students to participate in monitoring their own progress, setting goals to pursue, and discussing how to achieve new benchmarks, allows students to practice independence with the guidance of teachers. We can think of this as training wheels when we learn to ride a bike: a bit of assistance that prepares us to ride off on our own. Even students with cognitive delays have demonstrated the ability to make choices and evaluate their progress, sometimes in simple ways.

Progress monitoring can be something that teachers do with students rather than to them. We can and should create a partnership with students to increase their motivation to work toward goals. The benefit to students is increasing levels of independence. For teachers, the benefits are less clear. Certainly, students who function with less support make the teacher’s work easier, but the satisfaction of helping a person prepare for autonomy is the real joy.

Many teachers may feel that progress monitoring is a time investment they can’t make right now. What would you say to teachers who are stretched thin and concerned about adding something else to their schedule? 

Time is always the enemy of change. Implementing new initiatives is difficult and we never have enough time to figure it out. Even so, the power of progress monitoring in aligning interventions with student needs allows teachers to be more effective and more efficient. We do not need to waste time providing interventions that do not yield benefits to students; instead, we can fine-tune our instruction so that students learn more quickly. Investing the time to develop progress monitoring systems will yield successful student outcomes that are far greater than the efforts we made to get started.

For educators who are taking a deep breath and preparing to give progress monitoring a try, I say: start small! Pick one or two students with similar needs and implement PM with them as a pilot project. There is no need to sweep through your entire class list or caseload. Instead, practice with a small group and scale up when you feel comfortable with what you have created.

A second tip for getting started is to find a buddy who will engage in PM with you. Having a colleague who can help you when you get stuck—or bounce around ideas with you—will be most useful and supportive. Create a community of practice. You might also talk with the school psychologist at your site who should have expertise in progress monitoring.

If you are stressed out about whether your students are learning, progress monitoring can alleviate your anxiety. It will show you whether your instruction is reaching the students and empower you to change your approach as you need to. You will feel confident that all the efforts you are making are beneficial to your students. That, too, will alleviate stress. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying PM out!

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Thanks to Dr. Mahdavi for being here today and sharing her expertise. For more in-depth guidance on using PM to comply with federal mandates, refine your teaching, and help every learner succeed, add her book to your professional learning toolbox!

“Makes the process of ongoing assessment come alive . . . a must-have for teachers who want to ensure that all students make progress toward learning goals.”—Diane Haager, Professor Emeritus, California State University Los Angeles

“An excellent resource and training tool for special educators…provides sound reasoning and pragmatic suggestions.”—Melinda Susan, Director, South County Consortium, Adjunct Faculty, Sonoma State University

“The comprehensive case studies provide the real-world link that readers need to see progress monitoring in action!”—Elizabeth Potts, Missouri Western State University

“Aligns with today’s emphasis on designing inclusive learning environments that maximize learning for all learners.”—Patti Ralabate, Executive Director, PKR Professional Learning LLC

The post The Power of Progress Monitoring: Q&A with Jennifer Mahdavi appeared first on Brookes Blog.

Adapted from the new edition of the bestselling Beautiful Beginnings curriculum for birth to three, this article shares tips for helping young children develop three important skills:

• talking and listening in a small group
• taking turns with toys and other materials
• playing with peers

Talking and Listening in a Small Group

• Ask the child questions or use a type of show and tell approach in which each person speaks or shows an item. Encourage the child to pay attention to other speakers, speak so that others can understand them, and encourage other speakers to listen fully when the child speaks.
• Draw the child into a conversation with another child and gently encourage the two children to take turns speaking. When another child is telling a story, encourage the first child to listen carefully and encourage them to ask questions of the speaker.
• Compliment the child or children on listening well, especially when they are able to do this without cues. Help the children find common conversation topics and themes.
• While reading stories, point out when characters express themselves and when others are good listeners.
• If the child wants to talk during another child’s turn, provide a gestural cue such as puffing your cheeks with air and holding an index finger to your mouth to remind them to be quiet while the other person talks. Be sure to let the child know they did a good job listening afterward.
• If the child needs even more support, preteach with an adult partner. Have the adult talk, show the child the bubble/finger gesture to help them be quiet, then do a countdown with your fingers from five to zero. When you get to zero fingers, say, “Thanks for listening; it’s your turn.” Let the child talk while the adult listens attentively, exaggerating the bubble-in-mouth gesture. Then, after a bit, have the adult do the countdown to show it’s their turn. Go back and forth taking turns talking.

Taking Turns with Toys and Other Materials

• If the child wants a toy that another child is playing with, teach them to ask, “Can I have it when you are done?” If the other child says “Yes,” then keep an eye on the situation and be certain the child receives the toy when the other child is finished. They may need to be supported in following through.
• Emphasize sharing when children are working on individual projects that involve shared materials. For example, when working with playdough, provide enough materials for every child to have one tool (e.g., a rolling pin, a cookie cutter, a plastic knife). Invite the children to exchange the tools.
• Model language such as “when finished,” “wait,” “next,” “done,” “your turn,” “their turn,” and “share.”
• When reading, stop to discuss what the characters are doing. If a character is taking turns, waiting, or exchanging, point that out.
• Using a visual timer such as a sand timer or app can help show the child how long they have to wait for their turn.
• It’s a good idea to have duplicates of the most popular toys rather than insisting that children always share.
• Many young children will need some ongoing adult support as they learn how to share. Continuing to model sharing and helping the child work through their complicated feelings around sharing will help the child succeed in the long run.

Playing with Peers

• Model words such as “cooperating,” “sharing,” “working together,” “playing together,” and “building together.”
• When reading stories, point out when characters are working and playing together.
• Set up block play, making sure there is room for at least two children. If the children are building while engaged in parallel play, ask them if they can build a tower together by taking turns adding blocks to the tower. Encourage one child to offer pieces to the other child to put on the tower. Use a similar strategy in other play schemes that the children are interested in.
• If children need more support, simplify by sitting between two children and facilitating joint play. Have the block pieces in a small bin in your lap and start building the block tower. Hand each child a block, encourage them to put it on the tower, then go back and forth giving them each a block to stack. Gradually set the small bin on the floor and back away to see if the two children will continue to work together. Offer support as needed.

If you liked these ideas, invest in Beautiful Beginnings for 350+ more! This NEW birth to three curriculum is full of joyful, engaging experiences that build on each child’s strengths and interests and encourage progress in areas of concern.

The post 17 Tips for Helping Young Children with Cooperation and Sharing appeared first on Brookes Blog.

Morphological Awareness Test for Reading and Spelling (MATRS)

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Sometimes, you have a student who is struggling with reading and spelling, but you don’t know why. You also may want to qualify that student for services in school, but none of the “typical” assessments seem to help you determine why the student is struggling.

One possible reason is that you don’t have the right assessment tool to guide you in explaining a contributing cause for that student’s struggles. The new MATRS tool can help you solve this problem.

MATRS assesses a skill that has shown itself to be quite influential in helping students read and write. It also may be a reason why they are struggling in the first place. That skill is morphological awareness: the ability to think about morphemes, the smallest units of meaning in a language. In English, that includes simple base words like cat, jump, and magic, as well as the prefixes and suffixes we attach to base words, like the ‘s’ in cats, ‘ed’ in jumped, and ‘ian’ in magician. It is important to be able to think about those add-ons because many English words contain them and English spellings are ruled by them.

Diagnosing Morphological Awareness Deficits

MATRS is the only available standardized, norm-referenced diagnostic test that comprehensively assesses morphological awareness, a skill identified by the International Dyslexia Association as a notable factor for why students aren’t able to develop literacy skills like their peers. IDA’s definition of dyslexia addresses this lack of ability: “Dyslexia is a specific learning disability….(which may be characterized by)…underlying difficulties with phonological and morphological processing.”

A student may meet normative expectations on some standardized tests that are typically given to determine why a student is struggling with reading and spelling. However, that does not mean there is no explanation for why the student is struggling. Instead, it likely means the tests used were not measuring morphological awareness in a standardized, norm-referenced manner.

MATRS can serve as a prescriptive assessment because it is possible that students may perform at or below grade-level on one or more of the four components of morphological awareness:

• Awareness of spoken and written morphemes
• The meaning of affixes and how they can alter the meaning and/or grammatical class of base words when they are applied
• How affixes are attached to base words, including any modifications to written base words when they are attached
• The relation between base words and their inflected and derived forms

Based on a student’s performance on each of the MATRS tasks, you can develop specific instructional tasks to improve their skill with the aspects of morphological awareness that were challenging and not waste your time instructing them in areas in which they have grade-appropriate abilities.

Easing the Assessment Process

There are several aspects of MATRS that will aid you in the ease and speed of testing. For example:

• MATRS includes short videos that demonstrate how each task is administered, so you have a clear understanding on how to give each task.
• There is an automatic standard score conversion process so you can determine students’ scores quickly and easily.
• There are two forms to MATRS so that you can monitor a student’s progress. Administer Form A as a pre-test before instruction begins, and then give Form B after a certain amount of instruction has occurred as a post-test to measure growth. Having the two different forms that equate with one another ensures you are not “teaching to the test.”

Instruction After Assessment

As mentioned above, MATRS helps you determine which specific areas of morphological awareness are best targeted for instruction. There are two other helpful features when a student is identified as needing instruction in morphological awareness.

• First, MATRS provides you with a document that helps explain morphological awareness and its importance to parents. When parents understand morphological awareness and how instruction targeting that skill will be helpful, they likely will be more on board with the instruction you provide their child.
• Second, the MATRS manual features a whole chapter on hypothetical cases of students who perform below grade-level on different morphological awareness components. The case studies also report the kinds of instructional activities that were implemented to help target those problems. These case studies will provide you with concrete ideas for how you might help your students who are struggling in different areas of morphological awareness.

With MATRS, your school will have the comprehensive, reliable, and valid tool needed to assess critical morphological awareness skills—and identify challenges that could impact future reading and spelling abilities. Learn more about the tool and invest in your students’ future literacy success!

The post Why MATRS Matters: Your New Tool for Assessing Morphological Awareness appeared first on Brookes Blog.

If you haven’t started using ASQ^®:SE-2 for social-emotional screening, take a minute to read about what it can do for your program and the young children you work with. ASQ:SE-2 isn’t just an add-on to ASQ^®—it’s an important part of comprehensive early childhood screening that helps get kids off to the best possible start.

Read on to find out why!

(Already use and love ASQ:SE-2? Share this article with a program leader who might need convincing!)

Why is it important to screen specifically for social-emotional development?

Children’s ability to regulate their emotions and skillfully manage social interactions is critical to their healthy development and future success. Beginning at birth, babies use vocalizations and body movements to begin building relationships. These relationships help young children feel a sense of comfort, safety, and confidence—all necessary for forming friendships, communicating emotions, and dealing with challenges.

Ensuring that every child has strong social-emotional skills through screening, early identification, and competence-building exercises helps prepare them for school, reduce bullying, and improve their well-being. And all of this helps set children up for future success!

Why should our program use ASQ-3 and ASQ:SE-2 together?

Many social-emotional challenges go unrecognized prior to kindergarten, keeping kids from receiving the interventions they need during those critical early years. Using ASQ:SE-2 alongside ASQ-3 provides a much more comprehensive look at a child’s development.

While ASQ-3 does touch on social-emotional skills, ASQ:SE-2 goes much further, delving into the child’s skills and progress in seven key areas to offer broad and deep knowledge of this important area of development. Because behavior and development are linked, using the two tools together can also add important context to responses and scores from either questionnaire.

The post Why Use ASQ:SE-2? 8 Questions Answered! appeared first on Brookes Blog.

Post and discuss directions

During class discussions, some students may worry about what you expect from them and what they’re supposed to be doing. Defusing fears can be as simple as clarifying roles and responsibilities before a discussion. Post directions and expectations on the board or pass them out so students will have an easy reference to keep on their desks during the discussion.

• Adapted from Fundamentals of Literacy Instruction and Assessment, 6–12, edited by Martha C. Hougen

Make sure all students can hear you

Make small adjustments so you can be seen and heard at every spot in the classroom. Avoid speaking with your back to students—voice volume significantly drops, and facial cues are eliminated. Routinely repeat questions and comments from other students to ensure everyone hears them.

• Adapted from True Inclusion With UDL by Patti Kelly Ralabate

Flip instructions from negative to positive

When you speak to students, phrase instructions in positive ways so they learn what you expect them to do instead of what you don’t want them to do. For example, instead of saying, “No running in the halls,” say, “Walk, please.” Or instead of saying, “Stop using put­downs,” try saying, “Tell us what you feel so everyone can feel safe.”

• Adapted from Building Trauma-Sensitive Schools by Jen Alexander

The post 14 Small Actions that Make a Big Difference to Students appeared first on Brookes Blog.