Ep 41. Supporting students with math difficulties with Sarah Powell

This transcript was created with speech-to-text software.  It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Deepika Tung.  

     

You can listen to the episode here: Chalk & Talk Podcast.  

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Ep 41. Supporting students with math difficulties with Sarah Powell

     

[00:00:00] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk & Talk, a podcast about education and math. I am Anna Stokke, a math professor, and your host. 

 

Welcome to today's episode of Chalk and Talk. My guest today is Dr. Sarah Powell, an expert in teaching students who may face challenges with math. She's not only a leading researcher in her field, but also a passionate advocate for evidence-based practices in teaching math. This episode focuses on how we teach math to students who experience difficulties. 

 

We discuss the shortcomings of a recent joint position statement by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, that's the NCTM, and the Council for Exceptional Children, that's the CEC. We explore why their recommendations fall short of addressing the needs of students with math difficulties and how critical evidence-based practices, such as systematic or explicit instruction, were glaringly absent. 

 

Sarah also provides actionable strategies backed by robust research that can make a real difference in students math success. This conversation is about more than just teaching, it's about the ethical responsibility we have as educators, policymakers, and advocates to get math instruction right. Math is a cumulative subject, and every missed opportunity to teach it effectively compounds the challenges that students face later. 

 

We owe it to every child to provide the best possible instruction. As Sarah emphasizes, the evidence is readily available. It's a moral imperative to follow it. I hope you enjoy the episode. Just a note, we have included a copy of the NCTM, CEC position statement along with Sarah's group's response to it on the resource page. 

You will find other articles and resources mentioned in the episode there too. Now without further ado, let's get started. 

 

It is an honor to have Dr. Sarah Powell with me today. And she is a professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Texas at Austin. She has a PhD in special education from Vanderbilt University. She's a former kindergarten teacher. Her research focuses on supporting students who face challenges in mathematics. 

 

She develops and evaluates interventions for students with mathematics difficulties. She also conducts professional learning for teachers across the U. S. and Canada, and she even spent three weeks in Australia in 2024 working with teachers there. She has won several awards for her research, such as the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2019, and the Kirk Award for Outstanding Research Article from the Division for Learning Disabilities, Council for Exceptional Children, in 2024.  

 

She helped lead a lot of the early efforts around conversations about the science of math. And I have been meaning to have Sarah on for a while, and I am really excited to talk to her today. Welcome, Sarah, welcome to my podcast.  

 

[00:03:31] Sarah Powell: Thank you so much, Anna. I feel this is a situation where I can be like, long time listener, first time caller, so I am really excited to be here today, and I am glad we could make this work, and I am quite excited to talk about our topic for today.  

 

[00:03:44] Anna Stokke: So, we will get right into that. So, there are a few things we want to talk about, but we are going to start with a discussion on a joint position statement that was recently released by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, that's the NCTM, and I have talked about them on the podcast before, and it's a joint statement between the NCTM and the Council for Exceptional Children, CEC, and the statement is on the Teaching of Mathematics to Students with Disabilities.  

 

[00:04:14] Sarah Powell: Yes.  

 

[00:04:15] Anna Stokke: The statement references the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which guarantees that students identified with a disability are entitled to a free, appropriate public education that ensures access to the general curriculum. 

 

Now, this joint position statement outlines a series of actionable recommendations for supporting students with disabilities in mathematics. However, you led the writing of a response letter that critiques that statement, calling it inadequate.  

 

[00:04:44] Sarah Powell: I did, yes.  

 

[00:04:46] Anna Stokke: Your letter points out that many of the recommendations are based on beliefs and philosophies, while key research-based methods are omitted. 

 

So, let's discuss where that position statement falls short, and let's actually explore some evidence-based strategies for effectively teaching math to students with disabilities, a very important topic. So, first off, for those who might be unfamiliar, can you just explain what disabilities in math can look like in the classroom, and what challenges students with disabilities typically face when learning math? 

[00:05:19] Sarah Powell: Yeah, that's a great question, Anna. So, it is estimated that about 3 to 7 percent of students in the school population likely have what we will call a math disability. So, here in the United States, that's often identified and called a “specific learning disability” and then those students have individualized education program, uh, goals in math, sometimes the United States and sometimes a lot of times out of the time out of the United States, people call this dyscalculia, which is the math version of dyslexia for reading. 

 

And so, when students have a math disability, they can struggle with a lot of different aspects of mathematics, whether those that is related to number and operations, that could also be related to how students work with geometry or measurement. A lot of students that have a math disability also experience difficulty with word problem solving. 

 

And so really what we see is that these students, for the most part, just have persistent challenges in mathematics. But I will say, even though this statement that we are going to talk about today is focused on students with an identified math disability, there's a large group of students in the United States, as well as Canada, and in many other areas of the world, that experience what I would consider math difficulty. 

 

And so those are students that don't have and identification of a disability but do show that they are having a hard time with math. And so, I think that this position statement is really important, not only for students with disabilities, but also for students who are in that gray zone. They are having some math difficulty. Their teacher likely needs to provide more math support than is currently being provided. And so many of the “actionable recommendations” that we could talk about today would be important for students with math disabilities as well as students who are experiencing math difficulty.  

 

[00:07:10] Anna Stokke: Okay, so we are actually talking about a very large group of students that would be affected by some of these recommendations, right? 

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[00:07:17] Sarah Powell: Yeah, in the United States at grade four, it's about 64 percent of kids that show that they are having difficulty with math. And I think it's a pretty similar number of students in Canada and in places like Australia and other places around the world. So, it's a lot of students. 

 

[00:07:34] Anna Stokke: And my guess is it might even increase as you move up the grades. 

 

Would I be right?  

 

[00:07:39] Sarah Powell: You're exactly right. Yeah. By grade eight, we see that it's around like 68, 70 percent of students in the United States that don't meet this, what we would consider a minimum level of math proficiency. And then by grade 12, it's about 75 percent of students. And I'll tell you, Anna, and you know this, but these “minimum levels of math proficiency” are typically pretty low bars. And so, this means that the majority of students in schools in the U. S. and, and in Canada and other places are not showing even the minimum level of math proficiency needed to go on and be successful in the next grade level or as they exit school and go into college or career. 

 

[00:08:19] Anna Stokke: Because of this, it seems like a great idea that we might get this position statement from the NCTM and CEC. So, you read it, and what were your initial thoughts when you read the position statement?  

 

[00:08:32] Sarah Powell: Yeah, so, a little background knowledge. So, I would say about 16-18 months ago, a colleague of mine called me, and they had some questions for me about research in the area of math difficulty and disability. 

 

And they were on the committee. And I texted them yesterday and asked if it was okay to say that somebody had talked to me, and they said it was, yes, yes. And they really had some questions of saying like, oh, we have been talking about this at this panel. Do you know of a research base to support X or Y? 

 

And is there anything that we might not be talking about this panel that you think might be helpful for kids with math disability. So, I knew this was on my radar, but I didn't see anything, I didn't really know about conversations that were going on until in September of 2024, I received an email from the Council for Exceptional Children, or CEC, and it said, There's this position statement from NCTM and CEC right now, this is a first draft, and we would like feedback on this. 

 

And so, I opened it up, and I read it, and I had about an hour open in my calendar, which is a little unusual, and I, um, wrote a response to it, and I, I have it here. Your viewers can't see it, but I wrote 10 things that I thought would be important to include in such a position statement that were included. 

 

And I submitted my feedback online, and I actually signed my name to it. It said they were looking for anonymous feedback, but I said, you know, I am Sarah Powell, this is my feedback. If you have any questions, please reach out. And so that was in September. And then, I believe it was early December, I started to see on social media, this statement has been released. 

 

So I was, I was like, oh, I wonder how much feedback they took from me and other people to put together with this statement. And when I opened it up, I would say I was pretty disappointed because the statement that was released in December seemed to be almost identical to the statement that I saw an early draft of in September. 

 

And again, it just had a lot of things in it that I would say teeter more toward beliefs rather than research-based practices or evidence. And I felt that the actionable recommendations for teachers were very underdeveloped and not really helpful at all. I think I actually referred to this statement as a fluff statement. 

 

And so that's where we are today. 

 

[00:10:56] Anna Stokke: Maybe you should summarize some of the key recommendations in that position statement.  

 

[00:11:02] Sarah Powell: Yeah. So, in the position statement, which I am sure you will link, uh, in your podcast, and it's also pretty easy to find online. The first part is they, they have three bulleted items that they say are really important. 

 

So, one is that students with disabilities have a right to access and be provided with appropriate supports to be successful with grade level math content. I do not disagree with that at all. My second bullet point is that students with disabilities have a right to high quality instruction. Totally agree. 

 

And a third bullet point is that students with disabilities have a right to be supported by educators who believe in their abilities. Great. I think all of those things are important. Anna, what do you think?  

 

[00:11:38] Anna Stokke: I agree.  

 

[00:11:39] Sarah Powell: All right, but then as we go into more of the details, so on the second page, it starts to talk about high quality, and they actually use the term research-based instruction. 

 

And it's really interesting to me that they say that students should receive research-based instruction yet put together a statement that I would say, fairly light on research, but they talk a lot about the importance of students with disabilities getting into grade level standards and having instruction on grade level content. And I agree. I wholeheartedly agree that students should be working on grade level content.  

 

Yet, there's the next sentence that says, limiting students to below grade level content will not improve outcomes towards mathematics proficiency. Now, I would agree that we don't want to only do below grade level content, but as I have listened on your podcast a number of times, so many people, including yourself, including myself, talk about how math is cumulative. 

 

And I cannot just work on grade level standards with a seventh grader if they are still having difficulty with multiplication, with division, with fractions. And the way this reads, it's almost, as it doesn't go beyond that. What I read to you was basically all it said there is that we shouldn't be working on below grade level content. 

 

And it really, for many students, it has to be a meaningful combination of unfinished learning content and grade level standards. It can't just be grade level standards. And then as it continues, digs into UDL, which we will probably talk about on this podcast, and it talks about use of representations. It talks about multi tiered systems of support. That's a big thing in special education. That's great.  

 

But then as we get to the actionable recommendations, this for me was where I felt that this statement was just completely underwhelming. So, they have some actionable recommendations, the first are for teacher educators and state education departments. 

 

The first is that they require special ed. majors to take a minimum of one mathematics method course. It doesn't say whether that should be a special ed. math methods course or a general ed. math methods course, or maybe a combination of that. But then the second bullet point says to require general education majors to have field-based learning opportunities to teach mathematics to students with disabilities, but no course on it. 

 

And so, I don't understand why there would be course related expectations for preservice teachers in special education, but not the same expectations for teachers in general education. Because as we all know, general education teachers are the people who are providing most, if not all, of the math instruction to students with disabilities. 

 

So, we've got some stuff there. Then I really had some, I'll say issues, with the actionable recommendations for general education and special education teachers of mathematics. So, the first, there's uh, eight bullet points here. Is it okay if I talk about all of them? 

  

[00:14:33] Anna Stokke: Absolutely. Go for it.  

 

[00:14:34] Sarah Powell: Okay. All right. Let's do it. All right.  

 

So, the first says to incorporate universal design for learning framework and unit and lesson planning. Well, Universal Design for Learning or UDL is a big thing that's talked about in special education. Yeah. The evidence base for UDL, I would suggest, is very underwhelming, and there have been some really good articles written on this pretty recently about UDL. 

 

So, the idea with UDL is that students should be engaged in instruction that really is individualized to the student and meets students needs. And there's these areas of like engagement, representation, and expression. So, maybe students have different ways that they can engage with their learning. But as a recent meta-analysis showed by Zhang et al. in 2024, it's very unclear what the definition of UDL is, it's very hard to quantify when teachers are actually implementing UDL, and it's almost impossible to measure UDL, and I know one of your previous podcasts with Brian Poncy, he talked about this whole thing and he said something like, if you can't quantify it, then you can't measure it, and if you can't measure it, you can't understand the impact. And that is totally what UDL is.  

 

And there's a, there's another really nice article by Boyson also in 2024 that kind of warned that UDL somewhat starts to cross over into learning style territory, which we know is an educational myth. And so, there's just like a lot of uneasiness as, as to what exactly UDL is. 

 

And it's not what I would say is a, A) Research-based recommendation for teachers or B) An actionable thing for teachers to do. So that's the first bullet point. The second bullet point talks about use of representations, and that is actually one of the research-based practices that has been identified time and time again for students with math. So, cool.  

 

Third says to plan proactively using a preventative model for instruction. I interpret that as something related to Multi Tiered Systems of Support or RTI, response to intervention, and that is important. Students need to have core instruction and then supplemental instruction when necessary. So, okay, great. 

 

But I will tell you, school's implementation of MTSS is very hard because it's very expensive and it's also a hard structure to put into place. So, it's not easy for everybody to do that. Fourth thing that they said was that position students with disabilities as valuable owners and contributors of the mathematics being learned. 

 

There's a lot of ways we could go with this. I would kind of go like a growth mindset way, which I think we would agree like having a growth mindset is helpful, but there's not a lot of research that says that improves math outcomes. There's a really great study by Lynn Fuchs and colleagues in 2021, where they did fraction intervention with kids. 

 

And then half of the kids in the fraction intervention received also a growth mindset activity each day. And what they learned at post test is that there was no difference on the fraction outcomes whatsoever, whether you received or did not receive the growth mindset activity each day. And so really the best way to help students see themselves as learners and owners of mathematics is to teach mathematics instead of to do all this other stuff. 

 

I'll pause there, Anna, to see if you have any comments so far and then we can get to the other four bullet points. 

 

[00:17:53] Anna Stokke: Well, I do have some comments. So, first of all, well, I mean, I was quite curious about the UDL stuff because I hear about UDL a lot, but I didn't actually know what it was. 

 

[00:18:04] Sarah Powell: It's very hard to define what UDL is, and most teachers, when you talk to them, they'll say like, oh, I am doing those things, and I agree.  

And I think that's the problem with UDL is like, well, what is it exactly? And then that Zhang et al., 2024 article, they talk about, well, we need to have these checkpoints to say like, this is exactly what UDL is. 

 

And, and there's just not a lot of real hard evidence to say that when teachers do UDL, it leads to improved student outcomes.  

 

[00:18:36] Anna Stokke: I will post that paper that you talked about on UDL. I also hadn't heard about the Fuchs's paper on growth mindset. And so, I am going to post that. I am going to post that for my listeners. 

 

So that's really helpful to know. Of course, yeah. Absolutely, the best way to get good at math and end up having a good mindset about math is just to actually learn math, right?  

 

[00:18:59] Sarah Powell: Yep. We have to teach the math. Yes. Agreed. 

 

[00:19:10] Anna Stokke: Let's keep going. What else have you got there? 

 

[00:19:11] Sarah Powell: So, then it, that continues the fifth bullet point about actionable recommendations for teachers is to provide paired time for students to share and rehearse their thinking and ideas in multimodal ways before moving to a whole group discussion. There's a lot in that sentence right there, and there's not a lot of research that says that students have to share and rehearse their thinking before engaging in whole group discussion. 

 

But, probably helpful for students, but not a strong evidence base. Six, it talks about providing a variety of interactive learning experiences. I pulled out my notes from the first time I read this, and I wrote next to it, what? I don't even understand what that means, and without further explanation, I don't know if a lot of teachers would understand what that means. 

 

Um, seventh, it says use flexible grouping structures to cultivate a community of learning. Again, this just seems a little wishy washy. Sure, let's have students work with different students, but what is a community of learning? I need more information. And then finally, it says build meaningful recommend, or connections between concepts and procedures. 

 

And I, I wrote here, okay, sure, how? and that's it, Anna. Those are the eight bullet point recommendations for general education and special education teachers of mathematics. There's other stuff in here for policy makers, for school and district leadership, for grant agencies. Great. And we, but I think we should focus on the recommendations for teachers and not only what is there, but what is not there? 

 

And I think that's what got a lot of people, including myself, a little riled up. And that's why I wrote a response to this position statement because of the absence of things on those actionable recommendations.  

 

[00:20:57] Anna Stokke: So, if I am understanding correctly, so, first of all, we have this list of recommendations which are billed as actionable, but they are actually not really that actionable because in a lot of cases, you don't even know what they mean. 

 

[00:21:08] Sarah Powell: Yeah, use representations. Okay, I got it. The other seven, I am not really sure how I would do that as a math teacher in the classroom and whether that would contribute to improved outcomes for students with disabilities.  

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[00:21:24] Anna Stokke: So, the next thing is they are billed as research based. Everything in education is always billed as research based, just so we know. 

But we have to figure out what actually is research based and what actually isn't research based because we don't, when someone says that we don't know if it's true. So, that's the second thing. And then the third thing is that really important things that have a strong research base for working with children with disabilities and mathematics were omitted from this statement, right? 

 

[00:21:53] Sarah Powell: Yes. Very much so.  

 

[00:21:55] Anna Stokke: So, let's talk about that. Can you provide some specific examples of where it really falls short?  

 

[00:22:02] Sarah Powell: I think your comment about everything is research based is something that I think about a lot, and I know based on listening to your podcast and talking to you previously, I feel like you think about that a lot too. 

 

And I know that there's different types of research that contribute to different types of evidence, but there are types of research that have been replicated again and again and again and again. And those are some of the things that I would suggest we rely on. Like if we didn't just work one time, it didn't just work 10 times, but we've seen that 100 studies have used representations to help students understand fractions better. 

 

Well, my gosh, we should probably be using representations to help students understand fractions better, right? In special education, there’s a lot of research related to math, and I would say there's a lot of very high-quality research that's been conducted in this area, not just in the last decade, but over the last several decades. 

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And so there are quite a few meta-analyses, so a meta-analysis is a, a study of other studies that can come to some conclusions. And we will see that a lot of meta-analyses say that students should be engaged in, I'll say explicit instruction, so that they can understand foundational content in math. 

 

There's meta-analyses that have showed that use of representations, hands on manipulatives, or there's a meta-analysis recently about virtual manipulatives, that that's been helpful at improving the math outcomes for students. And some of this literature has been conducted with students within identified disability in math. A lot of this literature is in that zone of math difficulty where some of the students might have an identified disability, but many of the students do not.  

 

But if we pull from those two areas of research, there's quite a bit that we can rely on. And I could go over a lot of different meta-analyses, but there's a practice guide from the U.S. Department of Education that came out in 2021 that does a pretty good job of putting together what are some of the research validated practices that are important for the teaching of math when kids experience difficulty with math, which I would say that's kids with a math disability and kids with math difficulty. 

 

And there they outline six practices that have a strong evidence base to support their use. And I use the word strong because that is the exact word, that's the exact terminology from that IES practice guide. And in fact, they identify that all six of these practices have “strong” evidence to support their use. 

 

And that's a little interesting because there are four other practice guides in math from the U. S. Department of Ed. There's one about word problem solving, one about fractions, one about algebra, and one about early math. And they have varying levels of evidence that they will say either minimum, moderate or strong level of evidence. 

 

And this is the only math practice guide where all six have a very strong level of evidence to support their use. So, you are probably asking, well, what are the six practices, right? I'll get there. So, in the practice guide, they talk about the following things, first, and I am going to do them out of order from the practice guide, because this is usually the order that I talk to teachers about these. 

 

First is that we need to make sure that students have a lot of opportunities to learn the language of math. So, we can think about that as the symbolic language of math. I know Daniel Ansari talked about that when he was on your podcast, but I think a lot of that is around the vocabulary of math. Like, do students understand the words and terms that are used to explain and communicate in mathematics? 

 

Second and third is that students need to use a variety of representations to understand the concepts and procedures of math. So, those are those hands-on tools, virtual tools, graphic organizers, drawings to really help connect things to that abstract form of mathematics and connected to that, third is students need to have a lot of practice with number lines, both number lines with whole numbers and then importantly number lines related to rational number understanding so that students understand the magnitude of number. 

 

So, we've got vocabulary, representations, number line. Fourth practice that has a very strong research base to support its use is this idea of explicit instruction. Some people call this systematic instruction or direct instruction. Um, in the practice guide, it uses the terminology systematic. A lot of people out in the world call this explicit instruction. 

 

I often refer to this as modeling in practice. But the idea is that we need to model mathematics and give students a lot of opportunities to practice mathematics while keeping them engaged, asking a lot of questions, getting, uh, you know, them to be highly engaged in both the model and practice, and then giving a lot of feedback to that engagement. 

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And then fifth in the practice guide, they talk about this idea of building fluency. They talk about it doing timed activities with fluency. I know Brian Poncy talked about that on your podcast. I would suggest just building fluency and that fluency is that ease and accuracy math, so that's important. 

 

And then sixth, they talk about a focus on word problem solving, which maybe a podcast for another day is my favorite thing to talk about, but that students need really good strategies for word problem solving and so on. So, they talk about those six evidence-based practices that have a strong level of evidence to support their use, yet, Anna, only one of those is mentioned in this NCTM, CEC position statement. 

 

What do you think about that?  

 

[00:27:23] Anna Stokke: Well, I know which one it is, and it, it's consistent with sort of the things that I have noticed over, you know, many years, recommendations coming from organizations such as NCTM.  

 

[00:27:36] Sarah Powell: Yeah. And why do you think we see representations so often? Why do you think that is?  

 

[00:27:40] Anna Stokke: It's because of these kinds of recommendations, right? 

 

[00:27:45] Sarah Powell: Yeah, well, and not that recommend, not that representations are easy, but I think they are some of the lower hanging fruit. It's harder to get into, well, how do we teach this math content? It's much harder to get into word problem solving. And so, like, representations, oh, yeah, like, let's use some manipulatives. 

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Let's do some drawing. Let's use a number line. You know, that's a good start. But that's not everything. And that's just a small piece of the math learning puzzle for students. And so while it's listed in the actionable recommendations as user representations, I say, great, but what about these other things that have a really strong evidence base to support their use, particularly, and I think the, the one around explicit instruction, a lot of people that I talked to kind of got bent out of shape, that explicit instruction in a document for students with disabilities was not mentioned all and that just seems, and I used it in my rebuttal statement, and I think I called it, “educational malpractice” and I do think, especially from an organization such as the Council for Exceptional Children, that we are doing our students a disservice by not talking about the role of explicit instruction in the learning of math. 

 

[00:29:07] Anna Stokke: So, why do you think explicit instruction was omitted?  

 

[00:29:13] Sarah Powell: Probably for a lot of reasons. There were panelists that got together to put together these recommendations. And I understand it was a panelist of people who represented general education and special education. And there's a lot of talk out in the math community about explicit instruction and whether or not it's a helpful thing and whether or not we should be doing it at all. 

 

And, you know, I remember Daniel Ansari on your podcast talked about these false dichotomies. And I think it's, it's not an either or like we should do explicit instruction, or we should do inquiry instruction. No, it's really a continuum. And, but it's like, when should we do this? and I see that explicit instruction is really foundational for learning anything new in mathematics. 

 

And until you have, I would say, a proficiency with that content in mathematics, you really can't move to engaging in tasks that revolve more around inquiry. I remember when Brian Poncy was on your podcast, he said, you can't start at the top to get to the top. And I was like, Brian, that's exactly right. 

 

There is a role for explicit instruction, but there's some conversations in the math ed. community where they just don't really embrace explicit instruction in the way that special education embraces explicit instruction, or I would even say like cognitive science or, you know, educational psychology have embraced explicit instruction. 

 

[00:30:39] Anna Stokke: So, why is systematic explicit instruction so crucial for teaching math to students with difficulties in math?  

 

[00:30:48] Sarah Powell: Explicit instruction is modeling that comes from the teacher. That modeling has to be engaging with the student. So, this is not just teacher talk. This is not just what a lot of people will call the I do, but it's a model for how to solve a specific type of problem. 

 

And the students are engaged in that model. And then the other big part of explicit instruction is that there's practice opportunities. I always suggest that students aren't learning math until they are practicing mathematics. The model kind of sets you up for success, but the practice is where that learning of mathematics occurs. 

 

And so, in explicit instruction, students, uh, are engaged in a lot of practice opportunities. A lot of that is guided practice where the teacher and students are practicing the same problem. Some of that might be peer to peer practice. Some of that might be independent practice. And all of the time when students are engaged in that modeling and engaged in that practice, teachers are asking a lot of questions to help with engagement. 

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Students are responding frequently. Um, our typical rule of thumb when we design intervention is that students have to be responding at least every 30 seconds or else you are losing their attention. And then we are giving a lot of feedback. We are giving affirmative feedback to those responses and corrective feedback. 

 

But it's just this, this combination of modeling and practice with those supports for engagement that lead to a very active learning opportunity for students. And so, when we think about explicit instruction, I think about modeling practice and that engagement. And what's interesting about explicit instruction is we are talking about math here today because this is a math podcast and you like math and I like math, but explicit instruction, the conversations are alive and well about explicit instruction related to reading, how students learn to read, how do students learn to write. 

 

It's very helpful for them to model and practice there. How do students learn reading comprehension in science or social studies? There's a lot of explicit instruction that goes on there. And in fact, the Council for Exceptional Children has really talked a lot about explicit instruction. A few years ago, they put together first a set of 22 what they call high leverage practices or HLPs. 

 

They've now kind of come out with version two where they have like these six big pillar high leverage practices. Gina Nelson and colleagues in 2022 did a meta-analysis of the HLPs, the 22 HLPs that were recognized by the Council for Exceptional Children as being high leverage practices for students with disabilities and the high leverage practice that had the single strongest research base was explicit instruction. 

 

So much so that when CEC just released their revised high leverage practices with their six pillar practices, explicit instruction is one of the pillar practices. So, to see the Council for Exceptional Children have all this documentation about how important explicit instruction is, yet a joint statement produced by the Council for Exceptional Children not saying anything, not, not one lick about explicit instruction, to me, goes back to my quote that I talked to you about a little bit earlier, does seem like educational malpractice. 

 

[00:33:56] Anna Stokke: It also seems strange, right? If they have a lot of other documents that that suggests that explicit instruction is really important, it's odd that they would sign off on a position statement, a joint position statement that excluded it.