Talking turkey about concept development

How many times in the last week have you heard the terms, "accountability," "documentation," "measurement," "evidence," "goals," or "objectives"? In both education and rehabilitation, our work increasingly follows a precise model of planning, instruction, and evaluation to verify effectiveness. Specific planning is vital in pinpointing success, but this precision sometimes restricts the value of the "teachable moment," especially with regard to understanding new concepts. The article featured in this installment of Practice Perspectives, "Talking Turkey," describes a comprehensive teaching unit on wild turkeys that integrates spontaneous experience with planned outcomes. The author not only adapts the experiences for her students with visual impairments, but she also measures what her students have learned. She applies a simple pretest-posttest comparison that identified misconceptions about turkeys and confirmed factual knowledge. Before the unit began, one child thought that turkeys weigh a million pounds! The measurement of scientific thinking and decreased misconceptions was the criterion for improved learning, and the testing was strengthened by comparison with the responses of experts on wild turkeys. MAKING CONCEPTS MEANINGFUL Teachers of students with visual impairments become skilled in interpreting ideas in a way that makes concepts immediate, concrete, and meaningful to their students. As a teacher, I was often overwhelmed by the variety of concepts that were needed for my young students to understand a natural or scientific phenomenon. One of my blind students could imitate cows and pigs, but he had no idea whether they had tails. Another could discuss the causes of the drop in gasoline prices, but she did not know how many wheels were on a car. Their concepts were based on what they heard others discuss as well as what they had personally touched or heard. In providing the backdrop for this introduction to Practice Perspectives, I asked three experienced teachers to share some of their strategies for working with students like mine who were still developing concepts about the world around them. TRANSFORMING CONCEPTS INTO COMPLETE EXPERIENCES Joy Coe, a teacher of visually impaired students at the California School for the Blind, remarked on the value of the teachable moment when concepts are introduced: an unexpected experience that captures the child's attention can be a powerful influence on learning. Joy mentioned an example of concept learning that could only come from Northern California, where earthquakes are a concern. She prepared a unit on volcanoes and earthquakes, which seemed to interest her students. She introduced her students to the duck-and-cover position that would help to protect them in an earthquake by teaching them to quickly duck under their desks with their hands pressed together behind their necks. Tables and chairs in the classroom were shaken to show what the real experience of an earthquake might be like. Before all of the teaching materials for the unit could be completed, a real earthquake occurred and students used what they had learned. Although a natural disaster is not the sort of teachable moment we hope for, the relevance and immediacy of learning was powerful for her students. Joy related other ways in which she translated incomplete concepts into complete experiences: growing a garden, because students did not understand that the food they ate came from the ground, or introducing maps by using three-dimensional models and then replacing them with flat symbols when the concept is mastered. …