Who: Joahna Koning, Educational Diagnostician,
Secondary Level Principal
Where: Tien Shan Education Center
When: October 21, 2004 8:30 am.
We discussed a number of
topics of mutual interest:
Teacher
Recruitment
Auditory
Processing Disorder
Reading
Disabilities/Dyslexia
Research
Based Educational Practice
Parent/School
Communication
School-wide
literacy activity
Assessment
for Learning Disabilities in her current population and communicating
adjustment needs to staff
We shared resources and
ideas in each of these areas –
re: Teacher Recruitment, I
shared my ideas about how to encourage teachers to come and suggested offering
a Cultural Exchange opportunity for prospective teachers so that they can come
and check out the teaching environment before making a full commitment.
re: Auditory Processing
Disorder, we briefly discussed two books that I had shared previously with Joahna for her perusal: The Source for Processing Disorders,
by Bibeau, When the Brain Can’t Hear by Bellis). Joahna had also shared with me, Common
Sense About Dyslexia by Huston.
Joahna had previously worked with Huston when she taught at the
university level. She wished to
purchase these books from me and we talked about contacting the authors to
discuss how new brain research intersects with Huston’s model of dyslexia.
re: Research Based practice,
we noted the book Best Practices in Literacy, by Morrow, Gambrell and Pressley
and Joahna requested to purchase this from me as a resource for the school as
they are developing their curriculum.
re: School-wide literacy
activity. I offered an idea that I had
developed in response to an article reviewed by a fellow student in READ
5325. The article was about Post Modern
Picture Books which have broad appeal across age levels. TSEC has a monthly school-wide activity in
which school teams compete for points during a collaborative activity for
developing school spirit and intersection between all grades. I suggested choosing Twisted Tales as a
theme one month. Students could work
together in their teams (representatives from grade k-12 are on each team) to
write their own Twisted Tales and perform them for each other. Team points could be offered for creativity,
cooperation, evidence of including everyone, costumes, props, etc.
re: Assessment, we talked
about the challenge of doing good evaluation in the overseas setting and the
wide variety of problems that get hidden in this population because generally,
the students are hard working. Most
work above what they might do back in their home countries. We also discussed the need to include
descriptive comment in addition to quanititative data that is acquired through
testing. Without such qualitative data,
it can be difficult to be approrpriately discriminating. Additionally, most teachers and parents need
the qualitative data in order to understand the learning issues appropriately.