Educators, Let Narratives In

Here are a few narratives to let in. It’s important to make time and space to grow. These stories are important, especially if you teach humans. When we listen to perspectives from lived experiences, our hearts and minds grow. (This list isn’t exhaustive.)

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez

This is How it Always is by Laurie Frankel

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Reading and Social Emotional Development

Did you know that in order to move through different reading levels, students are asked to retell the story in their own words?

Story retell is incredibly important to help students access their full reading potential.  It’s also important socially and emotionally to be able to talk about their lives, their stories, their weekend, personal anecdotes, their family, and the things they care the most about. 

This week in the teletherapy world, my students watched wordless short films and videos of wordless picture books. They gave the characters voice through perspective taking, dialogue, problem-solving and narrative

We did a mini-lesson about retelling stories. I gave them sentence starters, visuals to remind them about story elements, and I target a skill (character development, dialogue, problem, solution, feelings, etc.)  I asked them questions about the story, but mainly just as prompts to get them thinking and talking.

“I wonder, why, what, where, who might, what might…” 

“What might they be saying here?”  Practice dialogue in stories, She said, “...” 

“I wonder how they feel at that moment?” 

“What’s a different way that story could have ended?” 

“What would you have done?” 

“I wonder why…”

The past few weeks we watched:

Chalk by Bill Thomson 

Hair Love by Matthew A. Cherry

Scarlett Aida Rivero Osejo Short Film by Studio NYC

Bao by Domee Shi 

What books and films do you like to use in therapy?

Authentic Assessment Pie

I have been asked...What is authentic assessment? Or as Chelsea Cornejo and Phuong Palafox say, “show me what that looks like!” 

This pie is everything to my practice. This “authentic assessment” pie is how I went from, “I don’t have time for that,” to “I would have left this field if I hadn’t started doing story-driven authentic assessments.”

Our students have lived stories. The story of their home language, the story of their educational learning environment, the story of their bilingual language development, the story of families’ hopes, dreams and concerns, the story of students’ communication strengths and differences in the classroom and the stories they share, create and retell in their own words. 

One frigid, icy and snowy day, I was stuck in Chicago traffic carpooling with Mari Bliss. Our conversations ranged from…”uh oh I think I just peed a little,” to books, weekend stories, venting sessions, our fur babies, our travels, and of course...speech-language pathology.

I will never forget brainstorming this evaluation process out loud with Mari one day and she said something like, “when you are doing an evaluation, it’s easy to get stuck and focused on the standardized testing, but the thing about converging evidence, is that it’s the qualitative information that gives us a full picture of strengths and needs.”

OHHHHHHH.

It finally clicked for me. 

In order to fully understand the academic and social-emotional impact of students’ learning and communication differences, we paint a complete and loving picture of the whole student. Check out the difference between this traditional pie and authentic pie. Authentic pie takes into consideration the important people in the student’s life. Traditional pie, takes a biased, irrelevant snapshot in time with high variability, and little acknowledgement for the whole student’s strengths and differences. 

In the next few weeks, I'll take slices of authentic assessment pie, cut them up, and look at the ingredients and recipe with you!

Written by: Laura Renee Finkel

References:

Mari Bliss Carpool circa 2017

https://the-juvenileforensic-slp.myshopify.com/

The Seven Integral Factors: The critical pieces of assessment for English Learners (Hamayan et. al, 2013)

Language Sampling Teletherapy

Language Sampling from Afar

Language Sampling

SALT Love: 5 reasons I love SALT as a practicing school-based SLP