At the beginning of this school year, I decided to add a PE endorsement to my license.  I’ve began to study in preparation for the content test.  I’m lucky enough to know PE teachers in the district who have been very helpful to me, encouraging me, even loaning me textbooks to study.  Currently I am reading Motor Learning and Performance, by Schmidt and Wrisberg.  Much like the posts during my ESOL courses, I find it beneficial to re-process what I read by writing about it and connecting it to my current situation as a Special Education teacher.  Currently I’m reading chapter 3, Processing Information and Making Decisions.  I find it extremely interesting how these PE concepts relate directly to student learning.

Practice, page 62

• Highly practiced performers can overcome many things
• 2 major factors affect Response Time (apply to non-sport tasks)
• 1) amount of practice
• 2) nature of practice

Decision making delays, page 63

• If you predict/anticipate what is coming next, you by-pass the processing activities needed to select and program a response

Attention, page 72

• Definition: focalization and limitation of information-processing resources
• Can place limits on human skilled performance
• Challenge is to effectively manage attentional space by making the right kinds of decisions about which information to attend to and how to handle it

Reflection from a Special Education perspective

My struggling readers do not have the fluency to predict/anticipate what the next word in a sentence is because of their disability.  They use so much brain power figuring out each sound, or each individual word, they may be unable to pay attention to other things, like making meaning (the most important thing when reading!).

What can I do?  Give them more practice to develop fluency with common patterns (letter-sound correspondences) of reading.  If they can become more fluent, they will be able to focus more on the meaning of their reading.

For my students with ADD or ADHD, what can I do?  Is “effectively managing attentional space” a teachable skill?  Or is providing instruction in a small group setting with less distractions the only thing I can do for them?