Special education teachers are experts in personalized learning. In a classroom where student needs can vary so tremendously, personalizing instruction and empowering self-directed learning aren’t just trendy buzzwords—they’re musts.
This makes the special education classroom an especially good place to discover and bear out successful personalized learning tools for all students.
"Our kids have one or more of 11 different types of learning disabilities,” Randy Carder, coordinator for special education campus operations at Killeen Independent School District in Temple, Texas, said. “What one curriculum can you use for a student that is nonverbal and autistic with a 40 IQ and for a student that is verbal with a 70 IQ? That gap is so great. Waterford can."
At Killeen, students with severe cognitive difficulties from grades K-8 use Waterford Early Learning in their classrooms. Created by the Waterford Institute, a nonprofit research organization, Waterford Early Learning uses adaptive learning software and a unique differentiated instruction sequence to tailor each child’s learning experience to his or her pace and needs.
"We have seen that students with a severe cognitive impairment learn best from an experiential environment,” Carder said. “They attach themselves to the one-on-one interaction with the computer songs and graphics, and they excel at it."
Multimodal Learning
Kinesthetic learning techniques can be particularly helpful for many students with learning disabilities. Classroom Advantage, part of the Waterford Early Learning classroom model, brings Waterford activities to small-group and whole-class instruction using interactive whiteboards or projectors. With playlists and training from professional development coaches, teachers get students interacting with movement, clapping, singing and touching the whiteboard.
With another Waterford computer-based remediation tool, learners engage fine motor skills when finger-writing letters on the table in front of them and gross motor skills when “sky writing” these letters in the air in front of them. Tapping phonemes and syllables within words links tactile stimulation with a concept, and even movement is employed as a source of input as students are asked to lightly press their hands below their jaws to feel their chins drop when pronouncing each syllable in a word.
The results, teachers say, are inspiring.
“C.D. is four years old. I have been working with him for over a year,” Michele Littman, special education teacher at Pleasantdale Elementary School in West Orange, New Jersey, said. “He has never spoken one word at school or at home. In the weeks that C.D. has been using Waterford, he has started singing the alphabet song both at school and at home—and he can now identify his letters. We had tears in our eyes when we heard his voice for the first time.”
Research-Proven Results
Accrediting groups and independent research support what special education teachers say they see in the classroom.
Waterford is endorsed by the Council of Administrators of Special Education (CASE) as an effective in-school learning tool and an at-home kindergarten readiness program. The International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards (IBCCES) also endorsed Waterford Reading as a Certified Autism Resource and indicated Waterford Reading meets the IBCCES criteria for communication competency.
In 2016, the Utah Department of Education published the results of a five-year study of students using Waterford’s at-home kindergarten readiness program. The study showed all Waterford students saw immediate and long-term gains. Students were not only more prepared for kindergarten, but continued to outperform state averages through fourth grade.
Special education students saw even higher gains than the overall group.
Vivien Van Leeuwen, a parent of two Waterford UPSTART students, saw these results firsthand. Her younger son struggled to speak and communicate effectively. He attended speech therapy, but still had a long way to go to catch up with his age group. With the help of Waterford UPSTART, he tested out of speech therapy completely by the age of five. Now, he communicates effectively and, like his older brother, is above average in reading and surpasses most of his class in comprehension.
“I had people telling me that even a couple months ago they had no idea if he was even saying ‘Hi’ to them and now they could understand him reading a long sentence,” Van Leeuwen said. “I would most definitely recommend the program.”