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Finding Success:

The stories in this section came from collaboration between Kris Hill’s middle school special day class and Mary Male’s teacher preparation class on inclusion. Students in the inclusion class did service learning projects in the special day class to help the students produce their success stories documenting examples of adults who have succeeded despite learning or physical challenges and their reflections on how their thinking about their own success despite challenges was affected by the project. The Examples folder contains the planning forms and rubric used for the project, so that any teacher or teacher educator could adopt or adapt the project to produce his/her own student success stories.

The initial inspiration for the project in Kris Hill’s class came from watching the video, “Ennis’ Gift,” a film dedicated to the memory of Ennis Cosby, a gifted special education teacher. The film consists of interviews with famous and not-so-famous people with learning differences about their challenges and how they found success in life. After watching this film, Kris’ students talked about the examples in the film and compared them to situations in their own lives. The richness of the discussion led Kris to develop the unit plan presented here, which led to the collaboration between Kris, a special education classroom teacher, and Mary, a special education professor.

Teachers-in-training in Mary’s classes volunteered to assist Kris’ students produce their own movies, based on their own research on people who have surmounted obstacles to success and their own stories. These new teachers learned on multiple levels: how to work effectively with students who learn differently, how to use technology to represent knowledge and learning, and how to develop a unit of instruction that can transform student lives forever.
To view a clip from this important film that started it all, go to www.hellofriend.org .

Imagemaking Within the Writing Process

These student stories grew out of a training that Sunnyvale School District provided to teachers. I participated in this week long training called Imagemaking Within the Writing Process, a research project from the University of New Hampshire Laboratory for Interactive Learning. It is a dynamic art-and-literature based approach to writing developed by Beth Olshansky to meet the needs of students with diverse learning styles. Through the use of simple hands-on art experiences, the introduction of quality picture books, and an on-going Artists/Writers Workshop, this innovative approach gives children access to visual and kinesthetic as well as verbal modes of thinking at each and every stage of the writing process. It allows all children to enter the writing process from a position of personal strength and enthusiasm. Since then, I have tried to complete this project annually with my students, 4th and 5th grade special education students identified with a variety of emotional disorders along with learning disabilities and autism/asperger syndrome with comorbid mental health diagnoses. The first 2-3 years, our class projects were paper only, creating wonderful books the students treasured. Eventually, I realized that there was tremendous power in the digital visual experience and our books were then converted to movies using MovieWorks. The students scanned in their collage images, learned how to do voiceovers, chose background music, and learned about timing and sequence. In addition to great integrated art and language arts lessons provided by this curriculum, they also learned about technology, math, and their own personal strengths.

Another project students complete to add to their digital portfolios involve science and social studies reports. These reports are researched and written in Keynote (application) and then exported to Quicktime as a self-contained movie.

 Dolphins                Jaguars              Komodo Dragons

Sharon Eilts

Please feel free to send us your student productions. Please make sure your students and families have signed the video release.

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