Vocabulary LINCing Routine

Edwin (Ed) S. Ellis, Ph.D.

Affliations

Professor
Special Education and Multiple Abilities
University of Alabama

President
Makes Sense Strategies, LLC

Research Affiliate and SIM Professional Development Specialist
University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning

My Background and Interests
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my interest in learning and teaching began way back in 1965 at age 15. My youngest brother had been diagnosed with learning disabilities, and with both parents working 80+ hours a week, many of the responsibilities for his treatment fell on my shoulders. This was back when perceptual motor training to establish brain hemisphere dominance to cure LD was in vogue. I spent countless hours doing “angels in the snow” types of activities with him and trying to help him learn to read and write, although I was somewhat clueless about how to do it. His and my own emotional experiences led me to pursue college studies in the area of psychology, and becoming a teacher never crossed my mind. I accidentally fell into special education when an opportunity presented itself with a tuition grant to pursue a master’s degree in special education/learning disabilities. I didn’t have anything else to do, and it seemed like a way to extend my interest in psychology in a practical way. Only when I had my own classroom and became very invested in understanding my students did I realize that I was one of those people who was “born to teach”… and born to observe and think about learning. I’ve been hooked ever since!

During the late 1970s, due to my service volunteer experiences developing a pretrial diversion program for delinquent adolescents and working in a adolescent drug rehabilitation program, paired with my experience as a teacher of students with LD, I became the education coordinator for one of the Child Service Demonstration Centers (CSDC), which were federally funded programs charged with developing and validating interventions for students with LD. Our particular CSDC program focused on developing interventions for adolescents with LD who had been adjudicated (convicted). Of the many CSDCs that were funded, only a few focused on services for adolescents, and fewer still actually did anything to validate their effectiveness. One of these was a CSDC directed by Don Deshler, a new Assistant Professor at KU, and another one was directed by Naomi Zigmond at the University of Pittsburgh. Those of us concerned with the validation of our programs would meet at conferences to share what we were doing and our data. These were exciting times for all of us, and especially for me because I was collaborating with some brilliant people, and we were all trying to figure out what to do, how to do it, and how well it worked. Most of the CSDCs, however, failed to validate their interventions, so subsequent federal support shifted to funding five research institutes where learning disabilities could be addressed in a systematic, empirical manner, and interventions could be scientifically validated.

Dick Shieffelbush and Ed Meyen were awarded one of these institute grants, and thus the Institute for Research in Learning Disabilities (KU-IRLD) was born. Don Deshler, who was the Coordinator for the KU-IRLD recruited many of us who had been collaborating with him within the CSDCs to come to KU for doctoral studies and to work at the KU-IRLD (now known as the KU-CRL). That’s how I landed in Kansas, and that’s how I became a part of an effort to change education that continues today.

The Story Behind the LINCS Vocabulary Routine
One of the things effective learning strategy teachers do is work very hard at promoting transfer and generalization of a strategy by students to other classes and settings. In other words, they want students not only to learn an effective/efficient strategy, they want the students to put the strategy to work in a range of situations and settings in ways that pay off for students. As a resource teacher, one of the things I would do to promote generalization of a strategy my students had learned was to be a “guest teacher” in my students’ general education classes and teach strategy lessons to all of the students in those classes. I would typically do this after my students had already mastered the strategy in my resource classroom. Thus, when I was teaching the general education students how to use the LINCS Strategy, for example, my students in those classrooms were often the only ones who already knew how to perform the strategy and could demonstrate their abilities to others. Obviously, this was very motivational for my students, but another objective was to make the general education teachers aware of the strategy my students had been learning and how it worked so that they could continue to promote its use in the classroom when I was not around.

What I learned while doing these “guest teacher” presentations was that most of the typical learners could readily acquire the LINCS Strategy, but students who were struggling to learn tended to need more intensive and extensive instruction in it for them to know how to perform it well enough to use it independently. I also learned that even when I did not provide the intensive strategy instruction to my students, they still benefited greatly when general education teachers embedded their subject-area instruction with activities that involved creating LINCS devices for the new vocabulary. From this knowledge sprang the LINCing Routine.

My Thoughts about Content Enhancement Instruction
Don Deshler helped me understand that the way to support inclusion and provide real access to the general education curriculum for students with disabilities was to enable subject-area teachers to use “robust” instructional techniques – that is, instructional routines powerful enough to really impact the learning of students who struggle to learn complex information while also being very effective for all other students in general education classes. Research on the effectiveness of the LINCing Routine shows that it clearly qualifies as one of those robust instructional routines. Furthermore, just as the LINCS Strategy proved to be a good strategy to teach when introducing students to learning strategies, so too has the LINCing Routine been a good introduction to the concept of Content Enhancement for subject-area teachers.

Teacher Feedback on the LINCS Vocabulary Routine
Subject-area teachers have indicated to me that the LINCing Routine is easy to learn, is easy to embed into their current instructional practices, and does not rob them of instructional time. Perhaps most importantly, teachers are very pleased when they immediately experience what Content Enhancement is all about as their students’ performance on classroom tests suddenly and dramatically improves. These experiences help subject-area teachers become much more invested in learning and using other Content Enhancement Routines that are more complex and demanding of their pedagogical knowledge, skills, planning time, and energy but that are also very effective and important to use.

My Contact Information
Please contact me at edwinellis1@gmail.com or at (205) 394-5512.