Developing Standards for Orientation and Mobility Instruction

Chapters:

1. Introduction
2. The Current Landscape for O&M
3. Aligning O&M Standards with an Appropriate Vision
4. Aligning O&M Standards with State Education Standards
5. Summary

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

TELLEFSON: At some point, we have to get to a place where we are using a 21st century model of education in order to justify levels of instruction that kids need. So, I am really passionate about finding a way to cheerlead the beginning of the development of standards in orientation and mobility instruction all across the states.

It's important to have standards in our field because standards are what drive the educational process. It's what justifies levels of service; it's what teachers use to justify the amount of time a child might be taken out of a classroom for instruction; it justifies everything. And in our 21st century educational model of today, standards-driven instruction is really where it's at, and that's where administrators can understand and support teachers of the visually impaired and O&M instructors in giving appropriate services.

NARRATOR: In a video clip, we see an elementary school-aged boy who is blind navigating the hallway of his public school. He trails his left hand on the wall and sweeps his cane with his right hand. Next, we see him in the school's literacy office working one-on-one with a teacher of the visually impaired.

TELLEFSON: We also know that without this disability-specific curriculum, orientation and mobility, our kids are at greater risk for not be employable and not being successful in college, career, and community. So, in order to equal the playing field so that children who are blind and visually impaired have the same access to the education they need to be successful, we really need to come through be successful, we really need to come through with these standards.

When students graduate, we want them to be able to function as their sighted peers do, except using a different set of skills, accommodations, strategies, and skills of blindness, but we want the same high standards that we have for all children, because standards are for all children.

CHAPTER 2: The Current Landscape for O&M

TELLEFSON: If we were to take our thinking about standards for O&M and apply it to a model of standards-based education, it would look something like this.

NARRATOR: A graphic slide with the title "Instructional Level" appears on the screen as Mary Tellefson cites examples. Bullet points appear on the screen in text.

TELLEFSON: At the instructional level, we have a lot going on. Boy, we have a lot to be proud of in our field. We have research and journals; we have best practice recommendations, and we have those gurus in our field, those leaders, who have taken a particular topic and just run with it with the result of having best practice strategies.

So for instance, we have people who are leaders in the field of Cortical Visual Impairment, and from them we get a whole set of strategies that will benefit kids.

NARRATOR: A graphic slide titled, "Fields of Expertise" appears.

TELLEFSON: We have people who are into traumatic brain injury. That's been their passion and they have come out with best practice recommendations. Deafblind strategies; we have a ton of gurus, nationally and internationally, working with kids with multiple disabilities - autism, low vision, early learning and the effects of vision impairment on development. We have so many really wonderful things happening at the instructional and strategy level.

The next level up is curriculum. At the curriculum level we have a lot going on. We have many resources and handbooks, the red book and the TAPS curriculum; we have a lot going on in that department too.

NARRATOR: This graphic slide is entitled "Curriculum: Scope and Sequence".

TELLEFSON: When we talk about scope and sequence for orientation and mobility, we have some elements as mobility instructors that we always keep track of, and it's a range or a continuum.

NARRATOR: The graphic depiction of the range or continuum contains a horizontal arrow that points to the right, linking the ends of the spectrum as described.

TELLEFSON: So for instance, we look at the environment, from simple to complex environments; that's the continuum. We have familiar indoor environments on one end of the spectrum and then on the other end we have unfamiliar outdoor or virtual environments. Then, one of the most important is how much safety supervision a child is going to need in any given environment. So, we have maximum, hands-on, or guided travel, all the way to age appropriate independent travel.

NARRATOR: We see a graphic slide with the title "Benchmarks and Performance Indicators".

TELLEFSON: This next slide is about the benchmarks and performance indicators in the assessment practices, and this what we don't really have in our field yet. What we tend to use in our field are developmental checklists and outcomes guides, and those are really appropriate for the curriculum and instruction level.

We can use those as assessments to make sure that children are reaching the level of skill development that we think they should. We have assessment at the instructional level, but we don't really have performance indicators and assessments that we use that would inform standards, and of course, those standards are what we want the children to get to by 12th grade. That's what we're reaching for; that's the overarching goal.

NARRATOR: In a video clip, we see several students who are blind or visually impaired exiting from a door at their school. A teenage girl who is blind sweeps her mobility cane on the walkway as she heads off to her next class.

TELLEFSON: What's really important about that assessment is that that assessment will help orientation and mobility specialists to promote an appropriate level of service, so that kids are able to reach those benchmarks, because you can't have grade level benchmarks and then not give a child instruction and expect them to reach it. And depending on additional disabilities or cognitive disabilities, whatever the individual parts of that child, they might require more instruction to reach a benchmark rather than less instruction to meet a benchmark.

NARRATOR: "Curriculum Influences" is the title of the graphic slide.

TELLEFSON: Curriculum is influenced by a lot of different things - local needs is one. For instance, when I was working on some standards and spoke with a teacher in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is an urban area, or a metropolitan area, they expect their children to learn how to take a bus independently a lot sooner than I would in my rural town, because the kids in Milwaukee have to learn to take a bus because they do that.

NARRATOR: In a photograph, we see a high school aged girl standing on the sidewalk, beneath a bus stop sign somewhere in Phoenix, Arizona. The girl, who is visually impaired, holds mobility cane as she waits for the bus.

TELLEFSON: So, that's an example of where a curriculum would be influenced by local needs, but also the universities have a big impact on what's in our curriculum, and consumers; a lot of great groups out there that are advocating for the needs of people who are blind or visually impaired. And then post-graduation research, when we find out from people who have graduated what worked, what didn't work, what can you do, what can't you do, and then all of that can also effect curriculum.

CHAPTER 3: Aligning O&M Standards with an Appropriate Vision

TELLEFSON: We researched what was going on in every state that we could get information from on the internet, as to what they were doing for standards and aligning IEP goals to standards and that sort of thing. And during this process, we came across a document from the British Columbia Ministry of Education that was so valuable because it broke down orientation and mobility into five major domains.

NARRATOR: The title "The Domains of Orientation and Mobility" appear on a graphic slide.

TELLEFSON: The five domains evident in this document that we found from the British Columbia Ministry of Education were concept development, sensory development, orientation and mapping, travel skills or travel techniques, and communication, personal safety, and advocacy.

So those five areas became the five domains for which we wrote standards. The standards themselves are usually driven by a vision.

Now, in orientation and mobility, we have this vision for children being able to travel as safely and independently as they are capable, and that's a great vision. That's our motto. But it's not good enough for our 21st century model of education. That is not enough. We need to really make sure that our vision has to do with the career, college, and community readiness skills that kids need to have so that they are employable and successful in post high school life.

NARRATOR: In a video clip, we see a young woman who is visually impaired reading her O&M assignment as she stands near a city street. The young woman holds the pages of text close to her face. The next clip shows her using a monocular to identify the cross street of an intersection that she has traveled to.

TELLEFSON: At the same time that we in Wisconsin were looking at developing orientation and mobility standards, we received training in the common core standards, because Wisconsin was one of those states that had decided to adopt the common core. Whether or not Wisconsin stays with the common core or not, really doesn't matter, for this purpose anyway, because it was great training; good timing for understanding what standards need to look like, understanding what coherence was, what rigor was, what kind of wording is used for standards, and how standards were developed.

So, we did use the model of the common core in developing a draft of what we have today. One of the things that the common core used was portraits of student readiness. The portraits of student readiness were the ideals that the standards were then meant to support. So we did use those as a model to come up with a portrait of student readiness in orientation and mobility.

NARRATOR: We see a graphic slide with the title "Portrait of Student Readiness".

TELLEFSON: Here's what it looks like.

Students who are blind or visually impaired are career, college, and community ready when they travel safely, efficiently, and independently in familiar and unfamiliar environments. They use tools and skills to maintain orientation during travel. They apply specific skill sets to variables in the environment. They solve problems of accessibility and safety. They use appropriate tools strategically.

They use independent and interdependent strategies to accomplish a goal. They use make use of environmental patterns and apply positional and relationship knowledge to new environments. They plan routes and construct cognitive maps using a range of media tools and information gathering techniques. They communicate and advocate clearly and effectively. And they access community information, resources, social venues, and services including public and private transportation.

That portrait is the vision of being ready for college, community, and career from an orientation and mobility perspective, and from there we get our standards, because in each one of those ten portrait characteristics that were just listed, there's a hundred thousand skill sets involved to get to that place, so those skill sets become our standards.

CHAPTER 4: Aligning O&M Standards with State Education Standards

TELLEFSON: I think it's really important that when we do have standards, that each state figures out how they align with their own state standards, whether they use the common core or they have a different set of standards. Not because I think orientation and mobility needs to align with other standards to make it important, because it is certainly important enough to have its own standards, and that's what this is all about.

We need to have our own standards because for kids who are blind or visually impaired, orientation and mobility is absolutely crucial to every aspect of their life. So I don't think that we need to align with state standards in order to justify orientation and mobility as a curriculum, but I do think it will be helpful to show where the two curriculums align together, because if you can show that while you're working on residential area concepts in orientation and mobility, that you're really working on math and social studies, if you can show that, then it so much easier to get kids out of their regular school day for instruction, because they aren't losing out on the curriculum.

They're applying the academic curriculum in a different domain, which would orientation and mobility, so I think that's really what's important about aligning the standards that we come up with for orientation and mobility with the other academic standards that are out there.

NARRATOR: In a video clip, a teenaged boy who is visually impaired is taking part in an O&M exercise with his instructor. The boy navigates across an intersection, he enters a convenience store, and inside the store, he purchases a newspaper.

CHAPTER 5: Summary

TELLEFSON: We simply can't justify a level of instruction without standards. And why do we need these standards?

NARRATOR: This graphic slide is titled "The Value of Standards".

TELLEFSON: Because educational standards are for all children. Because visual impairments and blindness effect development and learning. Because disability-specific curriculum is the accommodation for the visual impairment and blindness, giving equal access to the learning environment.

And because research indicates that children who are blind and visually impaired do not have the same employability potential as sighted children. And because orientation and mobility instruction is the curriculum that teaches skills to accommodate for the role of vision in travel and access to the community.

And because O&M instruction is a critical part of a 21st century education that prepares a child who is blind or visually impaired for career, college, and community.

I'm really hoping that if there are other people out there listening to this webcast that have the kind of mind that grooves on curriculum and development standards and that sort of thing, and feels the same about the need for the standards in O&M, that they would contact us and put their minds together with ours, because it can only be a really, really good document and really usable if it has the thinking of a broad range of people in our field.