Intellectual Quality for Students with Severe Intellectual Disability

Recent models of effective pedagogy in schools, such as authentic pedagogy and productive pedagogy have a strong focus on “intellectual quality” – the teaching and learning of significant ideas and concepts, higher order thinking skills, metalanguage, substantive communication and problematic knowledge. This paper explores the application of the idea of intellectual quality to the education of students with high support needs, particularly those with severe intellectual disability and/or multiple disabilities. Special education pedagogy customarily used with this population has its roots in applied behaviour analysis and thus has had a strong focus on teaching functional and observable skills. Internal mental processes have been largely neglected. This paper will explore ways in which intellectual quality can be interpreted in evaluating teaching practices for students with high support needs. Research on teaching communication skills to students unable to use speech for receptive and/or expressive communication has reintroduced a consideration of intellectual development to teachers. This work can be considered as an aspect of metalanguage, and similarly, other fundamental cognitive skills can be considered as deep understanding and higher order thinking. The challenge is to make these aspects of pedagogy more explicit for those who work with this population. Introduction In New South Wales the current model of effective pedagogy advocated by the NSW Department of Education is the NSW Quality Teaching (NSWQT) model, developed from the Queensland productive pedagagy and Newmann and associates’ authentic pedagogy. Within these models there is a strong emphasis on academic learning, on students producing rather than reproducing knowledge, on in-depth understanding and on elaborated and sustained communication. Examples illustrating the application of the model include students demonstrating learning through lengthy writing tasks, sophisticated analysis and problem solving, presentations, in-depth conversations and the like. Yet students with severe intellectual disability cannot read and write, many may have complex communication needs that preclude the use or comprehension of speech or other symbol systems, some will still be in the early stages of cognitive development, and some will always depend on others to interpret their behaviours as indicators of their needs and wants. When a teacher of students like this looks at the framework and examples as it has been presented, for example, in the NSW DET documents, it is not immediately obvious how intellectual quality could be relevant. Indeed, one of the presentations at AARE last year denied the relevance of the QT model even for students with moderate intellectual disability (Formosa & Dixon, 2005). How do we reconcile “high intellectual quality” with limited intellectual abilities? Yes, these students have scored three or four standard deviations below the mean on an IQ test – but what does that mean? In the past (and even today) it was believed that people with severe intellectual disability were “ineducable,” that they had no right to access educational programs. It was acceptable for them to be warehoused in big institutions separate from their families and the community. In recent times, we have seen people who were relegated to institutions emerge and learn to live in the wider community, with various levels of support. We accept that all people can learn a range of skills and can participate in the life of their families and communities, let alone play a part in their own lives. The field of special education has developed research-based practices and strategies to teach functional skills to learners with intellectual disability. The question is, can the principles of special education teaching technology be applied to develop intellectual skills as conceptualised in the QT