Common Core State Standards

Question

Answer

Absolutely.  I do not mean that 100% of the standards relate to what we do, but you are going to be hard-pressed not to find something that relates to what we do in the speaking and listening and the language standard for every single grade level. In addition, language undergirds the other content areas like social studies and technology.   Start by looking at the speaking and listening and language arts standards and you will see they are rich with skills related to syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics and phonology.  You can use these to facilitate your discussions with school teams about the relationship of the speech-language impairment to the general curriculum.  For example, you are doing the IEP in march of the kindergarten year and this child continues to have difficulty with turn-taking and topic maintenance.  At the IEP meeting you can point out "this is what the standard is expecting the child to have by the end of kindergarten.  We need to make a focus on that to enable the child to meet the standard by the end of kindergarten.”

Lissa Power-deFur is Professor and Program Director in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Longwood University.  She has offered numerous presentations on the educational relevance of speech-language impairment, collaboration, and the Common Core State Standards.