March 5, 2009
A pair of capstone honors for College of Education’s Joseph Jenkins
You know you’re succeeding when people say your personal work history reads like a chronology of advances in your profession.
Such is the case with Joseph Jenkins, UW professor of special education — and two recent awards underscore the point nicely. Not bad for a guy who came to special education by a kind of sideways trajectory.
Jenkins has taught special education teachers-in-training at the UW since 1988, and was director of the Experimental Education Unit, a state-certified school on the UW campus, for 10 year before that. Before coming to the UW he taught for several years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“For 40 years, I’ve worked to understand reading processes, reading instruction, and how to improve reading skills of children with learning disabilities,” Jenkins wrote in a statement for one of the honors. He has also done significant research on the effectiveness of early intervention and the delivery of special education services.
His two recent awards are:
- The Council for Exceptional Children, dedicated to improving education for students with “disabilities and/or gifts and talents,” named Jenkins the recipient of its 2009 CEC Special Education Research Award.
- Also, the council’s Division of Learning Disabilities gave Jenkins its 2009 Jeanette Fleischer Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Learning Disabilities, for advancing the field “through direct services, policy development, community service, research, or organizational leadership.”
“Either of these awards is considered a capstone achievement of a professional career,” said Eugene Edgar, a friend and fellow UW professor of special education. “To be selected for both awards, and in the same year, is highly unusual and indicative of Joe’s phenomenal career in special education.”
Thomas E. Scruggs, a special education professor at George Mason University, offered high praise in a nomination letter for the CEC award: “(T)he contributions of Joe Jenkins are consistently high in quality, highly influential, and pass the test of time in their longstanding value to the field. It is difficult to imagine another individual who has contributed so much to the field of special education research.”
Jenkins said he’s honored by the recognition and has been blessed with supportive colleagues and working environments, here and elsewhere.
His career got started in the late 1960s, when “there was a lot of self-questioning” about whether one’s work was of practical value. With a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Gonzaga and a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Minnesota, Jenkins got a job at the University of Delaware and began a career in educational psychology.
He conducted research, he said, “but it didn’t seem like it was making much of an impact on people.” Changing direction, he became director of a special education laboratory school on the Delaware campus and the following year took an administrative job at the Southwest Regional Resource Center at New Mexico State University, where he researched reading and writing instruction for students with learning disabilities.
“At that time I had been working in special education for maybe four years without any training in it,” he said lightly. His career transformation was complete when took a job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They hired him as a professor of special education. “Kind of flew in under the radar,” he said.
The highly-regarded special education department at Illinois “had developed a way of thinking about students with learning disabilities that dominated all the thinking in the field,” Jenkins said.
Simply put, it was a derivative of the “medical model” where teachers sought to measure learning-disabled students’ underlying abilities with a series of “careful psychological tests — deep processing stuff, visual and spatial relationships” on the theory that these deficits caused poor reading performance.
“If you think about medicine and apply that kind of thinking to education it all makes sense. But it was just one of those theories that was wrong,” Jenkins said. Instead, teachers should build reading skills “in a systematic way, and measure the acquisition in reading,” so they can adjust their instruction accordingly. “That’s still the answer today,” he said.
Jenkins also has researched early intervention in special education. “What kind of additional instruction can you provide to kids who are not ‘getting it’ in first grade?” he asked. “These are the kids who later get identified as having a learning disability.”
He has also studied how special education services can best be delivered, and has advocated for “redesigning services for struggling students (and) eliminating artificial barriers between general and special education.” This way, schools can save money by teaching similarly-achieving remedial and special education students together in mixed groups.
Jenkins said his current work involves a concept in education called Responsiveness to Intervention, a three-tiered system used to identify students with learning disabilities. All students are tested in the first level, called primary prevention. Those shown to need additional help are moved to secondary prevention, and if they respond well, return to the first tier.
“The kids who don’t succeed, who don’t respond to that secondary intervention, are the kids who have a learning disability,” and receive tertiary services, which can involve individualized programming and monitoring, he said.
Jenkins said he’s working on clarifying which students should be in the secondary screening. “Right now, screening measures are not accurate enough and you end up with too many kids in the secondary pool, so it’s hard for schools to provide a quality secondary intervention.”
Levels of impairment vary among students with learning disabilities, which makes the already difficult task of teaching special education even harder. Most teachers don’t have the time for individualized instruction, Jenkins said.
He said, “I think teachers have to be very good observers — they have to really be paying attention to kids’ performance during their lessons” to better know who needs what kind of additional help.
Jenkins’ recent honors also please his College of Education colleagues, who speak highly of him and his work.
“Joe Jenkins is an incredible scholar, teacher, mentor and colleague,” wrote Ilene Schwartz, professor and chair of special education and director of the EEU. “He has provided some of the guiding principles that are used in schools every day to work with students with learning disabilities and has graduated hundreds of special education teachers and many Ph.D.s in education.”
For his part, Jenkins said he’s been lucky to have supportive colleagues “and some really great students.”
He said, “It helps your work. You end up having conversations about research and getting ideas and it just moves the whole thing forward.”
Learn more about the Council for Exceptional Children and its Division of Learning Disabilities online at http://www.cec.sped.org.
