What to ask potential teachers

I am meeting with the 2 3rd grade teachers at our school next week to see who is a better fit for our daughter who has a language disorder and is on an IEP. I’ve heard very good things about both of them, but just want to see if one is a better choice for my daughter.

Do you have any suggestions as to what questions I should ask the potential teachers? Here are the test results from a private SLP that we are working with. Also note that I MIGHT be in for a little bit of a fight from the school/school district in regard to taking my daughter to private SLP during school hours since she is getting very minimal help at school. While we plan to ask for 1:1 instead of group therapy at school, they are still limited in how many times she can go because the SLP is only at school 2 days/week, therefore justifying more intervention, which will be at our own expense which is mostly covered by insurance.

This is my post from the Parenting a Child with LD board.

***********
Went to private SLP today and got tons of information. We met with her for 2 hours, but left there feeling very good about things.

Here are the test results: Note that some are not scored because Michelle could not do the tasks without being cued. Instead of just giving her a 0 she decided to cue her and invalidate that subtest because the point of the testing was to gain information on how to help Michelle with therapy and it did give her helpful information in that she knows where the specific deficits are based on what cues helped.

TOLD-P 3
Picture Vocabulary 9%
Relational Vocabulary not scored
Oral Vocabulary not scored
Gram Understanding 1%
Sentence Imitation <1%
Word Discrimination not scored
Phonemic Analysis 50%
Word Articulation 50%

Notice the sentence imitation was so low. That’s because she had to repeat imitation without any visual cues. This was (IMO) similar to karloon’s Balloons in that she could do it much better with the pictures. Take the pictures away and she could not do it at all.

CTOPP
Phonological Awareness Subtests:
Blending Words 63%
Blending Nonwords 75%
Sound Matching 25%

Phonological Memory Subtests:
Memory for Digits 9% (age 5-3)
Non-word Repetition 37% (age 7-6)

Rapid Naming Subtests
Rapid color naming 9%
Rapid Object Naming <1

Sound matching was interesting because she was able to match beginning sounds at 100% and ending sounds at 0%. She kept going back to what the beginning sound was even though seeing the word visually and knowing where the ending sound was located, she could not pick a word with the same ending sound. She said it’s because she is focusing so much on the beginning sound and still processing the beginning sound that the ending sound is lost. I believe this is where the phonemic awareness was a deficit. She said “Her relative strength with the nonword task reflects her ability to code information phonologically for temporary storage in working memory.” In terms of the rapid naming tasks, she could name everything, but not with speed. She did better with colors because they are more familiar. So, she has accuracy, but not speed.

So, she said that rapid naming compounded with phonological weakness was considered a double deficit, which affects her reading abilities moreso than someone with either of those 2 deficits alone.

In the summary section, she stated that her difficulties are in the areas of auditory memory and temporal auditory processing. Difficulty was noted with most auditory processing tasks, especially those involving storage, retrieval and manipulation of information. Phonological processing is inconsistent, with some very weak areas.

So, we’re going to start therapy 3x/week during the summer and cut back to 2x when school starts. For future, she recommended Fast ForWord for possibly later next year or next summer to improve temporal processing. We already discussed that she could not possibly do the program right now.
*****************

Any suggestions as to what to ask potential teachers would be helpful. Thanks,
Kathryn