Special Ed Instructional Resources Secondary

  • Guiding Principles
     
     
    Build capacity for general ed and special ed teachers to design responsive instruction that supports a range of student needs
     
    Instructional practices promote students’ belief in themselves as learners
    • Teach a Growth Mindset
    • Build winning streaks
    • Mistakes and struggles are opportunities for growth & learning
     
    Students Learn by Doing
    • Active engagement is key to learning - talking, writing, experiencing, making meaning
    • Talking is learning
    • Curriculum and tasks should be relevant to learners
     
    Rigor and Access for All
    • Consider principles of Universal Design for Learning
    • Pacing should be responsive to individual needs
    • Students can benefit from repeated exposure to concepts - cycling back to previous learning (presented in new ways) while continuing to move forward with new learning
     
    Assess Well, Assess Frequently
    • Provide explicit feedback sooner rather than later
    • Adjust instruction in response to data
    • Frequency of progress monitoring should be related to the gap
    • Students track their own progress
    • Students need a variety of ways to demonstrate learning
    • Quality assessment guides teams in making critical decisions about instruction, placement, etc.
     
    Student Voice and Agency
    • Students express long-term goals and design individual pathway for college & career readiness
    • Students understand their different strengths and abilities as learners
    • Students learn to self-advocate and take ownership of own learning
    • Student Talk is fundamental to learning
     
    Inclusive Cultures
    • Students learning from/with peers
    • Relationships Matter
     
    Make the Hidden Explicit
    • Even within a constructivist pedagogy, there is an important role to instruction that is explicit and systematic. This includes providing models of proficient problem-solving, verbalization of thought processes, guided practice, corrective feedback and frequent cumulative review
     

     
     
    Resources: