Ch 1-2
What is Special Education?
Delivering and monitoring a specially designed instruction that is universally designed and tailored to identify and address the individual and the strengths and challenges of students; to enhance their educational, social, behavioral, and physical development; and to foster equity and access to all aspects of schooling, the community, and society.
What is a High-Incidence Disability?
Having learning disabilities, mild emotional/behavioral disorders, mild intellectual disabilities, attention deficit disorders, and speech/language disorders.
What is Preteaching?
A technique used to prepare students for the academic, behavioral, and social expectations of a new classroom that involves introducing them to the curriculum, teaching style, and instructional format they will encounter in the new class.
What is Backward Design?
a process for planning units of instruction and individual lessons by which you first determine the assessments you will use to evaluate your students’ learning. Once you determine these assessments, you use them to guide you in designing and sequencing the instructional activities that your students will engage in to achieve your learning outcomes.
What are Context Cues?
The context in which the word is presented can provide useful cues for determining the pronunciation of unknown words.
What is Inclusion?
Inclusion recognizes that all students are capable learners who benefit from a meaningful, challenging, and appropriate curriculum delivered within the general education classroom and from universally designed, evidence-based, culturally responsive, and differentiated instruction practices that address their diverse and unique strengths, challenges, and experiences.
What is a Low-Incidence Disability?
having physical, sensory, and more significant cognitive disabilities.
What is an ecological assessment?
An assessment that involves analyzing the critical features of the learning environment and the key skills that affect student academic, behavioral, and social performance as well as interviews with students and teachers.
What is Reciprocal Teaching?
You ask students to read a selection silently, summarize it, discuss and clarify problem areas and unclear vocabulary, use questions to check understanding, and give students the opportunity to predict future content.
What are Syntactic Cues?
They deal with the grammatical structure of the sentence containing the word. The syntactic structure of English dictates that only certain words can fit into a particular part of a sentence or statement. Thus, students can be taught to use parts of sentences to figure out difficult words.
What is Least Restrictive Environment?
LRE requires schools to educate students with disabilities as much as possible with their peers who do not have disabilities.
What is a Gifted and Talented Student?
Those who give evidence of high performance capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who require special services or activities not ordinarily provided by the school.
What are Antecedents and Consequences?
The events, stimuli, objects, actions, and activities that precede and trigger a behavior and that follow and maintain that behavior, respectively.
What is the Jigsaw Format?
Divide students into groups, with each student assigned a task that is essential in reaching the group’s goal. Every member makes a contribution that is integrated with the work of others to produce the group’s product. When teams work on the same task, expert groups can be formed by having a member of each group meet with peers from other groups who have been assigned the same subtask. The expert group members work together to complete their assignment and then share the results with their original jigsaw groups.
What are Semantic Cues?
These are available by examining the meanings of the text, can help students improve their word identification skills. Semantic cues can be taught by having students closely examine the sentence containing the unknown word as well as the entire reading selection in which the word appears. These cues are particularly appropriate when students are learning to read abstract words.
What is Response to intervention?
The RTI process attempts to minimize the number of students receiving special education by ruling out ineffective instruction or lack of instruction as reasons for poor academic performance and to reduce the disproportionate representation of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in special education.
How Can I Plan My Inclusive Classroom to Address the Strengths and Challenges of My Students from Diverse Backgrounds?
Recognize that variety characterizes these students and their school performance, with many of them performing above grade level, being highly motivated to succeed in school, and having experiences with overcoming adversity. In addressing the educational strengths and challenges of your students from diverse backgrounds, be sensitive to and adapt your services to take into account the cultural, linguistic, religious, and economic factors that affect you, your students, and their families. It is important to value diversity, foster resiliency and grit, and employ culturally responsive, differentiated, research-based, and universally designed practices. You also need to use a multicultural approach and adjust your teaching behaviors and curricula to reflect your students’ different backgrounds, communicate high expectations for them, and take actions to provide them with the resources they need to achieve.
How Can I Facilitate Friendships Among My Students?
You can facilitate friendships among students by engaging in professional behaviors that support friendships, teaching about friendships, offering social skills instruction, using circles of friends, creating a friendly classroom environment, using peer-based strategies, and involving families.
How Can I Differentiate Instruction for Students Who Have Difficulty Reading and Gaining Information from Text-Based Materials?
You can use a variety of teacher and student-directed text comprehension strategies. In addition, you can make materials more readable by modifying them, reducing their linguistic complexity, incorporating the principles of typographical design, and using instructional technology. Many times, the accommodations you make may benefit more than one type of learner.
How Can I Differentiate Mathematics Instruction?
Focus mathematics instruction on your curriculum and use a problem-solving approach to foster the development of the basic mathematical understandings and skills students need to learn to reason, think, and communicate mathematically and become confident mathematical problem solvers. This involves helping students develop their math facts and procedural skills and teaching them mathematics by experiencing and thinking about meaningful problems related to their lives. In addition, present mathematics appropriately; use a developmental instructional sequence, a variety of teaching aids, and instructional approaches, practices, technologies, and multimedia; provide practice and feedback; and use assessment to guide future teaching and to foster generalization.
Who Are the Members of the Multidisciplinary Team?
The members of the multidisciplinary team include family members, general and special educators, a representative of the school district who is knowledgeable about he general education curriculum and the availability of resources, an individual who can determine the instructional implications of the evaluation results, and the student, when appropriate.
How Can I Differentiate Cultural and Language Differences from Learning Difficulties?
You can work with a diverse team of professionals and family members to assess your students’ performance in both their primary and their secondary languages, understand the processes and factors associated with learning a second language, employ alternatives to traditional testing, and identify your students’ diverse life and home experiences. You and the team can then analyze this information to try to differentiate cultural and language differences from learning difficulties and to develop an appropriate educational plan that includes research-based practices for supporting your students’ academic, social, and language development.
How Can I Promote Positive Classroom Behavior in Students?
You can use relationship-building strategies, social skills instruction, antecedents based interventions, consequences-based interventions, self-management techniques, group-oriented contingency systems, and behavior reduction techniques.
How Can I Use Effective Teacher-Centered Instruction?
To teach effectively, you should establish the lesson’s purpose and relevance to students; review and assess prerequisite skills; give clear, explicit, and complete directions, explanations, and demonstrations, use modeling, think-alouds, and relevant examples; provide time for active and guided practice; promote active responding and check for understanding; give frequent, prompt, specific, and differentiated instructional feedback; offer time for independent activities; summarize main points; and evaluate mastery, maintenance, and generalization.
How Can I Evaluate the Academic Performance of My Students?
You can use summative common assessments, high-stakes testing, and valid, appropriate, and individualized testing accommodations; create valid and accessible student friendly teacher-made tests; and employ technology-based testing and assessments. You can use progress monitoring to make data-based instructional decisions to support student learning and your teaching effectiveness. A variety of classroom-based formative assessments at the beginning, during, and end of lessons can provide you with data to monitor your students’ progress, guide your feedback to students, and inform your teaching. Students’ learning progress also can be assessed by using authentic/performance assessment, portfolio assessment, and instructional rubrics and by examining their IEPs/IFSPs/504 Individualized Accommodation Plans, and promotion and graduation rates.