Students with disabilities in self-contained classrooms have a right to have access to the general-education curriculum. But how? An 8th-grade student who is learning to decode words and skip-count by 2s could not possibly perform at the level of those in general-education classrooms! The keyword here is access. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) […]
If You Give a Kid a Real-World Problem If you want to engage students, offer them a real-world problem to solve! (See my blog: “If You Give a Kid a Real-World Problem.”) A compelling problem will drive them into the curriculum; they’ll have a “felt need” to learn! And in our technologically advanced world, they […]
Let’s think differently about how schools can serve students. . . . Learning and Schools Children love to learn! They learn all the time! Schools, however, are frustrated by declining test scores that indicate students are not learning from teachers’ lessons. Sadly, the result is a leaning into more whole-class instruction, more explicit (but not necessarily […]
When information lives online, application must live in the mind. That single reality changes everything about school. For centuries, teachers have been seen as repositories of information, passing along the information that students need to know. Teachers deliver lessons, students absorb content, and success often means recall. In the past, without school, you had little […]
Being SDI-Focused In a nutshell: Specially designed instruction (SDI) is a Federal requirement under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for all eligible students with disabilities who have an Individualized Education Program (IEP). It essentially calls for instruction to be designed by a special education professional that includes: It’s More Than a Lesson There […]