Including learners with significant communication needs in the general education classroom will require additional planning for general and special education teachers as well as related service providers. These include speech-language pathologists, physical and occupational therapists, and vision/hearing specialists. Coordinating the work of these service providers and leveraging their expertise can result in a high quality experience for all the learners in an inclusive class.
The use of empirically validated instructional practices is pivotal for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities to make academic progress in inclusive settings. The purpose of this literature review is to extend previous literature reviews to bring the review of literature up-to-date on pedagogical practices for students with the most significant disabilities in inclusive settings.
The Working Together Series from CADRE includes five interactive self-directed courses that provide families and educators with strategies for working together and through conflict. Anyone supporting children or youth with disabilities may benefit from this series, however; the setting in which collaborative problem solving and conflict resolution takes place within this series is typically the school or IEP meeting. Facilitation materials are also available.
This IRIS Module is designed to help teachers build positive relationships with families. The module highlights the diversity of families and addresses the factors that school personnel should understand about working with the families of children with disabilities (est. completion time: 1 hour).
This module from the IRIS Center defines and discusses the purpose of interagency collaboration and addresses the importance of partnering with agencies to improve outcomes for students with disabilities who are transitioning from high school (est. completion time: 2 hours).
The purpose of the MTSS for All: Including Students with the Most Significant Cognitive Disabilities brief from the TIES Center is to provide suggestions for ways in which the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS), a framework for organizing and providing a tiered instructional continuum to support learning for all students, can include students with the most significant cognitive disabilities. Ideas for how to make MTSS fully inclusive of all students are presented following a short history of MTSS and a summary of current MTSS models.
These two modules from the IRIS Center introduce users to progress monitoring in reading and mathematics. Progress monitoring is a type of formative assessment in which student learning is evaluated to provide useful feedback about performance to both learners and teachers. Because the overall progress monitoring process is almost identical for any subject area, the content in the two modules is very similar.
This four part course is designed to support faculty and professional development providers with instructing pre-service and in-service educators who are developing and/or refining their implementation of explicit instruction. This course provides learners with an opportunity to extend their understanding of explicit instruction through in-depth exposure to the explicit instruction model and supporting practices required for effective implementation.
This video highlighting the high-leverage practices (HLPs) focuses on providing positive and constructive feedback to guide students' learning and behavior. This video is intended to support teacher educators and new teachers with concrete, easy-to-access examples of HLPs in action, in real classrooms, with real students. The videos and supporting resources are easily and freely accessible online, offering a practical, real-world illustration of HLPs by teachers intentionally and explicitly using the practice to meet the specific needs of students in their classrooms.