Instructional Practices in Special Education

Catalog description

This course examines various ways of assessing student knowledge and identifying and implementing evidence-based practices to increase the success of students with disabilities in mathematics, social studies, science, and English language arts, primarily in grades 3-12. Students learn best practices for understanding and evaluating curricular demands, monitoring student progress in content-area courses, providing tiered supports and accommodations in teaching, using assessment and grading alternatives, and incorporating the principles of explicit and strategic instruction to design methods that promote and enhance content-area learning. This course also presents the needs for specialized services to meet specific learning and/or behavioral needs and provides the basic frameworks for conceptualizing best practices, including the principles of Universal Design for Learning and Multi-Tier Systems of Support (MTSS). At the completion of this course, students evaluate and design initial instructional accommodations and interventions for meeting the needs of students with high incidence disabilities. Graduate students extend their understandings by researching broad-based instructional practices that benefit diverse learners in whole group instruction; they also conduct an audit of classroom instruction across a grade level or content area in an actual school and devise practical recommendations based on their findings.