MODULE 3

Serving students with disabilities starts with inclusion in the classroom. This session begins with New York State’s Blueprint for Improved Results for Students with Disabilities, focusing on two principles for general and special education teachers that are key to improving results for our students with disabilities. We then explore the components of an inclusive classroom and the necessity of fostering beliefs and attitudes of positive orientation to inclusion, a strong sense of self-efficacy, and growth mindsets to help develop truly inclusive classrooms.

Educating all students calls for the practice of universal design for learning (UDL) to account for learner variability in our classrooms and create meaningful, challenging learning opportunities for all students. UDL challenges us to reframe our thinking related to learning barriers by focusing on the three domains of UDL — engagement, representation, and action and expression. This session provides guidelines on how to implement UDL within our classrooms, questions to ask ourselves about student engagement, and examples of learner variability in action.

An inclusive classroom ensures accessibility across all parts of the curriculum and learning environment, from educational materials to assistive technologies. This session introduces four key content development principles that help ensure learning materials are accessible — is your content perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust? We also explore scenarios that help us see how planning for accessible learning can be portable across learning environments. The session concludes with the importance of explicit instructions as part of making content accessible, a topic that will be further discussed in Session 7.

We learn in Session 4 that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel — a set of 22 high-leverage practices (HLPs) for general and special education teachers shows us how to support all students’ learning. These practices fall into four categories: collaboration, assessment, social emotional behavior supports, and instruction. Understanding HLPs helps us become flexible problem-solvers able to overcome barriers across learning environments and open up new opportunities for teaching and learning.

In this session, we take a deeper look at the high-leverage practice (HLP) of flexible grouping to foster an inclusive learning environment. We unpack what we mean — and don’t mean — by flexible grouping, how it can be implemented in our classrooms, and how it benefits all students, regardless of ability. We explore a series of questions that help us plan for flexible grouping across learning environments.

This session brings the adage “There’s more than one way to learn how to ride a bike” into our classrooms through the high-leverage practice (HLP) of scaffolded supports — a learning process that is transparent, flexible, chunked, and within the control of the learner. We revisit how backward design helps us identify barriers to learning and how we can supercharge our scaffolds by digitizing educational materials. We explore how to implement scaffolded supports using gradual release of responsibility and moving our content from passive to active to interactive.

A recipe can easily turn sour when a step or ingredient is missing, and so can our instructional plans. Paying careful attention to the high-leverage practice (HLP) of explicit instruction helps our students with disabilities through well-developed directives for each learning task. Baking this practice into classrooms includes purposeful and meaningful descriptions, the 16 elements of explicit instructions, and step-by-step instructions resulting in your final masterpiece learning experience. This session also includes a few twists on old recipes to help us embrace explicit instruction as part of instructional planning.

Collaboration between general and special education teachers is a hallmark of inclusive classrooms. This session starts by defining specially designed instruction (SDI) and the critical partnership of our teaching teams to serve the needs of students with disabilities while maintaining high expectations for their progress. We then explore how SDI intersects with universal design for learning (UDL), high-leverage practices (HLPs), and teaching across learning environments to foster student success. Module 3 concludes by helping us build our skills and capacity for collaboration with our colleagues.