Teaching ELL Students in the Elementary Grades

This chapter presents information regarding teaching ELL students with high incidence disabilities in the mild to moderate range. Specific disabilities to be discussed are learning disabilities, dyslexia, cognitive impairments, and autism. Identification procedures and implications for the individual education plan are offered. Learning characteristics that are manifested with these disabilities are explored. Instructional strategies that are most effective for children with these disabilities are explained. The impact of ELL on the disability is discussed. Accommodations to instructional strategies for ELL students are suggested. The misidentification of ELL students as having a disability is examined as well as misplacement into special education.

Remote Schooling Supports for Linguistically Diverse Parents of Students With Disabilities

Remote schooling has increased in prevalence. Although remote schooling may feel novel, remote and online educational requirements have been consistent parts of the educational landscape for years. Remote schooling increases learning opportunities within the home, magnifying the need for home-school collaborations to support the academic and socio-emotional development of marginalized learners in urban settings, particularly multiply marginalized learners such as students classified as English learners who also have a high incidence disabilities (e.g., learning disability, speech and language impairment, autism spectrum disorder). Much policy and practice around remote schooling centers on ensuring students have access to devices and technology; little consideration is given to what happens after devices are distributed, especially within culturally and linguistically diverse households. This paper explores considerations to be made before, during, and after engaging in remote schooling, whether it’s for short- or long-term use, to ensure that students who are dually classified are not digitally excluded during remote schooling.

Sufficiency of Teachers’ Access to Resources and Supports for Students With Disabilities

Students with disabilities are served by both special and general educators, yet teachers often feel unprepared to meet the needs of these students in their classrooms. Using data from a nationally representative survey, we examined the sufficiency of teachers’ access to supports available for meeting the needs of students with high-incidence disabilities, their access to development opportunities, and the sources teachers used to access interventions. We explored differences in teachers’ experiences by grade band, service delivery model, and teacher preparation model. We found teachers of students with disabilities rated the sufficiency of access to supports between somewhat insufficient and somewhat sufficient, with the lowest ratings for planning/release time and training and information. Teachers reported greater rates of access to collaboration than professional development. Colleagues were sources for resources related to academic interventions and administrators were sources for nonacademic intervention resources. There were few significant differences in these results by teacher characteristics.

Making Environmental Education Accessible for All Students: Inclusion of students with emotional and behavioral disabilities

One of the most difficult tasks of an educator is engaging students in rigorous learning opportunities. A greater challenge is finding ways in which environmental education can be accessible to all students, especially those with emotional and behavioral disabilities. This article and lesson provides best practices for engaging students with high incidence disabilities in environmental concepts through varied representations and expressions of content. In addition, teaching collaborative protocols to fully engage students with social skills challenges within the local environment are discussed. The instructional approaches are aligned to increasing academic discourse, building positive peer-peer relationships, and observation using multiple modalities.

Using Technology to Increase the Use of Evidence-Based Behavioral Interventions With Students With High-Incidence Disabilities

Educators of students with disabilities who frequently display challenging behaviors are expected to deliver high-leverage practices and evidence-based behavioral interventions to improve student academic engagement and appropriate behaviors. For these practices and interventions to be successful, educators need innovative, accessible, and sustainable tools to efficiently and effectively implement these practices and interventions as part of their classroom and behavior management routines. Using technology as a delivery platform can fit this need. The Journal of Special Education Technology special issue presents three experimental studies where teachers used technology to deliver behavioral interventions and one qualitative study examining teachers’ perspectives of using technology for behavior management.

Planning Computer Science Instruction for Students With High-Incidence Disabilities

States increasingly are adopting computer science standards to help students develop coding and computational thinking skills. In an effort to support teachers in introducing computer science content to their students with high-incidence disabilities, a new model, computer science integration planning plus universal design for learning (CSIP+) offers ways to integrate computational thinking and coding into content area instruction. This column presents an example of how a teacher might implement the CSIP+ model when designing instruction accessible to all learners. Guiding questions to support teachers at each phase of the planning cycle are provided.

Using Number Talks to Support Students With High-Incidence Disabilities in Mathematics

Number talks are increasingly used in general education mathematics classes to engage students. Yet, and despite the potential benefits, number talks are given limited attention for students with high-incidence disabilities in special education settings. This article presents special education teachers with both the why and, more importantly, the how for implementing number talks to support students with high-incidence disabilities in special education settings. Specifically, the authors address how number talks can serve as both a formative assessment and an intervention for fluency and activating students’ background knowledge to be successful in general education settings. The article also provides suggestions for implementing number talks with fidelity and flexibility (e.g., use of manipulatives, pictorial representations, and teacher explicit instruction of numerical strategies).

Three Low-Tech Active Student Responding Strategies for Inclusive Online Teaching

This article discusses how three low-tech instructional strategies, typically used in face-to-face teaching, can be successfully used in synchronous and asynchronous online instruction with students with high-incidence disabilities and their typical-learning peers in inclusive online classes. The three strategies are choral responding, response cards, and guided notes. Each strategy has been researched extensively and has been shown to result in high levels of active student responding, which improves students’ learning with and without disabilities across various academic subjects and grade levels. With high-tech tools, such as video conferencing platforms and learning management systems, educators can successfully use these strategies during online teaching. This article describes each strategy, presents research on its effectiveness, and suggests potential adaptations when used during inclusive online instruction, including students with high-incidence disabilities and those at-risk.

Using the VA Framework to Teach Algebra to Middle School Students With High-Incidence Disabilities

Algebra is considered by many to be a gateway to higher-level mathematics and eventual economic success yet students with and without disabilities often struggle to develop algebra skills. This study builds on the limited understanding of how virtual manipulatives support students with disabilities in the area of algebra by investigating their use within the virtual-abstract (VA) framework. Using a multiple probe across behaviors, replicated across participant design, researchers found a functional relation between the VA framework and student algebraic learning. Mathematical behaviors based on grade-level curriculum included: one-step equations with positive and negative numbers, two-step equations with positive numbers, and two-step equations with positive and negative numbers. All three seventh-grade students with high-incidence disabilities improved their performance on each of the three algebra behaviors during intervention, and all participants maintained their accuracy after intervention, as compared to baseline to maintenance. Detailed results and their implications for practice are discussed further.