Despite the popularity of co-teaching and widespread professional literature describing exemplary co-teaching practices, this instructional approach has yet to realize its potential. One way to increase the effectiveness of co-teaching is for special educators to contribute meaningfully by assuming the role of strategy leader in the co-taught…

Practicum experiences, a crucial component of preservice teacher preparation, help establish the foundational knowledge and skills necessary for beginning special education teachers (SETs). Preservice SETs need cooperating teachers (CTs) who support preservice SETs in proper emotional development (i.e., feeling like a teacher), who can model and…

Tier 2 supplemental instruction within a response to intervention framework provides a unique opportunity for developing partnerships between speech-language pathologists and classroom teachers. Speech-language pathologists may participate in Tier 2 instruction via a consultative or collaborative service delivery model depending on district needs.…

With many states moving toward increased accountability for all teachers, special educators, who have long been held accountable through the implementation of individualized education programs and the use of evidence-based practices, have much to offer. Formative instructional practices are evidence-based techniques that are familiar to special…

This article provides recommendations for teachers to better prepare 3rd through 12th grade students with learning disabilities for large-scale writing assessments. The variation across large-scale writing assessments and the multiple needs of struggling writers indicate the need for test preparation to be embedded within a comprehensive,…

The special education field is challenged by a lack of attention to and recruitment of well-trained language interpreters in schools. As such, special education teachers need to take a leadership role in working with interpreters to ensure diverse families are collaborative members of individualized education program (IEP) teams. Using the…

Schools are increasingly adopting tiered models of prevention to meet the needs of diverse populations of students. This article outlines the steps involved in designing and implementing a systematic Tier 2 behavior intervention within a tiered service delivery model. An elementary school example is provided to outline the identification,…

Student response systems, often called clickers, have become more popular and visible in the K-12 classroom in recent years. There are numerous competing systems on the market, but all perform the same function: to allow the student to use a small hand-held device (i.e., a clicker), or even web browsers on laptops or mobile phones, to respond to…

This article describes the essential instructional elements necessary for delivering explicit mathematics instruction to students with mathematics difficulties. Mathematics intervention research indicates that explicit instruction is one of the most effective instructional approaches for teaching students with or at risk for math difficulties.…

There are many instructional approaches that had been arranged in special education, especially with learning disabilities. Although the field of learning disabilities has been a safe harbor for dozens of techniques, a number of others had been beached. It is regrettable that data rarely played a role in whether a technique was dispatched or…

Bullying has come to be recognized as a pervasive problem in schools today. Frequently bullying is not immediately recognized or viewed by classroom teachers as problematic behavior. As more students experience bullying, questions arise as to how well teachers understand the bullying dynamic and are aware of strategies for intervening when those…

Adolescence is an important time in human development. Teenagers spend much time questioning their core belief structures and developing the foundations of their identity. For students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT), this path of development is difficult in American schools because of strongly held homophobic…

The experiences that beginning special education teachers encounter moving from the pre-service environment into the first year of classroom teaching put them in a uniquely tenuous position that could lead to leaving the classroom after only a few years of teaching. District- and school-level administrators can influence the retention rates of…

Thousands of children are living in stressful and dysfunctional situations. Scores of them reside in conditions replete with drugs or alcohol. As a court appointed special advocate (CASA), this author has advocated for children who have been abused or neglected and whose situations are involved in the courts, more specifically in the dependency…

Student meltdowns can be a frequent source of discouragement for teachers. Mild to moderate verbal outbursts, anger, defacing instructional materials, and withdrawal can cause the most seasoned teacher to wonder if there is a way to help students constructively deal with their frustrations without losing control. There can be situations in which a…