2010-11-13 LPS - Student Services Staffing & Financial Assessment

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35 Instruction is tightly aligned to a clear, comprehensible standard Accommodations are incorporated into daily classroom instruction for all students 5.Make extensive use of student achievement data Data reviewed at the student level Both formative and summative assessments used regularly 6.Create a belief system embracing students with special needs achieving at high levels High levels of achievement by students with special needs is a the responsibility of all teachers and administrators, not just special education staff 7.Foster collaboration Walls between special education and general education are knocked down Give schools strong support from the central office 8.Give schools strong support from the central office Superintendent and general education leadership, as well as special education administrators placed a high priority on students with special needs achieving at high levels The current practice in LPS differs from this best practice theory of action in a number of ways: Special education support is not tightly connected to the general education curriculum. (Recent efforts in elementary reading will be a joint general and special education effort). Resource room pull-out support is not re-teaching or pre-teaching, for the most part. During push-in support, it is difficult to supplement the core curriculum while it is being taught for the first time, especially when the special education teacher hasn’t seen the material in advance. Academic support staff are talented professionals, but not content experts. It is hard to effectively teach material that the teacher has not mastered. Perhaps the greatest difference between best practice and LPS practice is the issue of time on task. Struggling students need more time, often a lot more time. Push-in, which is 65% of all support, adds no additional time. Some pull-out takes place during the core instruction time block which also provides no extra time. Richard DuFour said it best “Learning should be the constant and time the variable.” In many cases in LPS the time for instruction is fixed. Different districts have put these ideas into action in different ways: Create a general education math class for struggling students, both with and without an IEPs. This was a general education class taught by a math teacher using the general education curriculum. The class met for 2 periods a day and included time for doing some homework in class as a daily check for understanding. Students had twice the time to master the material. A special education teacher coached the general education teacher (not the students) one day a week in specialized teaching strategies. If concerned about grouping struggling students together, a district can apply a different twist to the model. All struggling students participate in a regular math class one period a day randomly intermixed with non-struggling students. The math teacher teaches four such classes, then The District Management Council 7 Harcourt Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02116 - Tel:1877-DMC-3500 | Fax:617-491-5266 |www.dmcouncil.org