Sarah Diehl

V –

Sarah works for a cooperative learning center and is assigned to her current school as the only special education teacher.  She has a caseload of 20 students who have diverse needs and special services. Students have physical, behavioral, cognitive and academic disabilities.

Sarah teaches self-contained history and English classes that allow students to obtain high school graduation required credits.  She also has skill groups to support students who are in general education classes and need tutorial access.  She is committed to finding ways that help adolescents benefit from services.

E –

Problem of Practice

1. Sarah indicates that her students are not motivated to learn the skills she should be teaching. We discussed methods to increase student motivation such as relevance discussion, goal setting, graphing their own progress, and use of grade level and general education materials for skill practice.
2. Working for a coop, she is required to address IEP documentation by simply adding SDI as the course of intervention. We discussed the IEP elements that should drive her instruction. She indicated that she might look to see how detailed and informative her IEP development is, but she notes that what she believes students need versus what is in the IEP are sometimes at odds given the programmatic requirements for successful content grades and credits.  We will continue this discussion as she completes various course modules to redesign particular aspects of the IEP that address pressure from both groups.  We discussed how strategy instruction that supports content acquisition and far transfer can address this issue.

C –

We brainstormed ideas to support student progress and to provide a menu of potential professional skill areas to choose from this semester:

Self-Contained (Adaptive) History Courses:

• Meet with general education teachers to understand essential learning outcomes and course questions to use as a foundation for adaptations.
• Identify key concepts and vocabulary in each unit of study as areas of focus rather than memorization of dates and historical names.
• Lengthen instructional time for each unit by delving into concepts and how they might relate to their world today.
• Use dialogic reading techniques to access the general education textbook content – also to motivate students
• Complete one course video assignment in this class?

Assessments:

• Need to develop assessments that examine the specific skills students need in decoding and comprehension.
• Develop CBMs for baseline and progress monitoring
• Review Fastbridge and Read Naturally assessments
• Examine how data is collected on the IEP PLOP to serve as a baseline for instruction in goal areas.

IEP alignment of services

• Identify the specific elements of SDI in content, methods and instructional delivery that should be detailed on the IEP and used to provide services. Consider how this review might enhance future IEP development.

Self-Contained (Adaptive) English Class

• Develop instructional skills to strengthen student sentence structure and comprehension.
• Complete one course video assignment in this class?

Course Progress:

Sarah indicates that she has no concerns with the course content.  She is preparing to complete the Module 3 Knowledge Assessment.  She has enough data at this time to complete the Module 2 Quadrant assignment.

Note to self: Sarah shared that she has low self-esteem and needs encouragement.  Our coaching sessions will include affirmations and explicit progress celebrations.