Special Education Content Standards

Demonstrate an understanding of the characteristics of individuals with disabilities and identify individual variations in learning and development requiring specialized instruction.

Describe the effects that one or more disabilities may have on an individual’s life across his or her life span.

Describe the implications of specific disabilities (e.g., visual or hearing impairments) on selection of instructional strategies.

Recognize typical and atypical child and adolescent development in the sensory, communication, behavioral, physical, social, and cognitive domains.

Demonstrate communication and problem solving skills related to the ability to interact thoughtfully and courteously with students and their parents/guardians/families and resolve conflicts in a professional manner while respecting the cultural context of the family, community, and school.

Demonstrate the ability to select instructional content, resources, and strategies that respond to cultural, linguistic, and gender differences and which are meaningful to members of diverse cultures.

Describe ways to create learning environments that allow individuals to retain and appreciate their own and each other’s respective language and cultural heritage.

Identify cultural biases and their influence on the referral, identification, placement, and learning of individuals with disabilities.

Identify the impact that gender, different cultural values, religious beliefs, languages and customs can have on individuals with disabilities and their families; address the effect that these differences can have on student learning, behavior, home school relationships, and teacher expectations.

Be able to inform and involve parents/guardians/families in evaluating their students’ educational progress, and in making appropriate adjustments in programs or goals.

Demonstrate understanding of the fact that the reactions and needs of families may vary as children with disabilities grow and move through the life cycle.

Describe the role of families in the educational process and demonstrate an understanding of parental due process rights relating to referral, eligibility, IEP development and placement of individuals with disabilities.

Discuss appropriate strategies to promote, and ensure parents’/guardians’/ families’ right to participate and be involved in all aspects of the special education process.

Explain how to plan, facilitate, and implement transitional adjustment activities at various levels (e.g., preschool, elementary, middle school, high school, adult roles) and the importance of collaborating with students and families to ensure successful transitions for individuals with disabilities.

Articulate effective strategies for promoting positive behavior and building constructive school strategies to ensure consistency across settings (e.g., how to design and manage daily routines at home and at school).

Define the concept of “least intrusive” behavior support strategy consistent with the needs of individuals with disabilities.

Describe how to develop, implement, and monitor school-wide positive behavioral supports.

Demonstrate knowledge of research-based classroom management techniques to structure and manage the learning environment.

• Design and teach clear class rules concerning classroom behavior and what students need to do to earn recognition or rewards.

• Provide explicit instruction about listening, sharing, and integrating the ideas of others and handling disagreements constructively.

• Demonstrate knowledge of the importance of encouraging student effort by focusing on the positive aspects of a student’s performance in a manner that is specific, descriptive, accurate, and meaningful.

• Demonstrate strategies for avoiding embarrassing, insulting, or demeaning students when providing feedback.

Demonstrate knowledge of the different purposes of various instructional groupings, including how and when to use whole class, cooperative groups, small flexible grouping, and individual tutoring.

Demonstrate strategies for improving the transitions between lessons and activities.

Describe strategies to adapt the physical environment to provide optimal learning opportunities and promote positive behaviors for individuals with disabilities including lighting, acoustic characteristics, seating, access, safety provisions, and strategies for positive interactions.

Describe the critical components of and procedures for implementing positive behavioral supports:

• Describe the distinctions between primary prevention behavior support, targeted behavior support, and intensive individual behavior support.

• Describe procedures for conducting functional behavioral assessment (e.g., the process for identifying the events that reliably predict and maintain problem behavior).

• Describe procedures for using functional behavioral assessment information to develop behavior support plans.

• Describe procedures for monitoring and adapting behavior support plans.

Design and teach consistent procedures and routines for classroom activities, e.g., lining up, attendance, lunch, passing out papers, pencil sharpening, restroom, entry and exit, tardiness, hall passes, and attention signal.

Discuss research-based strategies for increasing and sustaining motivation for students.

Discuss ways in which interventions can aid generalization and maintenance of appropriate behaviors.

Identify barriers to accessibility in school and nonschool environments and acceptance of individuals with disabilities.

Identify the basic principles of behavior that guide the development of behavior support techniques and their application to teaching individuals with disabilities (e.g., positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, negative punishment, generalization, maintenance, transfer, generalization, extinction, antecedent, stimulus, response, consequence, and contingency).

Identify strategies to facilitate learning for students whose primary language is not the dominant language.

Demonstrate how to scaffold students’ oral language by using a variety of strategies.

Know how to design lessons in which students must use oral language.

Compare the effectiveness of systematic and non-systematic approaches to phonics instruction.

Demonstrate knowledge of how to match students’ reading level to appropriate materials to increase fluency rates.

Demonstrate knowledge of the order in which phonemes should be presented and taught (i.e., initial phoneme, final phoneme, medial phoneme).

Demonstrate the knowledge of a multitude of vocabulary building activities.

Design instruction based on the knowledge of the level of difficulty of tasks (i.e., production, recognition, identification, order in which phonemes should be presented).

Design systematic instruction based on the knowledge of similarities and differences among phonemes (e.g., continuous and stop, voiced and unvoiced).

Explain how words for vocabulary study should be selected.

Explain the importance of designing instruction so that students have repeated encounters with the same word in different contexts over time.

Explain the importance of fostering word awareness or word consciousness and strategies to do so.

Identify and implement best practice strategies to assess and explicitly teach comprehension in fiction and non-fiction material.

Know a variety of fluency-building activities (e.g., repeated reading, choral reading, reader’s theater, chunking).

Know a variety of instructional arrangements (e.g., use of peers, tape recorders) to incorporate the use of fluency-building activities in feasible ways.

Know a variety of phonemic awareness activities that can be used with struggling readers, including phoneme manipulation, phoneme counting, phoneme identification, phoneme segmentation, and phoneme deletion.

Know how to engage children in using, extending, and generalizing phonics through word study, spelling, and reading activities.

Know how to foster the rapid and accurate association of phonemes and graphemes (written letters and letter groups that represent phonemes) and that these associations should be taught explicitly, cumulatively, and systematically.

Know the correct pronunciation of each letter sound in isolation.

Know which of the following methods are most effective for struggling readers: implicit phonics, explicit phonics, analytic phonics, synthetic phonics, embedded phonics, or non-embedded phonics.

Recognize common reading errors and error patterns and select appropriate remediations to address these errors.

Select and administer fluency diagnostic assessments to determine areas of strength and weakness and use this information to plan for instruction.

Select and administer phonemic awareness diagnostic assessments to determine areas of strength and weakness and use this information to plan for instruction.

Select and administer phonics diagnostic assessments to determine areas of strength and weakness and use this information to plan for instruction (e.g., Does the student need work on CVC vs. r-controlled word patterns?).

Select and administer vocabulary diagnostic assessments to determine areas of strength and weakness and use this information to plan for instruction.

Understand and explain the use of visuals and graphic organizers during vocabulary instruction.

Understand the need to contextualize idiomatic phrases when working with English Language Learners.

Understand that the order of presentation of letters should be systematic and take into consideration their properties (e.g., auditorily and visually similar letters should not be presented at the same time).

Understand why word families should be taught together (e.g., solemn, solemnity), why words must be pronounced when they are being learned, and why the meaningful parts are useful to discuss.

Identify guidelines for appropriate selection of words (type, number, context) and activities (recognition v. production, fix-ups, rewrites, oral v. written, dictation, copy/cover/compare) for spelling instruction.

Identify phonetic patterns the student can and cannot spell.

Identify strategies to assist students to generalize spelling knowledge to their own writing.

Identify the stages of spelling development including the role of invented spelling.

Know and select various spelling strategies appropriate to different types of words (e.g., regular, irregular or whole word, structural strategies, morphographic strategies, spelling rules).

Utilize effective strategies for providing corrective feedback on misspelled words.

Describe how to provide explicit and recursive instruction on each step of the writing process.

Describe how to teach students to provide feedback to self and others on written drafts.

Explain the need to identify audience and purpose in developing written compositions.

Explain the role of discourse in supporting students in the writing process.

Identify and use various strategies for evaluating and scoring student writing (analytic trait, curriculum-based management, holistic) and discuss advantages and disadvantages of each.

Identify best practices and explicit strategies to teach the writing process to students with diverse learning needs (e.g., cognitive strategy instruction, self-regulation, use of procedural facilitators, plan sheets, checklists).

Identify organizational strategies, graphic organizers and think sheets appropriate for planning and executing the steps of the writing process (e.g., POWER, COPS. TREE).

Identify organizational structures corresponding to each genre.

Identify strategies for systematically teaching grammar, usage, and punctuation, including task analysis, use of examples and non-examples, sequencing guidelines, guided practice, cumulative review, and strategies for generalizing to own writing.

Identify strategies to expand and refine the writing skills of older students.

Identify various editing strategies (peer, teacher, self, checklists, computer) and explain the advantages and disadvantages of each.