Content-Based Strategies and Resources

Collaboration - Samara Reyna

a. Strategies for collaborating with families of students with disabilities.

Parent-Teacher Conference Strategies

Prepare Thoroughly

Ensure you're familiar with the student's (IEP) or 504 Plans, including goals, accommodations, and modifications.
Collect recent work samples, progress reports, and assessment data so you can share specific examples of the student's progress.

Create a Welcoming Environment

Use clear precise language and be sensitive to cultural and linguistic differences.
Take the time to establish a connection with the family and acknowledge their expertise in regards to their child.
Help accommodate different needs by providing different meeting options such as in-person, virtual, or a phone meeting.
Be aware of cultural norms that might influence the parents' views on education and disability.

Collaborative Goal Setting

To set realistic goals, ask the parents for their concerns and observations and work together with any suggestions from them.
Talk about the interventions and how they can be supported and reinforced at home.
Show that you value their input by listening carefully and reflecting on what they share.
Support parents in becoming strong advocates for their child's needs both in school and in the community.

Focus on Student Strengths and Needs

Start with the student's strengths and achievements
When discussing challenges, focus on potential solutions and supports rather than just the problems.

Provide Clear, Actionable Takeaways

Document the discussion, including any concerns raised, strategies agreed upon, and the follow-up plan. Share this with the parents for their records.
Recap the main discussion points, agreed-upon goals, and next steps they can do at home and you can do at school.
Provide the parents with resources or strategies they can use at home, such as websites, apps, or materials from school.
Set a date for a follow-up meeting or check-ins to discuss progress and adjust plans if necessary.

Reflect and Improve

After the conference, consider asking parents for feedback on how the meeting could be improved.
Use this feedback to enhance future conferences, making them even more effective.

These strategies can help create a more collaborative and supportive environment for families of students with disabilities, ensuring that the student’s needs are met both at school and at home.

Parent Advocacy Resources

Advocacy means being a voice for your child. Advocacy is speaking up for them and asking for the services they need. This is something you can do all the time by talking with your child’s teachers and school administrators.

Disability Rights Texas (previously Advocacy, Inc.)
www.disabilityrightstexas.org
The federally funded "watchdog" is there to protect and advocate for the legal rights of people with disabilities in Texas. It has helped parents with school issues when a precedent can be set to help others in the state. It also has a great parent-friendly guide to Special Education.

Texas Center for Disability Studies
https://disabilitystudies.utexas.edu/
Serves as a catalyst at the University level so that people with developmental and other disabilities are fully included in all levels of their communities and in control of their lives. Web-based courses are available on disability studies. They also can recommend community inclusion projects, person & family centered planning, family support, and self determination projects, assistive technology and other special projects.

Family Voices - aka Texas Parent to Parent
www.txp2p.org
Grassroots network of parents and professionals who advocate on health care for children and youth with special health care needs.

b. Strategies for collaboration between general education and special education teachers.

Co-teaching Models and Resources

One Teach, One Observe

One of the advantages in co-teaching is that more detailed observation of students engaged in the learning process can occur. With this approach, for example, co-teachers can decide in advance what types of specific observational information to gather during instruction and can agree on a system for gathering the data. Afterward, the educators should analyze the information together. The educators should take turns teaching and gathering data, rather than assuming that the special educator is the only person who should observe.

Station Teaching

In this co-teaching approach, educators divide content and students. Each educator then teaches the content to one group and subsequently repeats the instruction for the other group. If appropriate, a third “station” could give students an opportunity to work independently. As co-teachers become comfortable with their partnership, they may add groups or otherwise create variations of this model.

Parallel Teaching

On occasion, students’ learning would be greatly facilitated if they had more supervision by the educator or more opportunity to respond. In parallel teaching, the educators are both teaching the same information, but they do so to a divided class group. Parallel teaching also may be used to vary learning experiences—for example, by providing manipulatives to one group but not the other or by having the groups read about the same topic but at different levels of difficulty.

Alternative Teaching

In most class groups, occasions arise in which several students need specialized attention. In alternative teaching, one educator takes responsibility for the large group while the other works with a smaller group. These smaller groups could be used for remediation, pre-teaching, to help students who have been absent catch up on key instruction, assessment, and so on.

Teaming

In teaming, both educators share delivery of the same instruction to a whole student group. Some educators refer to this as having “one brain in two bodies.” Others call it “tag-team teaching.” Most co-teachers consider this approach the most complex but satisfying way to co-teach, but it is the approach that is most dependent on educators’ styles.

One Teach, One Assist

In a final approach to co-teaching, one person keeps primary responsibility for teaching while the other professional circulates through the room, providing unobtrusive assistance to students as needed. This should be the least often employed co-teaching approach.

Inclusion Resources

The Inclusive Classroom: Strategies for Effective Differentiated Instruction

This book provides practical strategies for differentiating instruction and creating an inclusive classroom environment, suitable for K-6 students.

Inclusion Strategies for K-6 Classrooms: The Best of the Best

This concise guide offers effective strategies and practical tips for including students with disabilities in general education classrooms.

Universal Design for Learning in the Early Childhood Classroom: A Guide for Practitioners

This guide focuses on applying Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles to early childhood education, providing practical strategies to support diverse learners.

Teaching Young Children with Disabilities in Inclusive Settings

This book offers a comprehensive approach to teaching young children with disabilities, including practical strategies for inclusive practices.

Inclusion in Action: Practical Strategies to Modify Your Curriculum (2nd Edition

This resource provides practical strategies for modifying the curriculum to meet the needs of all learners in an inclusive classroom, focusing on K-6 settings.

3-5 intervention studies from a peer-reviewed special education journal that focuses on co-teaching/inclusion and your team’s specific certification area. Include a one minimum of a one-paragraph synopsis of each study.

c. Strategies for developing/delivering culturally responsive instruction

Diversity considerations (at least 5 resources for strategies)

1. Activate students’ prior knowledge.

Students are not blank slates, they enter the classroom with diverse experiences. Teachers should encourage students to draw on their prior knowledge in order to contribute to group discussions, which provides an anchor to learning. Taking a different approach to the literature that’s taught in classrooms is one example of this.

2. Make learning contextual.

Tie lessons from the curriculum to the students’ social communities to make it more contextual and relevant.

3. Encourage students to leverage their cultural capital.

Because not all students come from the same background, it’s important to encourage those who don’t to have a voice.
The teacher may choose a book for the class to read that ESL students can relate to and feel like they could be the expert in, for example a book that told the story of a child of migrant workers because some students might come from an agricultural background.

4. Reconsider your classroom setup.

Take inventory of the books in your classroom library: Do they include authors of diverse races? Is the LGBTQ community represented? Do the books include urban families or only suburban families? Beyond your classroom library, consider the posters you display on your walls and your bulletin boards, too.

5. Build relationships.

Not all students want to learn from all teachers, because the teachers may not make them feel like they’re valued. Teachers need to work to build relationships with their students to ensure they feel respected, valued, and seen for who they are. Building those relationships helps them build community within the classroom and with each other.

Culturally Responsive Resources

Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice

This foundational book on culturally responsive teaching offers a comprehensive guide to understanding and applying CRT in diverse educational settings. It includes strategies for integrating students' cultural backgrounds into the curriculum.

Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

This book connects culturally responsive teaching strategies with neuroscience to help educators engage students from diverse backgrounds more effectively. It provides practical tools for fostering rigorous and inclusive learning environments.

The Culturally Responsive Teacher's Guide to Learning Frameworks

This resource provides educators with practical strategies and frameworks for delivering culturally responsive instruction, including how to adapt teaching methods to meet the needs of diverse learners.

d. Student developed or existing pictorial representation of relationship between Content Based Teaching and Collaboration

https://graduate.northeastern.edu/resources/culturally-responsive-teaching-strategies/

https://www.understood.org/en/articles/6-models-of-co-teaching

https://www.navigatelifetexas.org/en/education-schools/special-education-advocates-and-advocacy

https://adayinourshoes.com/parent-teacher-conferences-iep/

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