Abstract
The Division for Learning Disabilities (DLD) of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) is dedicated to improving outcomes for individuals with specific learning disabilities (LD) through research, professional development, and resource dissemination for members. Individuals with LD are typically identified during early schooling and are supported by a host of evidence-based practices in reading, writing, and numeracy. For a searchable set of resources, including these and others, please go to https://www.TeachingLD.org. However, DLD also recognizes that LD is a lifelong issue, affecting individuals in secondary and postsecondary settings as well as later life.
The context of secondary schools presents students with LD with an increasing set of demands, which in turn require educators to implement a unique set of practices to ensure student success. To complicate matters, secondary educators are beset by external pressures, such as high-stakes testing and increasingly complex standards (for more see Scheuerman et al., 2009). These collective challenges often result in a mismatch between the characteristics of adolescents with LD and the reality of secondary school expectations.
To support secondary educators by directly addressing this mismatch, the 2021 DLD Showcase during the CEC L.I.V.E. Conference featured a panel of experts who presented crucial features of evidence-based instruction in secondary settings. In what follows, we summarize the first four critical areas—explicit instruction, modeling, data-based decision making, and formative assessment—before concluding with an invitation to you, our readers, to engage by suggesting the final element.
Explicit Instruction
Explicit instruction (EI) is carefully designed instruction whereby the educator unambiguously explains new concepts, demonstrates new skills, and supports student understanding and active engagement through use of several research-supported instructional behaviors (Hughes et al., 2017). The five core behaviors associated with EI include (a) breaking down complex skills into more manageable chunks, (b) modeling skills step by step, (c) providing multiple opportunities to practice, (d) providing positive and corrective feedback, and (e) scaffolding instruction (Hughes et al., 2017). Secondary students who receive EI outperform peers receiving other types of instruction (e.g., discovery-based learning) in reading and writing (Scammacca et al., 2015), math (Lee et al., 2020), and science (Kaldenberg et al., 2015).
Educators working across a range of secondary instructional settings (e.g., general education, resource, self-contained) can plan for and use EI. Educators might use backwards planning to first break down grade-level standards into core concepts and skills, which are then taught across a series of lessons. During instruction, educators model (described in more detail next) new or complex skills using think-alouds and clarify difficult concepts by providing examples and nonexamples. They provide students multiple opportunities to practice with and without support and give positive and corrective feedback to guide learning. Educators scaffold instruction so that supports are faded over time, resulting in independent application of the skill or concept.
Modeling
Within EI, modeling is the most essential instructional component. Because many secondary students with LD continue to be concrete thinkers, they need to see or watch what they are supposed to do as well as hear instructions about what they need to do. Modeling is, therefore, essential to ensure that students with LD master secondary content. To prepare a model or demonstration, teachers should analyze a task that students have to complete and the types of errors that students have made in the past on that task. The teacher should then create a clear set of steps for completing the task. Next, an advance organizer should be provided to the students by naming the task, telling students that a demonstration will take place, and explaining that the students will be expected to imitate the teacher’s thoughts and actions as they complete similar tasks. During the demonstration, the teacher should “think aloud,” demonstrating all of the steps involved in completing the task. The teacher should enlist individual students in demonstrating parts of the task and, later, in completing the whole task. Finally, the teacher needs to provide a post-organizer by summarizing the demonstration, explaining how such demonstrations help students learn, and specifying expectations that the students will imitate the demonstration the next time they are asked to complete a similar task.
Data-Based Decision Making
A crucial element for teachers who work with students in special education at the secondary level is data-based decision making. As part of a model that is based on the use of reliable and valid data, teachers use data-based individuation (DBI) to analyze student progress and to make timely and appropriate decisions (see www.intensiveintervention.org). The DBI process is particularly important for students at the secondary level, because by middle or high school, they may have had years of lack of success in academics. Therefore, teachers must identify student needs in a timely manner (checking student data early and often) and make appropriate decisions (utilize decision-making rules to examine and implement instruction changes as needed). DBI assessment components include screening, progress monitoring, and utilizing diagnostic data. Decision-making guidelines are then applied to these data to make instructional decisions.
Screening and progress monitoring utilize curriculum-based measures and are typically conducted three times per year (screening) for all students, followed by weekly progress monitoring for those at risk, which includes administering brief academic measures to students and graphing data from those measures. Decision rules, like the trend line rule (compare trend of data with goal line), are implemented to determine whether the students are on track to meet their instructional goals or need an instructional change. If a change is needed, diagnostic data can be used to determine the students’ strengths and needs. At the middle school level, for example, teachers might use mathematics screening and progress-monitoring measures to determine which students are benefiting from the instruction provided, and instructional changes might be implemented for those students who are not on track based on decision rules (see Project Stair, https://blog.smu.edu/projectstair, for more information).
Formative Assessment of Student Learning
In conjunction with DBI, formative assessments are essential for supporting the relationship between teacher-led practices delivering secondary content-area instruction to students and the learning that results from those practices. By design, they serve as formal and informal evaluations of student progress that are conducted during initial teacher modeling and guided practice portions of explicit instruction (Fennell et al., 2017). Based on student responses, teachers can recognize in real time which portions of their lesson students are understanding and which areas require reteaching. For students with LD in particular, immediately addressing misconceptions in their learning is crucial to ensuring they do not fall behind their peers in large, inclusionary settings.
Formative assessments include practices such as student demonstrations, short-answer responses, thumbs-up and thumbs-down responses, letter- and color-card responses, whiteboards for constructed responses, concept maps for summarizing key ideas, and classroom exit tickets (Furtak et al., 2016). To design formative assessments, teachers should prepare questions in advance that elicit information indicating where students may be oversimplifying complex ideas, overgeneralizing properties and steps, or exhibiting common misinterpretations. Moreover, on the basis of data gathered, teachers can identify prerequisite skills that may need to be reviewed and subsequently scaffold the practice opportunities they provide within their lesson moving forward. Through such strategic adjustments, teachers can ensure that their daily instruction meets the needs of all students within their classrooms.
The Final Element
We conclude with our most important element—you! A hallmark of DLD is engaging our members, and so we invite you to tell us, What is the final element for consideration regarding the education of students with LD in secondary schools? It might deal with executive functioning, assistive technology, or self-determination skills. Or perhaps it pertains to enhancing background knowledge, self-regulation, or educator collaboration. Let’s keep the conversation going by tweeting your suggestions for a final element to @teachingld. We look forward to hearing from you!
Footnotes
Authors’ Note
The authors contributed equally to the article and are listed in alphabetical order.