Timely Reads.
The 4 ingredients you need for reaching students with disabilities online
“Fortunately, there is a lot of evidence on quality instruction for students with disabilities that just needs to be translated to distance learning. It all boils down to four key ingredients: Universal Design for Learning, formative assessment strategies, student data, individualized or small-group instruction.”
NWEA
7 Ways to Maintain Relationships During Your School Closure
“Suddenly, you’re not in the same physical space as your students. We asked teachers to share strategies for maintaining relationships—both peer-to-peer and student-teacher—when everything’s gone remote.”
Edutopia
Ensuring Equity in Online Learning – Considerations in Response to COVID-19’s Impact on Schooling
Online education brings a host of equity and access concerns, misperceptions around students’ abilities, and unique challenges for some student populations, including special education students and English learners. This special edition issue brief provides educators ideas on how technology can best serve us during these times.
IDRA
Preparing to Reopen: Six Principles That Put Equity at the Core
“During this period of rebuilding and recovery, we must put equity at the core, not only in initial preparation but in the fiber of all education systems. Retire the plan to the shelf, and instead commit to ongoing preparation that lifts the voices and ideas of the diverse needs of your community.”
Getting Smart
Special Ed Students Have Lost Many Services. How SEL Strategies Can Help.
This is the first of a three-part series looking at how social-emotional learning strategies can support teachers of students with learning differences during the pandemic.
EdSurge
Recommendations for Prioritizing Equity in the Response to COVID-19
As resources grow scarce, states and districts must target their resources and design emergency response and recovery programs that prioritize our most vulnerable students from the beginning. Together, our organizations offer recommendations in six areas to support states and districts in crafting an equity-focused response to COVID-19.
Alliance for Excellent Education
Design for the Margins First
We cannot allow marginalized students to be an afterthought, but instead to infuse equitable, inclusive strategies from the outset in order to benefit all students. NCSECS’s Lindsey Coker offers some key design principles and several examples of equity-centered reentry planning.
Planning for Reentry: Amplifying the already present strengths of special/EL educators
Perhaps the diverse learner educators who are most prepared to help us through this crisis. Here’s why….
TDOE Announces $1 Million IDEA Innovation Grant
The TN Department of Education announced a new Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Innovation Grant, making $1 million dollars available to support Tennessee school districts in implementing innovative ways to remediate for the loss of instruction during school closures for students with disabilities.
Fact Sheet: Providing Services to English Learners During COVID19 Outbreak
This fact sheet outlines States’ responsibilities to English learners (ELs) and their parents during the extended school closures and, in some cases, the move to remote learning due to the national emergency caused by the novel Coronavirus disease.
U.S. Department of Education
Fact Sheet: Addressing the Risk of COVID-19 in Schools While Protecting the Civil Rights of Students
This document provides guidance and explanations for school leaders around preventing discriminiation in schools in the context of COVID-19. It reviews how schools should respond to situations of discrimination and provides resources around communicating information about coronavirus to students and families. U.S. Department of Education
Supplemental Fact Sheet Addressing the Risk of COVID-19 While Serving Children with Disabilities
This is the most recent guidance by the U.S. Department of Education that intends to provide clarity around how schools should address educating all students, including those with disabilities, during school closures. It also provides information on IDEA timelines that may be extended given current school closures.
U.S. Department of Education