Joseph John Morgan

Tools and Strategies for Making Co-teaching Work

A large percentage of students with disabilities are being educated in the general education environment for a majority of the academic day. Many educators have chosen co-teaching as the most appropriate method of educational service delivery to meet the needs of this population of students. To ensure the success of this delivery method, co-teaching teams should engage in active communication, co-planning and preparation, shared instructional delivery and assessment, and conflict resolution. This article presents a variety of tools and resources that co-teaching teams might use to establish a successful classroom environment for all students.

Creating Safe Environments for Students With Disabilities Who Identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender

Adolescence is an important time in human development. Teenagers spend much time questioning their core belief structures and developing the foundations of their identity. For students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT), this path of development is difficult in American schools because of strongly held homophobic beliefs. Barriers in sexuality identity development could cause problems for students with disabilities, including low self-esteem, psychological problems, and suicidal ideations. This article addresses action steps that educators can take to support this student population.

Unwrapping Academic Standards to Increase the Achievement of Students With Disabilities

Over the past 15 years, students with disabilities have been included in the general education environment at markedly higher rates; however, their achievement is not increasing at the same pace. One reason for this lack of increased achievement may be that academic standards lay the foundation for instruction in this environment, but standards fail to address the component academic skills needed for academic mastery. This article presents a method for analyzing the academic standards and then unwrapping them to their component skills using a lattice task analysis. After employing this analysis, educators will be able to systematically plan instruction in the component skills to ensure achievement and growth for all students in the classroom environment.

Social Networking Web Sites Teaching Appropriate Social Competence to Students With Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

The Internet has opened a variety of different avenues for people to interact with each other. As new digital environments are developed, new sets of social skills are needed to appropriately interact. Students with emotional and behavioral disorders often have deficits in social competence and require specialized training in specific social skills to appropriately participate in specific situations. For students with emotional and behavioral disorders to access the academic and social benefits of social networking Web sites, it is important that the skills for these new environments be taught to them. This article covers ways that classroom teachers can address this need.

The Faces of Hunger The Educational Impact of Hunger on Students With Disabilities

The relationship between students’ living in poverty and academic underachievement challenges schools across the nation. Poverty is particularly prevalent among children with disabilities. One detrimental condition of poverty that directly affects student development and academic achievement is food insecurity and hunger. With the increasing number of children identified as living in food-insecure households, it is inevitable that at some point, a teacher will work with a child suffering from hunger. With this article, the authors hope to assist educators in understanding poverty and its relationship to childhood hunger. Tips for identifying the signs and symptoms of hunger are shared. School- and classroom-level recommendations are made to aid in alleviating hunger in school-age children.

Incorporating English Language Learner Instruction Within Special Education Teacher Preparation

The number of students who are English language learners (ELL) is increasing significantly across the United States. As this number increases, so does the number of students who are ELL and being identified as having disabilities. The intersection of English language instruction and special education is an emerging field of scholarship, and it is important that special education teacher preparation programs incorporate theoretical frameworks and evidence-based practice for students who are ELL into their teacher preparation programs. Indeed, there are several topics and techniques that can be incorporated into special education teacher preparation coursework that have natural connections to topics typically addressed. This article provides a framework to support the inclusion of these strategies as well as specific examples of activities that could be incorporated in coursework to strengthen the preparation of special educators to meet the needs of students who are ELL.

An Observation Tool for Monitoring Social Skill Implementation in Contextually Relevant Environments

Skills related to social-emotional learning (SEL) are essential for college and career readiness. Failure to use appropriate skills for SEL in school is often linked to several negative academic outcomes, including rejection by school community members, academic deficits, and higher rates of problematic behavior. Social skills interventions are commonly used to address deficits in SEL. To be most effective, these interventions must be culturally and contextually relevant to the student. The Social Skills Observation Tool (SSOT) was developed to (a) identify the social skills commonly used within natural school environments and (b) determine specific student deficits in the appropriate use of these skills. Implications for practice are discussed.

Teaching Online Social Skills to Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBDs) often lack appropriate social skills. Participation in direct and explicit instruction related to social skills is common in their educational programming. For these interventions to be effective, it is important that students have the opportunity to apply them in the natural environment. Increases in the use of technology have created new natural environments for social participation, with their own specific rules for social interaction. Although not specifically studied, it has been theorized that students with EBD will display social deficits in online environments. This study focused on teaching eight online social skills (OSS) to students with EBD. Two instructional conditions were compared: traditionally based OSS instruction (OSSI) involving paper-and-pencil and OSSI involving practice in an online social environment. Twenty-three culturally and linguistically diverse adolescent students with EBD (mean age of 13.35) participated in this intervention. Findings indicated that both interventions were effective at increasing students’ identification of problem behaviors in an online environment and that students believed learning about OSS was important at the end of instruction. Based on overall knowledge acquisition scores, however, neither intervention produced significant results. Implications for the incorporation of this instruction into social skills interventions are discussed.

Legal and Ethical Considerations Regarding the Integration of Assistive and Educational Technology for Students with Disabilities: Perspectives from the United States of America

The availability of assistive and educational technology to support the academic, behavioural, and social-emotional outcomes of students with disabilities in United States public schools continues to increase. As such, educational professionals are seeking evidence-based methods for providing students with disabilities increased access to information and learning using these technologies. As the proliferation of these technologies continues, it is important that school leaders consider both the legal and ethical requirements for technology use with culturally and linguistically diverse students with disabilities. This chapter will review these legal and ethical principles as they apply to public education in the United States, and will discuss a conceptual framework for ensuring culturally relevant and appropriate assistive and educational technology integration. Implications for practice will be discussed.

Making a Case for Case-Based Teaching in Data Literacy

Abstract Building on a study conducted by the authors, this article provides strategies for teaching data literacy and outlines the case-based teaching method as an effective way of developing data-literate teachers