The Exceptional Student Education

Name of the practice guide	Teaching Newcomer English Learners: Four Powerful Vocabulary Practices	Integrating Play into Literacy Instruction: Strategies for Your Classroom
Subject Area	Teaching English as a Foreign Language	Reading
Brief summary of practice	The video introduces the four recommendations for teaching English as a foreign language to elementary and middle school newcomer learners. 1. The teacher must use brief, interesting, and engaging texts, such as magazine or newspaper articles. It has to be dedicated to a well-defined topic and contain the target vocabulary for that topic. 2. The teacher should choose a small number (five to seven) of the keywords for in-depth study to allow students to understand the concept and nuances of each term. Images and scaffolds can be used for understanding unfamiliar words. 3. The teacher must use multiple modalities for teaching, combining reading, writing, speaking, and listening. 4. The teacher should get students acknowledged with several word-learning strategies. It will help students to figure out the meaning of the unfamiliar words independently, which will help them in further life.	The video approaches some strategies for teaching reading to young children. 1. Teachers have to develop their students’ awareness of the segments of sound in speech, the capability to perceive the individual sounds and later connect them with letters. 2. Teachers can effectively use a play-based approach, which works better in small groups of children or individual teaching. Using songs and poems can help to make learning more playful. For example, the teacher can ask children to perform some activity (clapping, jumping) while recognizing the same initial sounds in two words, separating words into syllables, etc. 3. Teachers must teach reading comprehension strategies, such as summarizing and asking questions about what is read. 4. Teachers can help their students to comprehend, learn and remember the text by making them familiar with the typical structure of it.

Staffing and Referral Process

Some students may encounter difficulties in their educational process due to features in development. After evaluation and determining eligibility, a special education service has to be provided to such children. The process of a student becoming eligible for special education is called Exceptional Student Education (ESE). It includes ten steps, which are described in the video 10 Step Exceptional Student Education Process.

In the first step, a child is suspected of needing services beyond those provided in general education. The teacher, parent, or anyone who works with the child may provide a report about the need for special education as the result of suspected cognitive, physical, or speech disorders. In the second step, the group of professionals, including school psychologists, teachers, social workers and others, evaluates the child. The third and fourth steps include the determination of eligibility of the child for special education and scheduling the meeting for drafting the Individual Educational Plan (IEP).

In the fifth and sixth steps, the IEP is constructed; it considers parents’ concerns and information about the child’s current performance, and includes measurable goals and benchmarks. Special needs are taking into accounts, and the best supporting methods and educational technologies are chosen (Rodríguez-Cano et al., 2022). For example, supplementary lecture recordings can be provided for students disclosing dyslexia, etc. (Nightingale et al., 2019, p.13).

The seventh step is the beginning of educational services, and the eighth step ensures documented measurement of the progress in a timely manner, which is reviewed at the ninth step at least once a year. Finally, the tenth step includes a re-evaluation of the child, usually done every three years. In summary, the process of exceptional student education is a well-developed and structured system that helps children with features in development to achieve the best results in their educational process.

References

Nightingale, K. P., Anderson, V., Onens, S., Fazil, Q., Davies, H. (2019). Developing the inclusive curriculum: Is supplementary lecture recording an effective approach in supporting students with Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLDs)? Computers & Education, 130, 13–25.

Rodríguez-Cano, S., Cuesta-Gómez, J. L., Delgado-Benito, V., & Fuente-Anuncibay, R. (2022). Educational technology as a support tool for students with specific learning difficulties—future education professionals’ perspective, Sustainability, 14(10), 61-77.