About the Classroom Foundations Series

I have a new series of posts that I've been working on and I'm excited to start sharing them with you! It's called the Classroom Foundation Series, and it is intended to give you the tools you need to build the foundation of a successful SPED classroom.

Let me start by giving you a little bit of back story about how this all came to be...

I work as an Instructional Specialist for the SPED department in my district. My job is awesome because it allows me to work with SPED teachers & SPED support staff across the district instead of only on one campus. Among many things, two big pieces of my responsibilities consist of instructional coaching & facilitating professional development, both of which I've learned a ton more about over the last school year!

I found a hole in my instructional coaching & that hole was highlighted when I attended Jim Knight's Instructional Playbook workshop. Holy moly! It gave me the ideas that I realized I was missing & helped me start filling in some holes in my coaching. That's what inspired me to develop the Classroom Foundations Series.

A quality SPED classroom has some particular foundational pieces in place, regardless of what the title actually is (co-teach, inclusion, self-contained, resource, etc.).

Some of the classroom foundational pieces that I will be analyzing are as follows:

• Organization

• Student needs

• Scheduling & routines

• Planning & preparedness

• SPED paperwork procedures (ARD prep, data collection, & review, etc.)

• Proceudres for collaboration

• Sub procedures

I plan to use the Classroom Foundations Series as a guide to help you think through some of the basic must-haves of a successful SPED classroom. Each post will cover 1 specific topic in detail (see partially completed list above) & have a companion application document available. I'm not taking a deep dive of any sort into pedagogy or strategies but rather breaking down some of the most foundational components of a classroom.

Coming up next, the first post in the Classroom Foundations Series: Organization

I hope you'll stick around for the long haul to see this series unfold!