How to Teach Mixed Abilities in Special Education

Differentiating in a classroom with a wide range of skill sets is so challenging. Having to accommodate for so many different skills, having the materials organized and ready to go, and knowing what, what to teach is extremely overwhelming. I'm Sasha Long. I'm a former special education teacher and board-certified behavior analyst, and today I'm going to show you how to differentiate a lesson for a group with a really wide range of skills. You're going to introduce a topic but then provide differentiated instruction for the different skill sets in your classroom. This is a great way to utilize a theme but also allow for individualization. If we teach the same content to a group with a lot of different skills, what's going to happen is we're going to shoot for the middle of the group, and for half the kids, the content is way too easy and they're bored. For the other half of the group, the content is way too hard and they're bored. And what happens when our kids are bored? Problem behaviors. We want our instruction to be on their skill level. Now I know that's challenging. As a special ed teacher, you are really half special ed teacher, half curriculum developer, and we don't talk enough about the struggles and how hard and challenging that weight is of having to prep and differentiate and create so many different types of content for your learners. So let's break it all down today and how to do this. I'm going to go through an example, um, with a science topic that's going to be focused on science but also vocabulary. And this same idea, the same framework can be used for a lot of different types of lessons and can be great, can be utilized really well in a self-contained or resource room. So let's say you have a lot of different types of levels in your classroom. You have students that are verbal, nonverbal, students that are near grade level, students that are significantly behind grade level, and you are overwhelmed with trying to figure out how to teach them all at the same time. Even if you have paraprofessionals, this is overwhelming. So what I would do is pick a theme. So the theme I'm picking here is animals. This is a broad theme because I want to have a lot of stretch here in what I teach my students. So I'm gonna have a small whole group lesson that introduces the topic of animals. So again, this theme is gonna be pretty broad because we're gonna have a lot of different focus topics amongst our groups. I might start off the lesson with a, is it an animal or not activity where I have the whole group thumb, giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down if something's an animal. This is something that my students with limited verbal skills could participate easily. Yes, this one is an animal. We're correct. Yes, this one is an animal. No, this one is not an animal. So we're looking at discrimination, we're looking at vocabulary. For my students that have more vocabulary skills, when we would get to something that is an animal, I would have them name the animal, maybe name the type of animal. So I would extend even within this whole group lesson. If something's not an animal, I would say, "How do you know it's not an animal?" and provide those extension activities and those more inferential questions for the students that have that language. After we introduce the topic of animals, then I'm gonna really highly differentiate the themes that we work on amongst our groups. Now, if I have students that are just working on vocabulary, receptive or expressive, I might just work on matching animals and naming animals. I might do activities like task cards or file folders where we are just finding the matches of animals. We might practice naming the animals or finding the animals. I might say, "Where's the raccoon?" and have them point to the raccoon. "Where's the bear?" and have them point to the bear. So even students with limited verbal skills are able to participate. If students know some animals, I might work on non-identical matching. So I might print a bunch of different pictures of different types of animals and sort. These are all different types of birds versus different types of ducks versus different types of pigs, and the difference between ducks and birds are a little similar, so this one's actually a little bit tricky. So we're looking at those close-in non-examples, and we're looking at discrimination and vocabulary and sorting here. So a lot of great receptive and expressive language skills that we could extend on in this activity. And look at a more advanced skill here. Let's say we have students that have a good knowledge and set of vocabulary related to animals, then we're gonna start to dig deeper. There's a lot we can work on from a science and vocabulary perspective here. I might work on omnivore, herbivore, and carnivore and sort animals into what they eat. I might sort animals by habitat. I might look at some of those characteristics and traits of animals beyond just naming them. So we're getting a little bit more advanced. We're looking at, is this an herbivore? Is this a carnivore? So we have more advanced vocabulary. We are looking at animals from a different perspective, but we're still on that theme of animals. I might look at life cycle and do an activity that looks at the life cycle and food chain of animals. So here we're gonna connect the food chain similar to this one. So we're gonna be extending a little bit deeper. For my students that have a lot of skills related to here, I might assign a research project on animals. Pick an animal and look up the life cycle of that animal. And we're going to do this online. We're going to learn how to utilize technology. We're going to learn advanced vocabulary about this animal. I might pick to learn the life cycle of a pig. We're going to do a KWL chart. We're going to look up some facts. So we're going to do that assisted research, and then we're going to create a whole research assignment and looking up sources and filling out the graphic, the infographic here. So this is a nice way to go from something as simple as matching animals to identifying the life cycle of an animal, all within the same theme. So our whole class is working on animals, but our individual lessons in our small groups are highly differentiated based on the skill sets of your learners. That's our goal. We can then use these types of activities for independent work, extension activities, when your students are not with you in the group. Because you're like, Sasha, when they're not with me, what are they doing? After a skill like this is mastered, this can be something that goes in an independent work bin for later when they're doing independent work bin and you're working with the students that are working on something like this. We want to have that great rotation going in your classroom where students are going between working with you and your paraprofessionals and doing independent work or having break time. That will allow you and give you the capacity to do this level of differentiated instruction. But I love this structure of having the overarching theme and then the differentiated lessons between. All of these activities are actually part of Curriculum Access, which is my dream curriculum that I created for special education classrooms. Um, and this is a highly differentiated curriculum that allows you to provide this level of differentiation, this level of individualization for a classroom that has a wide range of skills. If you're interested in learning more on Curriculum Access, click the link below and click follow to learn more on how to run your self-contained or resource special education class.