Why General Educators Should (and Can) Provide Specially Designed Instruction
For decades, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) has stood as the cornerstone of special education law, ensuring students with disabilities receive the support they need. Yet, despite its longevity, confusion persists about who can legally provide specially designed instruction (SDI).
Let’s clear this up right off the bat: General educators can—and in many cases should—deliver some SDI.
This clarification, solidified by the 2012 Letter to Chambers from the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), has emboldened schools to rethink their approach to special education, increasing opportunities for collaboration and ensuring students receive the highest quality instruction from highly skilled providers—general educator or special educator. This ultimately improves outcomes in reading, writing, and math.
This mindset shift is especially crucial as two current realities collide:
Outcomes for students with disabilities remain flat to lagging, and
The special education teacher shortage is not improving, but worsening
These trends may be further complicated by Presidential leadership changes which are causing more uncertainty and fear among educators than perhaps any other time in our nation’s history.
There is no better time than now to rethink how SDI is provided for students with mild-to-moderate disabilities.
What is Specially Designed Instruction?
SDI is at the heart of special education. It involves tailoring content, methodology, or delivery of instruction to address the unique needs of a student with a disability. Most crucial to this understanding is that IDEA does not mandate that only special education teachers can provide SDI. Instead, the law emphasizes that instruction must be “uniquely adapted to meet the student’s needs.” This opens the door for content experts—such as general educators, reading specialists, and interventionists—to play a pivotal role in providing SDI.
The Letter to Chambers: A Game-Changer
Dr. Melody Musgrove’s 2012 Letter to Chambers was a turning point. It clarified that SDI is not about job titles or certifications—it’s about qualifications. That is, if a general educator is equipped to adapt instruction in a specific area, they can and should provide SDI, so long as the IEP team deems them qualified to meet the student’s needs.
This is great news for students with mild-to-moderate disabilities: Under the Chambers Letter, schools have the latitude to match the teacher’s content strengths to the specific learning needs of students, particularly in reading, writing and math. The mounds of educational research over several decades are clear: Students, including those with mild-to-moderate disabilities, simply learn better, faster, and with more depth when taught by a content-strong teacher as compared to being taught by a teacher who is not content-strong. This finding should shock no one.
Here is an example of how it can play out in real life: A reading specialist with expertise in literacy interventions may be the best fit to support a student with a reading disability, while a special education teacher who lacks specialized training in the science of reading could serve as a consultant, ensuring the adaptations align with the student’s IEP, the teaching is applying multi-sensory methods, assistive technology is used, and so on.
Rethinking Roles and Responsibilities
This shift challenges traditional perceptions of special education roles. Historically, special education teachers were expected to deliver SDI across all subjects, regardless of their expertise. The role of special educators has become the most difficult one of all educators and, frankly, an impossible one to do well! So, delivering SDI across all subjects is neither realistic nor in the best interest of students.
Instead, by leveraging the strengths of all educators, schools can provide more efficient and effective support through high-quality teaching for students who arguably need it the most. In matters of student achievement and growth, the content expertise of the teacher is most important, not job title.
The Role of General Educators
Active Collaboration: General educators—classroom teachers, interventionists, specialists, content tutors, and even some Title I teachers—have regularly become members of the IEP team, but often in a passive role to meet “participation compliance” reasons. Instead, under this new approach, general educators become truly integral and purposeful members of IEP teams by not only contributing their content expertise and working alongside special educators to design SDI, but also in their potential role to deliver SDI.
Role Clearly Stated in the IEP: When it is most appropriate for general educators to provide SDI, their responsibilities should be clearly documented in the IEP to ensure accountability and transparency. For example, the IEP would clearly show that direct services are provided by the general educator (including reading specialists and interventionists) while the indirect (or consultative) services are provided by the special education teacher, and that services are conducted in the regular classroom setting.
The Role of Special Educators
Focus on Strengths: Special education teachers can concentrate on their areas of strength, such as IEP paperwork and meetings, caseload management, curriculum adaptations, student achievement and growth monitoring, managing assistive technology, addressing student behavioral challenges, addressing student “crises” as they happen, and so on. Also, and this is crucially important to understand, special education teachers who have the necessary training and background and are a content expert in reading or math (and many are), absolutely can and should deliver SDI in reading, writing, or math for students with disabilities.
Consultative Roles: By collaborating with content experts, special educators can ensure that instruction meets both academic and disability-related needs including, but not limited to, consulting on the use of multi-sensory methods (e.g., visual aids, math manipulatives, earphones, etc.), making curriculum adaptations, applying executive functioning strategies, scaffolding instruction, reteaching concepts, teaching content in multiple ways, and so on.
By combining forces—the content expertise of general educators along with the disability expertise of the special educators, the outcomes for students with disabilities could be supercharged!
Professional Growth: This model fosters opportunities for special education teachers to help build the capacities of general education colleagues through professional development, enhancing classroom skills through coaching, collaboration, differentiation and curriculum adaptation.
What This Means for IEP Teams
The IEP team plays a critical role in determining how SDI is delivered. They must:
Identify the most qualified individual to provide SDI and match them to the IEP student(s), based on content expertise, that will benefit most from their content knowledge and teaching skills.
Clearly document roles and responsibilities in the IEP, ensuring all services are transparent and align with the student’s needs.
For instance, if an 8th grade student with a math disability requires intensive math services, and the special education teacher does not have the training and confidence in teaching math, the IEP team might select a math interventionist as the primary provider of SDI, with the special education teacher consulting on unique disability-related concerns that help the interventionist become an even better provider of content to the student.
Collaboration: The Key to Success
This approach hinges on collaboration, not departmental division. When general and special educators work together, they can break down siloes and ensure students receive the best of both worlds: content expertise and specialized disability support per their unique needs. This not only benefits students in their learning outcomes but also provides for a more inclusive and collaborative culture for all educators.
Final Thoughts
The Letter to Chambers reaffirmed what many educators already knew: providing the best possible instruction for students with disabilities requires a team effort—and the use of team efforts to improve student outcomes is not only legally supported, but pedagogically the right thing to do. By embracing flexibility, leveraging expertise, and increasing collaboration, schools can ensure that all students who struggle, with or without disabilities, thrive toward reaching their learning potential.
Special education teachers remain indispensable, but their roles are evolving. And so are the roles of general educators! That’s a good thing as we build a future where, regardless of whether resources are lagging or not, every licensed educator is tapped to support any learner, no matter their title.
Source
Dr. Steve Sandoval is a senior consultant at New Solutions K12. He brings to his work more than 25 years of experience in school-based mental health and district leadership roles in which he successfully led district-wide improvement and implementation efforts. Prior to joining New Solutions K12, Steve served as executive director of special services for Westminster Public Schools in Colorado. Under his leadership, the district’s Special Education program improved dramatically, moving from a state designation of “Needs Significant Intervention” to “Meets Requirements.” Before joining Westminster Public Schools, he served as director of special programs for Weld County School District RE-4 in Windsor, Colorado. Steve is a nationally recognized thought leader and has served as an adjunct professor. Steve received his Ph.D. in School Psychology and his M.A. in Educational Psychology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. As a consultant, he has helped dozens of school districts and departments of education to make dramatic differences in the outcomes of students who struggle, with and without disabilities.