Are you ready to make a difference in the lives of underserved Black Students with Special Needs? Change agency begins with awareness, knowledge, and skill. In this self-paced course, Wyoming k-12 teachers and school staff will recognize personal and professional biases, relationships between structures of racism and special education, relate empathy for ignorance to strategies for equity, and relegate evidence-based and privileged best practices to the most marginalized students with special needs: Black students.
Objectives
As a result of this course, Wyoming teachers will:
- Analyze data and recognize disparities and challenges among boys and girls across all special education boys and girls, specifically, Black, White, Latinx and Native American Indian.
- Apply the idea of best teaching and advocate practices to their classrooms to better support struggling students to reach their potential.
- Begin to assess/unpack/reflect on their own individual identities and cultures, including influences on teaching and learning.
- Choose equitable and easy to implement classroom management practices as a strategy for inclusion.
- Design an instructional practice, process, or program proposal that directly impacts the outcomes for Black students with special needs.
- Design and implement a learning environment that affirms students’ racial and cultural identities and contributes to their engagement and learning through the cultivation of critical inquiry.
- Develop strategies for implementing best teaching practices to support struggling students and students with disabilities.
- Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of School Resource Officers (SRO)
- Explore evidence-based interventions as instruments for academic success.
- Explore their own conscious and unconscious bias in working with racially diverse students.
- Explore the process in which schools use to identify students with disabilities.
- Envision equitable special education systems and practices as a way forward toward improved outcomes.
- Identify what struggling students may look like in your classroom.
- Identify and question underlying personal and institutional beliefs, norms, practices, and assumptions that contribute to inequity.
- Identify the Practices to support identifying students with a disability. Identify historical oppression and the multigenerational impact on Black students and families.
- Investigate institutional norms and practices that form or contribute to inequities in special education.
- Learn about specific biases in special education and reflect on their own biases.
- Learn methods for identifying and responding to inequities that relate to the special education system.
- Recognize effective early intervention practices.
- Recognize collaboration with a special education advocate as part of the individualized education plan (IEP) process.
