Designing Instructional Strategies: The Prevention of Academic Learning Problems

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Designing Instructional Strategies: The Prevention of Academic Learning Problems is about designing and delivering instruction to students with academic learning problems. These students are identified as learning disabled, mildly handicapped, or emotionally disturbed who receive services in special education or general education settings. They are also nonhandicapped students in general education classrooms who are referred to as low performers, academically at-risk, or culturally disadvantaged, as well as students "prereferred" for academic assistance. Although these students may differ with respect to intelligence, social-emotional development, or educational placement, they are the same in at least one respect -- they have significant difficulties successfully performing academic tasks in reading, mathematics, language, or expressive writing. For some students, these difficulties create a cycle of failure. In order to break the cycle, instruction must be intensive, direct, sustained, carefully designed, and passionately delivered.

We developed this book for both special education and general education advanced undergraduate and graduate courses designated for training teachers of students with academic learning problems. In our own teaching, we found many “methods” texts too cursory in their treatment of the teaching of academic skills. These texts, for a variety of reasons, often fail to provide teachers with a clear framework or “way of thinking” about instruction – how it should be systematically designed and consistently delivered.

In this text, we establish an instructional framework and an instructional template as pedagogical anchoring points. These features are constants throughout the instructional tasks – constants that teachers can rely on when teaching everything from simple facts to complex cognitive operations. Examples of specific instructional strategies in language, decoding, reading comprehension, mathematics, expressive writing, and classroom management are developed utilizing this instructional set and framework. Because it is not possible to describe instructional strategies for every academic skill, we have designed the Generic Instruction Set so that it can be adapted by teachers when developing other teaching sequences.