DeCASA’s Educational Consultants provide expertise in delivering specialized instruction to special educators, counselors, and leaders on an array of topics in special education and assistance with student supports. Our team delivers instructional strategies, differentiated techniques, 504, Response to Intervention, teacher retention support and best practices, through face-to-face and virtual professional learning sessions. We empower teachers and leaders for re-delivery to their teams with practical everyday tools to make them successful and help their students achieve academic success. We support teachers with social emotional learning.
Our team provides teachers with models and examples that they can transfer to their classrooms. We also offer 1:1 Coaching for teachers that require more intensive support.
Our team also provides services to families need of support with special education services.
Special Education Practices
Special education is the practice of educating students in a way that addresses their individual differences and needs. Ideally, this process involves the individually planned and systematically monitored arrangement of teaching procedures, adapted equipment and materials, and accessible settings. These interventions are designed to help individuals with special needs achieve a higher level of personal self-sufficiency and success in school and in their community, which may not be available if the student were only given access to a typical classroom education.
Student
Supports
Services
Student supports offers a continuum of services that provide academic, social-emotional, and ADA support to schools and communities.
Compliance
Compliance includes both process and content. Process includes following all the required steps, in the correct order and within the timelines. Content includes documenting correctly (your evidence of following the process) and implementing the IEP as written (your implementation of the results of the process). Compliance ensures state and federal guidelines are being enforced.
Professional Learning
Specialized process of providing special educators with intense, direct instructional, hands-on learning opportunities with strategies and trainings for special education practices. Differentiated instruction for adults presented though various approaches to professional development, including face to face sessions, consultation, coaching, mentoring, reflective supervision and virtual learning. Modules are designed to help teachers improve their skills over time.
Teacher Retention
Special educators, the professionals in greatest need in public schools today work daily to deliver on the promises of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Some of the reasons for leaving included unsupportive school climates, minimal professional development opportunities, non-licensure or certification status, administrative burdens associated with IDEA, caseloads with multiple areas of disabilities, and role conflict or dissonance. Six percent of all special education teachers leave the teaching field each year with an additional five percent of special education teachers transferring to another field of teaching.
Teacher retention initiatives are most often based on this recognized need to keep in classrooms those teachers who are qualified and utilize effective teaching strategies, demonstrated by increased student achievement year after year.
Advocacy
Providing support to the student and families on behalf of a student to help the family obtain compliant special education services.