Specially Designed InstructionFrom IEP to Daily Instruction

A tenth grader with an IEP sits in Living Environment on Monday. She has extended time, a word processor, and the same CER graphic organizer the rest of the class has. All three are being provided exactly as written. Her lab write-ups have not moved in eight weeks, and nobody in the building is teaching her to write a scientific argument.

That is the problem this unit is about — not whether those three supports are correctly labelled, but whether anyone is teaching. The labels turn out to matter anyway, because of what they let a teacher believe. She has extended time and an organizer, so her IEP is being implemented is a true sentence, and it can be true of a student no one is instructing. Telling SDI from its neighbours is worth the trouble for exactly one reason: the confusion has a cost, and the cost is always that student.

This is an instructional design problem, not a compliance problem. IDEA and New York regulation define SDI by its purpose: adapting the content, methodology, or delivery of instruction to address needs that result from the student's disability and to secure access to the general curriculum. Neither condition can be read off a strategy list. Extended time is not SDI. Neither is a graphic organizer, or small group, or a check-in. They can all be part of SDI, or part of something else entirely, and telling the difference requires knowing why you chose them and what you expect to change.

So this unit is built around a chain of reasoning rather than a catalogue of strategies. You will run the same seven-step sequence dozens of times, on seven different students, in seven different courses, until it becomes the thing you do automatically when you open a lesson plan next to an IEP.

Who this is for

The unit assumes wildly uneven starting points. A first-year teaching assistant and a fifteen-year special educator can both work through it, because the anchor is not prior knowledge, it is the seven-step chain, and everybody starts that chain in the same place.

A commitment about rigor

Learning objectives

By the end of the unit, you should be able to:

How the unit is built

Total: roughly 12 hours of module work plus 2–3 hours for the assessments and performance task. Facilitated delivery pacing options are in Section 17.

The seven students

Every module returns to the same seven fictional students. They are not illustrations of disability categories; they are illustrations of the fact that a category tells you almost nothing about what to teach. Two of them are classified with a learning disability and need entirely different SDI. Two are classified with autism and need entirely different SDI. That is the point.

The legal floor

Two things are law. Everything else in this unit is professional judgment informed by research.

The New York and federal definitions are substantively the same. New York's phrasing is what you will hear in a CSE meeting in Albany or Buffalo, so it is the phrasing this unit uses. The important thing about both is the sentence structure: a single verb (adapting), three objects (content, methodology, or delivery), and two purpose clauses joined by and. Both purposes must hold. That is the whole test, and Module 1 is built on it.

The third legal anchor is the standard of progress. In Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE-1 (2017), the Supreme Court held unanimously that an IEP must be reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child's circumstances — rejecting the argument that merely more than trivial progress suffices. That case is why this unit refuses to treat “the student is in a special class” as an answer to “what should the student learn?”

New York's own framing

NYSED's Blueprint for Improved Results for Students with Disabilities sets out seven principles; three of them govern this unit directly.

Two structural facts about New York matter for how you will look for SDI in a real IEP.

• There is no box on the New York IEP labelled “specially designed instruction.” SDI is distributed across the present levels of performance, the measurable annual goals, the recommended special education program, and the supplementary aids and services / program modifications and accommodations. Reading the IEP as the SDI plan is a skill; Module 3 teaches it.
• New York's continuum is defined by service, not by label. Under §200.6, integrated co-teaching classes provide “specially designed instruction and academic instruction” to a group of students with and without disabilities, capped at 12 students with disabilities; consultant teacher services run a minimum of two hours weekly; resource room a minimum of three, with a maximum instructional group of five. Those numbers describe the container. They do not describe the instruction, and a compliant service delivery schedule with no designed instruction inside it is the failure mode this unit exists to prevent.

The instructional evidence base

Where the evidence is strong, and where it is not

Items 1–9 are multiple choice. Items 10–12 are matching or sorting. Items 13–15 are short response; write two to four sentences each. The post-assessment in Section 14 is parallel in structure and difficulty, so the two are directly comparable.

Part A · Definition and distinctions

Part B · Sorting and matching

Part C · Short response

Essential question

If two teachers were doing exactly the same thing in two different classrooms, how could one of them be delivering SDI and the other one not?

Learning objectives

• State the IDEA and NYSED definitions of SDI and identify the two purpose conditions that both contain.
• Classify an instructional adaptation as a change to content, methodology, or delivery.
• Explain why SDI is a property of a decision rather than a property of a strategy.
• Locate where SDI lives in a New York IEP.

Key vocabulary

Before you go on

• 34 CFR §300.39 — read (a)(1) and (b)(3). Two minutes. Read the actual regulation, not a paraphrase of it.
• 8 NYCRR §200.1, NYSED — find subdivision (vv) and compare it word by word to the federal text.
• WVDE Specially Designed Instruction Guidance Document (Aug 2025), pages 2–4: the Elements of SDI table, the Myth Busting table, and “What SDI Is, and Is Not.”
• NYSED Blueprint for Improved Results for Students with Disabilities — read Principle 3.

The definition, taken apart

Here is the New York text with the load-bearing parts marked:

Adapting, as appropriate to the needs of an eligible student under this Part, the content, methodology, or delivery of instruction to address the unique needs that result from the student's disability; and to ensure access of the student to the general curriculum, so that he or she can meet the educational standards that apply to all students. 8 NYCRR §200.1(vv)

Three things follow from that sentence, and each one overturns something teachers commonly believe.

1. SDI is a verb applied to instruction, not a category of student support

The subject of the sentence is adapting. Not providing, not listing, not offering. Something has to change about the instruction itself. A support that sits beside instruction — a device, a seat, a clock — is not what this sentence describes. It may be necessary, it may be required by the IEP, and withholding it may be a violation. It is still not, by itself, specially designed instruction.

This is the distinction that makes teachers uncomfortable, so be precise about what is being claimed. Nobody is saying accommodations are unimportant. The claim is narrower: an accommodation removes an obstacle so the student can do the thing. SDI teaches the student to do the thing. Extended time gives Marisol more minutes in which to not write. Explicit strategy instruction in how to structure a written argument teaches her to write.

2. There are exactly three things you can adapt

Content, methodology, delivery. Everything else is one of those three wearing different clothes. Getting fluent at naming which one you are changing is the single most useful habit in this unit, because it forces you to say what is actually different about Tuesday.

Structure adapted from the WVDE Specially Designed Instruction Guidance Document (Aug 2025, p. 2), which credits the PROGRESS Center at AIR.

3. Both purpose clauses have to hold at once

This is the part that gets dropped. The regulation is not “adapting instruction to address disability-related needs.” It is that, and to ensure access to the general curriculum so the student can meet the standards that apply to all students. An adaptation that addresses a disability-related need while removing the student from grade-level standards has satisfied half the definition and violated the other half.

Why the same practice can be SDI in one room and not the next

Return to the essential question. Two chemistry teachers each hand a student a partially completed lab report scaffold. Same paper. In one room it is SDI and in the other it is not, and the difference is invisible if you are only looking at the paper.

Notice that the classroom observation would look nearly identical. The difference lives in the reasoning behind the paper and in the data behind the reasoning. That is why this unit teaches a chain rather than a checklist — and why documentation matters, which is Module 7.

Where SDI lives in a New York IEP

There is no SDI field. Reading a New York IEP for SDI means assembling it from four places.

1. Present levels of academic achievement and functional performanceThe barrier is described here, or it is nowhere. If the present levels say “Marisol struggles with writing,” you cannot design anything. If they say “produces a claim and stops; 41 words against a class median of 190; the same content spoken aloud contains six accurate reasoning statements,” the instruction almost designs itself.
2. Measurable annual goalsThe goal names what the SDI is for. A goal that specifies a taught routine (“using a taught note-taking routine”) is telling you methodology is being adapted. A goal aligned to the grade-level standard is telling you the second purpose clause is satisfied.
3. Recommended special education program and servicesConsultant teacher, resource room, integrated co-teaching, special class, related services — this is the delivery element: by whom, where, when, how often, in what group size. Under §200.6 these carry specific minimums and caps.
4. Supplementary aids and services, program modifications, accommodations, supports for school personnelAccommodations live here. So do program modifications, which are where you find authorized changes to content. And “supports for school personnel” is the sleeper field: it is where the training a paraprofessional needs to implement the SDI correctly gets written down.

Interactive activity · Element sort with justification

Knowledge check

Click a question to reveal the answer and explanation.

Essential question

If a practice helps a student, why isn't that enough to call it specially designed instruction?

Learning objectives

• Distinguish SDI from accommodations, modifications, differentiation, UDL, intervention, and scaffolding using purpose and origin rather than appearance.
• Explain why the same practice can be SDI in one case and not in another.
• Apply a decision procedure to sixteen common secondary practices.

Key vocabulary

Before you go on

• WVDE Additional SDI Resources — the Comparison of SDI, Differentiated Instruction, and Universal Design for Learning one-pager, and the EBP Spotlight: Scaffolding SDI.
• WVDE SDI Guidance, pp. 6–7: “Difference Between SDI, Accommodations, and Modifications” and the guiding questions, and p. 21, FAQ 15 on small-group instruction.
• IRIS Center: Universal Design for Learning — the Perspectives & Resources pages on the three principles.

The six neighbours

Each of these is a real, defensible practice. None of them is SDI by definition, and each is confused with SDI for a slightly different reason. Sorting them by who decides, on what basis, for whom, and what changes makes the boundaries visible.

The one that needs extra care: intervention

Intervention and SDI overlap more than any other pair, and the distinction is genuinely subtle. An eleventh-grade Tier 3 reading intervention and eleventh-grade SDI in reading can be the same program, the same length, the same explicitness, delivered by the same person.

What separates them is origin and obligation. Intervention is available to students who meet criteria and can be discontinued when they stop meeting them. SDI flows from an IEP need, and its provision is an entitlement that does not depend on continued qualification for a program. In practice, three things follow: SDI must be individually determined rather than assigned by protocol; SDI must be documented and monitored against the IEP goal; and SDI cannot be discontinued because a program's cohort ended.

WVDE's guidance makes a related point worth carrying: in a multi-tiered system, SDI is not synonymous with Tier 3. It is delivered in whatever tier the student's instruction occurs in.

Is This Actually SDI?

This is the centre of the unit. Sixteen practices that show up in every secondary building, each shown twice: once where it is part of SDI and once where it is not. Read the pairs. Do not read the practice names as a list of answers — every one of them appears on both sides.

Interactive activity · Flip the card

Knowledge check

Essential question

The student can't do the task. What exactly is stopping them — and how would I know if I were wrong?

Learning objectives

• Move from a grade-level standard to a specific, observable learning target.
• State a disability-related barrier in instructional terms rather than diagnostic ones.
• Use error patterns and performance discrepancies to distinguish competing barrier hypotheses.
• Read a New York IEP for the information that constrains instructional design.

Key vocabulary

Before you go on

• NYSED, Turnkey Guidance for Developing a Standards-Based IEP — Parts 2 and 3, the seven steps and the discussion of gap analysis and point of access.
• IRIS Case Study: Mathematics — Identifying and Addressing Student Errors. Do Level A before the session; it takes about 25 minutes and it is the fastest way to feel what error analysis buys you.
• High-Leverage Practices for Students with Disabilities (2024), Chapter 5 — HLP 4 and HLP 11.

Step 1 and 2: standard, then target

Start at the standard, always. Not at the student's level, not at the IEP goal, not at last year's materials. NYSED's standards-based IEP process opens with “Know the grade-level content standards” for a reason: everything downstream is a comparison against that anchor, and if you start the comparison somewhere else, you get a plan for a curriculum nobody is enrolled in.

The standard is annual and abstract. The learning target is what a student does in front of you this week. Making that move well is a skill, and most vague SDI plans are downstream of a vague target.

Step 3: the barrier

Here is where most plans go wrong, and the failure is almost always the same. The barrier is written as a restatement of the classification (“has a learning disability”), a restatement of the outcome (“struggles with writing”), or a folk theory (“is a visual learner,” “is unmotivated,” “has low processing”). None of these tells you what to do on Tuesday.

A usable barrier statement has three properties: it names a mechanism, it is observable, and it predicts where performance will and will not break down. That last property is what makes it testable, and testability is what saves you from a semester of teaching the wrong thing.

Three tools for finding the mechanism

1. Look for the discrepancyFind two conditions where the same student performs very differently. Oral versus written. Familiar versus novel. Untimed versus timed. Observed versus unobserved. With the text present versus from memory. The variable that changes across the two conditions is a candidate mechanism. Marisol's 41 words versus six accurate oral reasoning statements is the whole diagnosis in one comparison.
2. Read the errors, not the scoreA score tells you how much. An error pattern tells you what. Thirty-one of Amara's thirty-one wrong answers share a form; that is not a fluency problem and no amount of extra practice will touch it. Collect 15–20 errors before you conclude anything, and sort them into factual, procedural, and conceptual.
3. Check the antecedentsFor behavior that interferes with learning, when the behavior occurs is the diagnosis. Cassidy's twenty of twenty-two incidents within ninety seconds of an evaluative announcement rules out several hypotheses at once and rules in one.

Step 4: what the IEP tells you

The IEP is not the enemy of good instruction and it is not a formality. It is a constraint document, and reading it well is a professional skill. Four passes, in this order.

Worked example · Running the front half of the chain

Interactive activity · Competing hypotheses

Knowledge check

Essential question

If I only had time to get good at six things, which six would make the most difference to my students with disabilities?

Learning objectives

• Name the four domains and six pillar practices of the 2024 HLP framework.
• Map each step of the planning sequence to the HLPs that operationalize it.
• Use HLP language to make an SDI plan legible to a colleague who was not in the room.

Key vocabulary

Before you go on

• HLP Pillars one-page chart — print it. It is the single most useful page in the framework.
• HLPs for Students with Disabilities (2024) — Chapter 1 for what changed; Chapter 7 for HLP 16 and HLP 7; Chapter 10 for HLP 20 and the essential components of intensive instruction.
• CEEDAR HLP Video Hub — watch the HLP 16 video before Module 5.
• IRIS High-Leverage Practices alignment tool — use it to find the IRIS module that matches a practice you want to strengthen.

The four domains and six pillars

The HLPs are the machinery of the chain

The planning sequence tells you what question to answer next. The HLPs tell you what skilled practice answering it looks like. Mapping one onto the other is the point of this module.

Worked example · The same case in HLP language

Interactive activity · HLP audit of a real lesson

Knowledge check

Essential question

What does the student actually see, hear, and do differently — minute by minute — because this instruction was specially designed?

Learning objectives

• Build an explicit instruction sequence for a specific secondary learning target.
• Distinguish modeling from demonstration, and scaffolding from doing it for the student.
• Deliver corrective feedback that is immediate, specific, and tied to a goal.
• Write a fading plan with criteria at the same time you write the support.
• Maintain grade-level rigor while changing content, methodology, or delivery.

Key vocabulary

Before you go on

• IRIS: Explicit, Systematic Instruction — the anchor page. Watch the video examples.
• WVDE EBP Spotlights — Explicit Instruction, Scaffolding SDI, and Corrective Feedback. Three short PDFs, one page each.
• HLPs 2024, Chapter 7 (HLP 16) and Chapter 9 (HLPs 15, 18, 8/22).
• IRIS: SOS — Helping Students Become Independent Learners for self-regulation, relevant to Jaden and Cassidy.

Explicit instruction, described accurately

The 2024 HLP wording is worth reading closely because it is more demanding than the “I do, we do, you do” shorthand suggests:

Educators use explicit instruction to make learning new content, skills, and strategies accessible to students. When using explicit instruction, educators explain concepts by highlighting essential content, anticipating common misconceptions, and strategically choosing examples, non-examples, and language to facilitate understanding. They model and scaffold processes… Educators provide students opportunities for supported and independent practice with feedback to learn, maintain, and generalize newly learned knowledge and skills to other relevant settings and situations. HLP 16, High-Leverage Practices for Students with Disabilities, 2nd ed., 2024

Three of those clauses are routinely dropped in practice, and dropping them is what turns explicit instruction into lecture.

• Anticipating common misconceptions. Not correcting them when they appear — planning for them in advance and building the non-example that prevents them.
• Strategically choosing non-examples. A concept is defined as much by what it excludes as by what it includes. For Amara, 3x + 7 = 5x − 9 solved with a one-sided operation, presented deliberately as a non-example to analyze, teaches more than three more correct worked examples.
• Maintain and generalize. Built into the definition, not an optional extension.

The sequence, with what each phase is for

1. Set the target and activate what's relevantState what the student will be able to do and why it matters in this course. Retrieve only the prior knowledge the new skill depends on — not a general warm-up. For Nia: “Today you'll find the main clause in sentences that have a clause tucked inside them. Yesterday you found subjects and verbs in short sentences. Same job, harder sentence.”
2. Model with a think-aloudNarrate the decisions, not the answer. Deliberately narrate the step the student's error data show they skip. For Tyler: “Before I look at the shape of this, I'm reading the vertical axis. It says millimetres. Millimetres of what? I need the caption.” Do it three times before expecting anything.
3. Guided practice with scaffolds and high response ratesThe student does it with support. This is where opportunities to respond are won or lost: aim for a response every 30–60 seconds, not a question every five minutes to whoever raises a hand. Use whiteboards, partner turns, written responses everyone produces.
4. Immediate corrective feedbackCorrect at the point of error, not on the returned paper next week. Name the step, not the person: “You subtracted 7 from the left side. What has to happen on the right for this to stay balanced?”
5. Independent practice at high successAim for 85–90% success. Below that, the student is practicing errors and learning that the task is aversive. Above 95%, you have stopped teaching anything.
6. Plan maintenance and generalizationSchedule distributed retrieval. Practice the skill in a second setting and a second format on purpose. This is HLP 21 and it is not optional.
7. Fade on a written criterionDecide now what performance will trigger removing the next layer of support, and write it down. Support with no exit criterion becomes permanent by default.

Scaffolding versus doing it for them

HLP 15 defines scaffolded supports as assistance that lets a student complete tasks they cannot yet do independently, calibrated to performance, used flexibly, evaluated, and gradually removed once no longer needed. Every clause in that sentence is a test a real scaffold has to pass.

Corrective feedback that does something

HLP 8/22 calls feedback “one of the most important instructional practices,” effective when it is goal-directed, focused on task, process, or self-regulation, and delivered “timely, contingent, genuine, meaningful, age appropriate, and at rates commensurate with task and phase of learning.” That last phrase is the one that changes practice at secondary level: feedback rate should drop as the student moves from acquisition to fluency to maintenance. Dense feedback during acquisition is correct. The same density during maintenance prevents independence.

Active engagement: count it

HLP 18 is about student engagement as an engineered property of the lesson. The measurable version is opportunities to respond — the number of times a student produces an observable response. In a typical secondary lecture-and-discussion period, an individual student's OTR count is often in the single digits. For a student like Devon, whose barrier is sustaining attention across extended oral input, that count is the intervention.

• Choral and written responses instead of hand-raising, so every student responds every time.
• Partner turns at fixed points — and for Devon, at the two cued pauses that are already part of his note-taking routine.
• Response cards, whiteboards, one-sentence written stops. Low technology, high count.
• Count it once. Have a colleague tally one student's responses for twenty minutes. The number is usually a surprise and it changes planning more than any reading will.

Rigor is preserved by changing the route, not the destination

The most common way SDI goes wrong at secondary level is that the adaptation quietly lowers the target. Here is the same lesson adapted three ways for three students, with the standard held fixed.

Interactive activity · Lesson redesign

Knowledge check

Essential question

Four weeks in, the line is flat. What exactly do I change — and how do I avoid changing five things at once?

Learning objectives

• Choose a progress measure sensitive enough to detect change within weeks.
• Apply a decision rule rather than an impression.
• Check implementation fidelity before concluding a student did not respond.
• Intensify along one named dimension of the taxonomy of intervention intensity.
• Decide among maintain, fade, modify, and intensify.

Key vocabulary

Before you go on

• NCII: Data-Based Individualization — the five-step process overview.
• NCII: Taxonomy of Intervention Intensity — the seven dimensions and the overview handout.
• IRIS: Intensive Intervention (Part 1) — Using DBI. Page 7, “Modify Delivery of Instruction,” is directly useful.
• HLPs 2024, Chapter 10 — HLP 20 and Table 10.1, the essential components of intensive instruction.

The five-step cycle

NCII's DBI process is deliberately boring, and its value is that it prevents the two most common failure modes: changing nothing for a year, and changing everything at once so that nobody can tell what worked.

1. Implement a validated intervention with fidelityStart with something with evidence behind it, delivered as designed. Most “the student didn't respond” conclusions are actually “the plan wasn't delivered,” and the difference matters enormously.
2. Monitor progressBrief, repeated, equivalent probes on the skill in the goal. Weekly for most secondary academic goals; more often for behavior.
3. If response is inadequate, assess diagnosticallyThis is the step that gets skipped. When the line is flat, the question is not “what else could we try” but “why is this not working.” Error analysis, a brief skills inventory, an FBA for behavior.
4. Adapt the intervention along a named dimensionChange one thing, deliberately, chosen because the diagnostic pointed at it.
5. Monitor again, and repeatThe cycle continues. Adaptation is normal, not a sign that the original plan was wrong.

Choosing a measure you can actually use

At secondary level the measurement problem is real: unit tests are too infrequent, and standardized measures are too insensitive to show four weeks of change. What works is a short, repeatable probe built from the goal itself.

Reading the graph: four patterns

Before you intensify: fidelity

HLP 6 says to use the data, analyze instructional practices, and adjust. The middle clause comes first. Four questions, honestly answered:

• Did it happen? Not “was it scheduled” — did it occur, on how many of the planned occasions? Count.
• Was it delivered as designed? Was the strategy explicitly modeled, or handed over? Was feedback immediate, or on returned work?
• Was it the same across people? If a special educator, a general educator, and a paraprofessional all deliver parts of it, are they delivering the same thing?
• Was the dosage what was planned? Three times a week means three, and “when we had time” is a fidelity finding, not a scheduling detail.

The seven dimensions of intensification

When fidelity is confirmed and the diagnostic is done, NCII's taxonomy gives you named dimensions to change. Change one, deliberately, and keep monitoring.

Worked example · A flat line, diagnosed and fixed

Interactive activity · Decision-making simulation

Knowledge check

Essential question

Could a colleague who has never met this student pick up my plan and teach it correctly on Monday?

Learning objectives

• Design SDI for the specific task demands of secondary coursework.
• Distinguish a task's surface demand from its underlying cognitive demand.
• Plan SDI within the constraints of a 42-minute period, a co-taught section, and a shared caseload.
• Document SDI so another educator can implement it without a conversation.

Key vocabulary

Before you go on

• WVDE SDI Guidance, Section 2 (pp. 8–10): roles in planning and delivering SDI, co-teaching, and the role of instructional support staff.
• TIES Center 5-15-45 Tool — collaborative planning structured by how much time you actually have. Useful if you have no common planning period.
• 8 NYCRR §200.6 — know the parameters of the service you are delivering.

Analyze the task before you adapt it

Secondary tasks are compound. “Write a lab report” is not one demand, it is eight, and a student can fail the task while being fully capable of seven of them. Adapting the whole task when one component is broken is how rigor gets lost.

Seven students, seven Tuesdays

Working inside real constraints

Forty-two minutes

SDI does not require a separate block. Most of what is described above occupies five to twelve minutes and happens inside the lesson.

• Pre-teach in the margins. Ten minutes before the lab, during a study hall, in the first five minutes while others settle.
• Embed the model in the whole-class model. When you think aloud for everyone, deliberately narrate the step your student skips. Everyone benefits; one student was the reason.
• Use guided practice as the SDI window. While the class works, that is the block where a group of three with the same error pattern gets fifteen minutes of designed instruction.
• Make the exit ticket the probe. Progress monitoring you have to schedule separately usually does not happen.

Co-taught sections

Under §200.6, integrated co-teaching provides specially designed instruction and academic instruction to a group including students with and without disabilities, capped at 12 students with disabilities. What makes it work is not the staffing; it is the planning. The WVDE guidance is blunt about the failure modes: splitting subjects, one teacher circulating while the other teaches, one adult hovering over two students, or one person's ideas determining everything.

The practical minimum is a standing agreement about three questions before each unit: What is the target for all students? Which students need which designed instruction inside it? Who delivers which part? If you have no common planning time, the TIES 5-15-45 tool structures the conversation for whatever you do have — five minutes in a hallway is enough for the third question.

Teaching assistants and paraprofessionals

Instructional support staff can and do implement SDI, under the guidance and supervision of a certified special educator or related service provider. WVDE's conditions are the right ones: the special educator designs it, the TA is trained on the specific procedure and given the materials, communication is ongoing, and the TA collects data. What a TA cannot do is invent the plan in the moment, and asking them to is a design failure by the adult who wrote the plan, not a performance failure by the person implementing it.

Documentation: the test is a substitute teacher

Objective 12 is that another educator could implement your SDI from your documentation. This is not a compliance concern. It is the difference between a plan that survives your absence, your transfer, and June, and one that lives in your head.

Interactive activity · The substitute test

Knowledge check

Essential question

Given everything, what would I actually do — and what would make me change my mind?

Learning objectives

• Run the complete seven-step sequence on an unfamiliar case.
• Justify each decision with evidence from the case rather than with preference.
• Critique a colleague's plan against the same criteria you will be scored on.

The case

The challenge

Peer critique protocol

One defensible answer

Read this after you build yours. It is one good plan, not the answer, and a differently reasoned plan can score just as well.

Knowledge check

What you are producing

A complete SDI plan for Simone Alvarez, built on the seven-step sequence, using the planning template in Section 16. Two to four pages. It must be specific enough that a colleague who has never met her could teach Wednesday's lesson from it.

1. Step 1Grade-level standard
2. Step 2Learning target
3. Step 3Disability-related barrier
4. Step 4IEP need
5. Step 5Specially designed instruction
6. Step 6Student response & data
7. Step 7Instructional adjustment

The student

The upcoming lesson

What to submit

Scoring

Part A · Definition and distinctions

Part B · Sorting and matching

Part C · Short response

Pre-assessment key

Post-assessment key

Three ways to run this

Session plans for the eight-session model

Grouping

• Mix roles deliberately. A general educator, a special educator, and a TA at the same table produces better analysis than three of any one. The TA usually knows things about the student the other two do not.
• Content-alike for Module 5 only. The lesson redesign needs subject partners.
• Cross-content for Module 7's substitute test. The whole point is that the reader cannot fill gaps from subject knowledge.
• Administrators participate, they do not observe. A principal at a table doing the sort learns more than a principal at the back of the room, and it changes what teachers are willing to say.

Six conversations that will happen, and what to do

Materials to have ready

• Printed copies of job aids 1, 2, 3, 7, and 10 for every participant. Do not project them — they are meant to be written on.
• The HLP pillars chart, printed, one per person.
• Participants bring: one real lesson plan (Modules 4, 5), one real IEP or de-identified excerpt (Module 3), and their current SDI documentation for one student (Module 7).
• Chart paper for the Module 2 flip-the-card debrief.
• For the Module 6 simulation, reveal rounds one at a time — printed strips or a slide per round.

Scoring the performance task

• Two scorers where possible, and reconcile differences on criteria 2 and 4 specifically. Those two carry the most disagreement and the most learning.
• Score criterion 2 first. If the barrier statement is a label, the rest of the plan usually cannot be strong regardless of how polished it is, and telling the participant this first makes the rest of the feedback land.
• Revise and resubmit is the default for anything below proficient. This is professional learning, not certification, and a second attempt after specific feedback is where most of the growth occurs.
• Return the three traps from Section 13 with every score. Participants who chose one of them need to see why, and participants who avoided them should know they did something hard.

Following through

A unit like this changes practice only if something happens after it. Three low-cost structures, in order of impact:

1. One SDI plan reviewed per department meeting. Fifteen minutes, using the peer critique protocol from Module 8. Rotate. This is the single highest-yield follow-through.
2. Coaching cycles using the Section 16 observation checklist, with the explicit rule that the post-conversation carries as much weight as the observation. Coaches should be trained on why an SDI observation cannot be scored on what is visible alone.
3. A shared progress-monitoring folder per grade team. Not for compliance — so that the four-consecutive-points rule triggers a conversation rather than sitting in one teacher's notebook.

Legal requirements

• Individuals with Disabilities Education Act regulations. 34 CFR §300.39, Special education. law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/34/300.39. Federal requirement. The source of the SDI definition at (b)(3).
• New York State Regulations of the Commissioner of Education, Part 200. §200.1 Definitions — subdivision (vv) specially designed instruction, (ww) special education, (bbb) supplementary aids and services. nysed.gov/special-education/section-2001-definitions. New York requirement.
• 8 NYCRR §200.4 Procedures for referral, evaluation, IEP development, placement and review — IEP content at (d)(2), transition planning at (d)(2)(ix), beginning with the first IEP in effect at age 15. nysed.gov. New York requirement; more stringent than the federal age-16 floor.
• 8 NYCRR §200.6 Continuum of services — consultant teacher, resource room, integrated co-teaching, special class, and the associated group size and frequency requirements. nysed.gov/special-education/section-2006-continuum-services. New York requirement.
• NYSED, Continuum of Special Education Services for School-Age Students with Disabilities. nysed.gov. State guidance interpreting §200.6.
• Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE-1, 580 U.S. 386 (2017). Holding that an IEP must be reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child's circumstances. Binding federal case law.

New York State guidance

• NYSED. Blueprint for Improved Results for Students with Disabilities. nysed.gov/special-education/blueprint-improved-results-students-disabilities. Seven principles; Principle 3 addresses SDI directly. State guidance, not regulation.
• NYSED. Turnkey Guidance for Developing a Standards-Based IEP. PDF. The seven-step standards-based IEP process, gap analysis, and “point of access.” State guidance.
• Narcisse, A., & Leone, V. Understanding Specially Designed Instruction. NYS Regional Special Education Technical Assistance and Support Center, presented at the Next Generation Learning Standards Conference, November 2017. PDF. Source of the content / methodology / delivery breakdown in New York terminology. Note the 2017 date; the regulatory definitions it cites are unchanged.

High-leverage practices

• McLeskey, J., et al. High-Leverage Practices for Students with Disabilities (2nd ed.). Council for Exceptional Children & CEEDAR Center, March 2024. Free PDF, 221 pp. All HLP descriptions quoted in this unit are from this edition. Replaces the 2017 first edition.
• HLP Pillars chart. CEEDAR Center, 2024. PDF. The four domains, six pillars, and sixteen embedded practices on one page.
• CEEDAR Center. High-Leverage Practices. ceedar.education.ufl.edu/high-leverage-practices-2. Video hub, faculty guides, leadership guides.
• High-Leverage Practices. highleveragepractices.org. The companion site maintained by CEC and CEEDAR.
• IRIS Center. High-Leverage Practices. iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/resources/high-leverage-practices. Interactive alignment tool mapping IRIS resources to each HLP.
• Clausen, A., Reyes, E. N., Wakeman, S., & Collins, B. High-Leverage Practices (TIES Center TIPS Series, Tip #9). University of Minnesota, TIES Center, 2020. Summarizes the HLPs most critical to inclusive practice and SDI.

Specially designed instruction — other state guidance

Used in this unit for the clarity of its framing. None of it is New York requirement.

• West Virginia Department of Education. Specially Designed Instruction Guidance Document. August 2025. PDF, 25 pp. The elements of SDI (p. 2), myth-busting (p. 3), what SDI is and is not (p. 4), roles and co-teaching (pp. 8–10), twelve evidence-based strategies with research citations (pp. 11–18), and the FAQ (pp. 20–21).
• WVDE. Additional SDI Resources. wvde.us. EBP Spotlights on explicit instruction, scaffolding, and corrective feedback; the SDI planning template; the SDI vs. DI vs. UDL comparison.
• WVDE. Specially Designed Instruction Planning Template. PDF. Collaborative instructional design, collaborative delivery, and an SDI design checklist.
• Kentucky Department of Education. Specially Designed Instruction Resources. education.ky.gov.
• Maryland State Department of Education. Success for All Students in the General Education Classroom: A Guide for Inclusive Practices. 2024. Source of the guiding questions adapted in WVDE's guidance and in Module 2 of this unit.
• Texas Education Agency & ESC Region 20. Specially Designed Instruction: A Resource for Teachers. 2022.
• PROGRESS Center at the American Institutes for Research. IEP Tip Sheet: What Is Special Education? A Focus on Specially Designed Instruction. 2024. promotingprogress.org. Source of the content / methodology / delivery table structure used in WVDE's guidance.

Instructional practice and intensification

• National Center on Intensive Intervention. Data-Based Individualization. intensiveintervention.org/data-based-individualization. The five-step DBI process.
• NCII. Taxonomy of Intervention Intensity. intensiveintervention.org. The seven dimensions: strength, dosage, alignment, attention to transfer, comprehensiveness, behavioral or academic support, and individualization.
• Fuchs, L. S., Fuchs, D., & Malone, A. S. The Taxonomy of Intervention Intensity. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 50(1), 2017. The peer-reviewed source for the taxonomy.
• Riccomini, P. J., Morano, S., & Hughes, C. A. Big Ideas in Special Education: Specially Designed Instruction, High-Leverage Practices, Explicit Instruction, and Intensive Instruction. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 50(1), 20–27, 2017. doi.org/10.1177/0040059917724412. The argument that these four are one connected system.
• IRIS Center. Intensive Intervention (Part 1): Using Data-Based Individualization to Intensify Instruction. iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/dbi1. Page 7, “Modify Delivery of Instruction,” is directly applicable to Module 6.
• IRIS Center. Explicit, Systematic Instruction. Module page. Video-illustrated model of the sequence used in Module 5.
• IRIS Center. Mathematics: Identifying and Addressing Student Errors. Case study unit. Assigned reading for Module 3.
• IRIS Center. Universal Design for Learning: Creating a Learning Environment that Challenges and Engages All Students. Module.
• Foxworth, L. L., Hashey, A. I., Dexter, C., Rasnitsyn, S., & Beck, R. Approaching Explicit Instruction Within a Universal Design for Learning Framework. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 54(4), 268–275, 2021. doi.org/10.1177/00400599211010190.
• Hart, E. J., Doyle, L., Cantero, C., & Garrington, F. O. Practice Guide: Teaching Self-Regulation Skills to Students with Disabilities (K–12). U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, 2022.
• Welch, M. The PLEASE Strategy: A Metacognitive Learning Strategy for Improving the Paragraph Writing of Students with Mild Learning Disabilities. Learning Disability Quarterly, 15, 119–127, 1992. One of the strategy-instruction studies underlying the written-expression SDI in this unit.
• Bone, E., Bouck, E., & Witmer, S. Evidence-Based Systematic Review of Literature on Algebra Instruction and Interventions for Students with Learning Disabilities. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal, 19(1), 1–22, 2021. Evidence base for the concrete–representational–abstract sequence.
• Kang, S. H. K. Spaced Repetition Promotes Efficient and Effective Learning. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(1), 12–19, 2016. doi.org/10.1177/2372732215624708. Evidence base for the retrieval schedule in Rafael's plan.
• TIES Center. The 5-15-45 Tool: Linking Available Time with Meaningful Collaboration. University of Minnesota, 2020. publications.ici.umn.edu. Co-planning structures for teams with no common planning period.
• Texas Education Agency. Guidelines for Co-Teaching in Texas. 2021. Source of the co-teaching role comparison adapted in WVDE's guidance.

Regulatory citations verified against NYSED and Cornell LII, August 2026. High-leverage practice wording quoted from the second edition (March 2024). West Virginia guidance current as of the August 2025 edition.