Methods for Teaching Students with Significant Disabilities: Sample Syllabus, Mini-Workshop Guidelines, and Case Studies

Created by Susannah Boyle, Early, Middle, and Exceptional Education Department, Millersville University

Background

These materials were created for the SPED 441 Supports for the Specialized Curriculum course at Millersville University. Senior special education majors take this course as part of a block of special education courses focused on instruction for and assessment of learners with disabilities. There is ten weeks of coursework, followed by a five-week full-time field experience in a special education classroom.

SPED 441 is focused on methods for teaching students with significant disabilities. A challenge with this course is that it directly follows a junior course focused on inclusive practices for students with significant disabilities. As a result, there is considerable overlap in content between the two courses.

To address this issue, I chose to focus this course on increasing student ownership of the content. I created three case studies describing various learners with significant disabilities. I then required each student in the course to lead a mini-workshop on an intervention found in the research literature that would be appropriate for the learners described in their case studies. This site thus includes a sample syllabus, mini-workshop assignment guidelines, and three case studies, all available and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International License for other faculty to use and adapt for their courses.