The purpose of creating this site is to explore the potential benefits of a blog devoted to special education. Hopefully, other special education administrators will find this site helpful. I will be reaching out to other Special Education Directors to determine if they are interested in posting guest blogs based upon their specific areas of expertise. I anticipate that my first official blog will be on alternative education. Future blogs will likely be on some of the following topics as they relate to special education:
1) Relevancy: Ensuring students understand how or why learning is relevant to their own personal experiences.
2) Connections: Explicit connections to other content areas using curriculum mapping.
3) Literacy across all content areas.
4) Lesson Design
5) Social/Emotional Learning
6) Impact of Exercise on Learning and Mental Health (based on the work of John Ratey's Spark)
7) UbD: Focus on the Big Ideas
That's enough to get this thing rolling! Lets see where it goes from here.
Ray Dorso
Director of Special Services
New Milford School District
