SPECIAL EDUCATION • PRACTICE • EVIDENCE
Special Education in Practice
Turning individualized plans into instruction that is measurable, accessible, useful, and connected to what students actually need.
Evidence-Based Interventions
Intervention should be selected because it matches an identified skill need—not simply because a program is available. This series will examine explicit instruction, systematic prompting, modeling, guided practice, feedback, reinforcement, task analysis, literacy and mathematics intervention, and approaches supported for autistic learners.
IEP Goals That Can Actually Guide Instruction
A useful annual goal identifies the skill, the conditions under which the student will demonstrate it, the expected level of performance, and a defensible way to measure progress. Future MKP guides will look at academic, communication, behavioral, executive-functioning, social, adaptive, and transition goals while emphasizing individualization rather than copy-and-paste goal banks.
Progress Monitoring
Data should answer a practical question: is the student learning at the rate we expected? Coverage will include baseline data, curriculum-based measures, work samples, frequency and duration measures, accuracy and fluency data, graphing trends, and deciding when instruction needs to change.
Assistive Technology
Assistive technology ranges from simple visual schedules and adapted writing tools to text-to-speech, speech-to-text, alternative and augmentative communication, accessible digital materials, and specialized devices. The focus here will be matching the tool to the barrier rather than using technology for its own sake.
Autism & Classroom Access
Autistic students are not a single instructional profile. MKP will examine communication supports, predictable routines, sensory and environmental considerations, explicit teaching, visual supports, self-regulation, independence, and behavior through a functional and respectful lens.
Practical Classroom Strategies
This track will translate research into usable routines: clear directions, checks for understanding, gradual release, error correction, structured choices, reinforcement, visual supports, task chunking, active responding, accommodations, and strategies for increasing independence.
MKP standard
These resources are educational, not individualized legal or clinical advice. Special education decisions should be based on the student's evaluated needs, data, applicable law and policy, and the decisions of the student's IEP team.