Benchmark – Cross-Curricular Remediation in ELA

Students who face learning challenges related to literacy skills often have similar struggles in other content areas such as math, social studies, and science. Since students’ reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills and abilities vary widely in all classrooms, identifying how poor literacy skills can negatively affect performance in other curricular areas and selecting remediation strategies that can be applied across disciplines can help special education teachers meet the unique literacy needs of each student and help them work toward becoming proficient in literacy and more successful in the content areas.

You have been asked to design a deliverable that could be used to help special education and content area teachers integrate literacy instruction into other areas of learning beyond the ELA classroom.

Choose one of the following deliverables to complete this assignment:

8-10 slide digital presentation, including presenter’s notes with documentation of resources and a title slide

750-word Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document or resource handout, including documentation of resources

• Utilizing the deliverable of your choice, create a resource intended for general education classroom teachers to use within a professional development setting.
• Address the following within your deliverable: 

Explain the difference between differentiation, remediation, and intervention.

Discuss how teachers can use content area knowledge of math, science, and social studies and integrate literacy skills practice to individualize learning for students, particularly those with exceptionalities. Recommend a specific instructional strategy for practicing literacy skills in each discipline and a research-based rationale for why it would be effective.

Discuss how to embed remediation strategies or resources into math, science, and social studies to meet the literacy needs of all students, particularly those with exceptionalities. Recommend a specific literacy remediation strategy/resource that is applicable for each discipline and a research-based rationale for why it would be effective. At least one content area should include a technology-based or online support resource that could be used to support literacy remediation.

• Discuss how to build reading and writing assessments into content areas such as math, science, and social studies to support remediation strategies and build ELA skills. Recommend a specific research-based reading and writing assessment idea for each discipline.
• Discuss how teachers can use the central concepts, structures of the discipline, and tools of inquiry of the content areas and organize this knowledge, integrate cross-disciplinary skills, and develop meaningful learning progressions for students with exceptionalities.