Finding and Learning from Bright Spots

By Patti Slobogin, PhD, Coordinator

November 2013

I have been thinking a lot about something I read two summers ago in the book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. In a chapter titled Find the Bright Spots, they tell the story of Jerry Sternin, who went to Vietnam for Save the Children, and was given six months to develop a solution to the se...

Multi-Tiered Systems of Support – Lower Hudson Schools Are Models for NYS!

By Andrew J. Ecker, Ed.D., Special Education School Improvement Specialist and Patti Slobogin, Ph.D., Director, Lower Hudson RSE-TASC

June 2018

New York State is on a mission to improve outcomes of students with disabilities and the State Systemic Improvement Plan (SSIP) is our blueprint for achieving that.  “The SSIP is a multi-year, achievable plan developed by NYSED, in consultation with stakeholders, that is designed to inc...

Fluency: The Forgotten Component of Literacy Instruction

By Denise Jaffe, Special Education School Improvement Specialist

May 2018

Why should educators focus on fluency? Experts in the field have determined that reading fluency is the best overall measure of reading growth in first to sixth grades (Feldman, 2017). Fluency is the bridge between comprehension and decoding. If students are fluent readers, reading will ...

Guidance for Language Proficiency Teams

By John Boniello, Bilingual Special Education Specialist

April 2018

In December 2014, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) issued changes to Part 154 of the Chancellor’s Regulations concerning English Language Learners. One of the revisions requires schools to create a Language Proficiency Team, or LPT, for the purpose of determining the Eng...