Specially Designed Instructional Strategies

Student Specific Planning Resources

What is this new feature?

You can now generate multiple instructional strategy ideas that not only align to a specific learning goal but are also specially designed to account for the important attributes and disability characteristics of your student.

Our new Specially Designed Instructional Strategies feature can be found on goal pages with progress monitoring in Toolkit. The feature is located at the bottom of these pages.

Why is specially designed instruction important?

Specially designed strategies and adaptations of curricular resources are not only best practice but a right afforded to students with disabilities in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA):

Specially designed instruction means adapting, as appropriate to the needs of an eligible child under this part, the content, methodology, or delivery of instruction —

(i) To address the unique needs of the child that result from the child’s disability; and

(ii) To ensure access of the child to the general curriculum, so that the child can meet the educational standards within the jurisdiction of the public agency that apply to all children.

Creating specially designed instruction is a rigorous undertaking. It requires educators to not only have a deep understanding of the grade level standards and curriculum, but to combine that knowledge with an understanding of a student’s unique characteristics and disability in order to develop instructional approaches that are bespoke for the student.

By providing educators with the ability to quickly generate custom research-based instructional strategies, we hope to accelerate and enhance how they go about planning specially designed instruction.

How do I generate custom instructional strategies?

Teachers will play the role of an orchestrator by controlling all the inputs that go into this feature. The feature uses a custom AI integration in order to generate unique strategies. Accessing them is as easy as going through the normal process of goal development in Toolkit. While you are customizing goals for a student, the process for generating Specially Designed Instructional Strategies is quite simple:

• Customize goal text for a student on goal pages with progress monitoring.
• Scroll down to Specially designed instructional strategies.

• Select the key student characteristics and disability information.
• Select any additional sub-context categories.

• Click the “Generate Strategies” button.
• Review and adapt them as needed for your student.

What is Goalbook’s Role in the Responsible Implementation of AI?

This feature integrates a custom and secure AI technology. We have spent a lot of time and resources to better understand how to leverage AI responsibly. Through our learning, we have made some decisions and commitments that make our implementation safe for our users.

At Goalbook, we believe that our impact on education comes from our ability to support what has been shown again and again in research to be the most important school-based factor in student achievement — the human teacher. This approach remains central to our work even as we integrate new AI technologies.

By leveraging AI technologies in both a responsible and responsive way, we can make Goalbook Toolkit an even more valuable tool for educators.

Here is what you should know about AI in Toolkit:

• Holistic Approach: AI technology is only one part of the development process of our custom AI-assisted features. Our team’s technical expertise, domain knowledge, and design practices are all leveraged to enable these features.
• AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement: Utilize AI-assisted content as a preliminary guide and tailor it based on your own expertise, knowledge of your students, and professional judgment.
• Content Verification: Despite rigorous testing, AI-assisted content might occasionally be inaccurate or not fully tailored to the needs of your student. Always review and adjust the content to ensure its accuracy and relevance.
• Bias or Harm: We aim for unbiased AI-assisted features, but the technology may still exhibit biases. If you notice any biased or harmful content, please flag it for us so we can address it.
• Security: Your data is secure with us, as our AI technology is deployed using a private cloud.
• Continuous Improvement & Feedback: We are committed to continuous improvement and will closely monitor this technology. By sharing your experiences with us, you help us refine our tools to better serve your needs.

We believe that Goalbook Toolkit can further empower educators by thoughtfully and intentionally integrating AI technology and ensuring that teachers are in the driver seat for the instruction of their students.

Our hope is that the addition of this feature will change the way teachers and related service providers go about planning their day-to-day instruction. Our goal was to help teachers simultaneously optimize their time, but more importantly, provide the highest quality, research-based, custom instructional design resources to their students.

Specially designed instructional strategies in Toolkit is helping teachers actualize the vision found within IDEA that places a premium on addressing individual student needs. This feature is truly about preserving the rights afforded to all people with disabilities within the school system.

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Follow our publication Innovating Instruction to stay up to date on all our product updates and to read about the impact Goalbook is having on our partner districts.