Specially Designed Instruction for Diverse Learners
An IEP is a promise. We coach the teaching that keeps it.
Specially designed instruction for students with disabilities that accelerates, not just accommodates. Language-rich structured literacy that treats a home language as a strength, never a deficit. And for dually identified students, both needs served together, because no child should wait while adults decide whose student they are.
SDI aligned to IEP goals
Deep special education expertise
ELLs · MLLs · Dually Identified
Designed for the Margins. Built for Everyone.
When we get it right for the students who need us most, we get it right for every student.
Most literacy support treats diverse learners as an afterthought, a modification at the bottom of the lesson plan. We put them at the center of the design, because instruction precise enough to reach them is instruction powerful enough to lift the whole classroom.
The Fork Every IEP Faces
Accommodation is not the same as instruction.
Meet a fourth grader with a reading disability, working two grade levels behind. Every school responds with good intentions. Only one of these two responses closes the gap. Toggle between them and watch five years unfold.
Support that carries. Instruction that doesn’t.
Text read aloud to him. Assignments shortened. Expectations quietly lowered, year after year, with kindness in every decision. He is supported everywhere and taught to read nowhere, and the distance to grade level grows while everyone means well.
Accommodations grant access to today’s lesson. Only instruction changes tomorrow’s.
The Dually Identified Dilemma
“Whose student is this?” is the wrong question.
Some students are both English language learners and students with disabilities. In most systems, that makes them everyone’s exception and no one’s priority. Watch how the question usually goes, then see our answer.
Spanish at home, eighteen months in English instruction, and reading progress far behind true peers with the same language exposure. Two teams have met about her four times this year.
"Give it time. It's probably just language acquisition. Wait before evaluating."
"We can't untangle it from the language. Let the ELL program work first."
Both. Together. Now.
For dually identified students, those who are both ELLs/MLLs and students with disabilities, we coach teachers to address language acquisition needs and disability-related needs together, in the same instruction. Nobody waits. Nothing is traded.
- Data comparison against true peers with similar language exposure, so difference is never mislabeled as disability, and disability never hides behind language
- Explicit, systematic foundational skills that serve both needs at once
- Cross-linguistic supports that use the home language as an anchor, not an obstacle
- One instructional plan both teams own, progress monitored against IEP goals and language growth together
What the Evidence Actually Says
Four myths that cost diverse learners years.
Each of these is said, with complete sincerity, in schools every week. Each one is wrong, and each one delays instruction a child needed today. Tap a card to flip it.
The Method Behind “Cross-Linguistic”
We map every student’s home language onto English.
Using ASHA phonemic inventories, our consultants and teachers compare the sound system of a student’s home language with English, phoneme by phoneme. Sounds that exist in both languages transfer; sounds that do not are taught explicitly. That single move turns guesswork into a plan. Select each strand to see how the home language does the heavy lifting.
The ASHA inventory shows which English phonemes a Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, or Haitian Creole speaker already produces, so phonics instruction targets only the genuinely new sounds and spellings, with articulation support where the languages differ. No minute is wasted reteaching what transfers.
Transfer what exists, teach what is newOne Service, Three Promises
Every diverse learner. Every need. Nothing traded.
Students with disabilities
SDI aligned to IEP goals and progress monitored against them
Multisensory, strengths-based strategies: sand and sky writing, letter tiles, phoneme tapping, articulation mirrors, gesture cues, and color-coded morphology
Inclusive classroom structures across Tiers 1, 2, and 3
Acceleration toward grade level, never accommodation alone
English language learners & MLLs
Language-rich structured literacy: explicit code, abundant language
Cross-linguistic supports that treat the home language as an asset
Vocabulary, oral language, and knowledge building in every lesson
Progress measured against true peers, never mislabeled
Dually identified students
Language acquisition needs and disability-related needs addressed together
One instructional plan both teams own
No student’s services come at the expense of the other
Nobody waits while adults decide whose student they are
The Evidence Behind Specially Designed Instruction
Four levers. One goal: every student achieving.
Four services, four verified results. Select any card to go straight to that service page, or explore them all together.
01
Explicit beats implicit, every time.
Across hundreds of intervention studies, the largest gains for students with learning disabilities come from direct, explicit instruction combined with strategy instruction. It is why nothing in our coaching is left for students to infer.
Swanson & Hoskyn, meta-analysis, 1998
02
Intensity changes trajectories.
Skilled, intensive intervention can bring word reading into the average range for the great majority of struggling readers. Time, group size, and frequency are not scheduling details; they are the levers we plan deliberately for every Tier 3 student.
Torgesen, 2004
03
When students do not respond, we individualize with data.
Data-based individualization is the strongest model we have for the students intervention alone does not reach: adapt the instruction, monitor progress frequently, and adjust from evidence rather than intuition.
Fuchs & Fuchs; National Center on Intensive Intervention
04
The architecture is proven, so we build it everywhere.
Universal screening, explicit and systematic small group intervention, and weekly progress monitoring carry the strongest evidence ratings in the federal practice guide for struggling readers, and they are the same architecture we build in every partner school.
Gersten and colleagues, IES Practice Guide, 2009
You have seen how we work. The next step takes thirty minutes.
Bring your benchmark data. A real person replies within two business days.
Why districts trust us with their most vulnerable readers
Special education is not our side offering. It is our foundation.
Every district has one line on the data wall that will not move. Students with disabilities and multilingual learners are usually sitting inside it, and most literacy training runs out exactly where their needs begin.
Our consultants are specialists at that intersection: science of reading, special education, and dual language reading. They have done this work in urban, suburban, and rural systems, and they know the difference between a Tier 1 problem, a Tier 3 problem, and a language need that has been read as a reading disability for three years running.
Instruction is explicit, systematic, and sequenced. Students who never learned to read by exposure get the code taught to them directly, in the order the brain needs it.
We coach teachers to deliver specially designed instruction that matches the goals on the IEP, and to document it in a way that holds up in a compliance review.
Multilingual learners are over identified in one district and under served in the next. We help teams tell the two apart before a student is placed on a path that is hard to reverse.
Coaching is built around your staffing, your schedule, and the curriculum you already bought, so the plan survives contact with your buildings.
Consultants work inside classrooms alongside your teachers and review subgroup data cycle by cycle, so the plan changes the moment the numbers say it should.
Bring us your subgroup data. We will tell you what is actually driving the flat line.
Worth Repeating
An IEP is a promise. A home language is a strength. Instruction should honor both.
Send it to the special education or MLL director who has been fighting this fight alone.
Before You Call
Asked by every special education and MLL leader.
Do you write IEPs or provide direct special education services?
No. Your teams keep ownership of evaluation and the IEP. We coach the adults who deliver the instruction: building teacher capacity to provide specially designed instruction aligned to IEP goals, progress monitored against those goals, inside inclusive classrooms across every tier.
How do you tell a language difference from a disability?
Carefully, with data, and never by waiting. We coach teams to compare a multilingual learner’s progress against true peers with similar language exposure, to examine skills in the home language where possible, and to look at response to strong, language-rich core instruction first. Typical language acquisition should never be labeled a disability, and a real disability should never hide behind the label of language.
Do you support multilingual learners who do not have disabilities?
Yes. Language-rich structured literacy for English language learners and multilingual learners is a core strand of this service: explicit foundational skills, cross-linguistic supports that treat the home language as an asset, and vocabulary and knowledge building that carries meaning alongside decoding.
What does this look like for dually identified students?
For students who are both ELLs/MLLs and students with disabilities, we coach teachers to address language acquisition needs and disability-related needs together, in the same instruction, so no student’s services come at the expense of the other and no student is bounced between teams while the year slips away.
One Conversation
Bring us the students everyone else has run out of ideas for.
Thirty minutes, their data, and an honest conversation about what specially designed instruction could look like in your classrooms by the next benchmark window. A real person reads every inquiry and replies within two business days.