PROJECT ONWARD: ACADEMICS
Balancing Core Instruction with Targeted Interventions
Students in self-contained and alternative education settings often face significant academic challenges alongside their emotional and behavioral needs. This strand explores how to create effective instructional frameworks that address skill gaps while maintaining grade-level expectations. By implementing structured, responsive teaching approaches like small group rotations and individualized learning paths, educators can meet students where they are while helping them progress academically. When academic interventions are integrated with behavioral and social-emotional supports, students experience success that builds confidence and reduces frustration-driven behaviors.
This strand provides practical strategies for balancing core instruction with targeted interventions that address individual learning needs. Topics include implementing small group rotations, aligning activities with IEP goals, monitoring progress within daily routines, and ensuring equitable access to resources. It also explores how to identify and close instructional resource gaps, integrate specialized services, and create classroom structures where individualized supports naturally fit within daily learning. By addressing academic needs alongside behavioral supports, educators create pathways for students to experience meaningful progress and develop the resilience needed to tackle increasingly complex tasks.
PROJECT ONWARD
What's in the Academics strand?
Developing Communities of Learning in Alternative Settings
Resilient Teaching
Resilient Teaching focuses on supporting teachers who work with students facing emotional, behavioral, and mental health challenges in alternative educational settings. The content emphasizes understanding student resistance as a defense mechanism rooted in fear of failure, and provides strategies for building trust, establishing routines, and implementing whole-group activities that create a sense of belonging and shared purpose. Additionally, the module guides teachers through a systematic inventory of their instructional resources to ensure equity and alignment with curriculum standards, recognizing that proper materials are essential for student success and that teachers must advocate for appropriate resources to meet their students' unique needs.
Addressing Academic Deficits to Reduce Behavioral Challenges
Breaking the Cycle
Academic intervention is essential, not optional, for breaking cycles of frustration and failure in students with emotional and behavioral challenges, as many challenging behaviors stem directly from unaddressed academic skill deficits. Small group rotation models provide an effective framework for delivering targeted instruction while supporting behavioral needs through predictable routines, clear transitions, and personalized learning experiences at teacher-led, support staff, and technology stations. Rather than waiting for behavioral stability before addressing academics, educators should implement academic and behavioral interventions simultaneously, recognizing that addressing underlying skill gaps reduces frustration, builds confidence, and creates pathways for students to experience meaningful success.
Connecting the Dots in Self-Contained Settings
Beyond Isolated Skills
Beyond Isolated Skills explores how to create a holistic approach to IEP implementation by integrating progress monitoring across academic, behavioral, and social-emotional domains within self-contained and alternative education settings. It emphasizes embedding assessment opportunities naturally into daily instructional rotations, transitions, and support stations, allowing educators to collect meaningful data without disrupting the flow of learning. The content demonstrates how viewing student progress across multiple domains simultaneously reveals important patterns and connections, enabling teachers to develop more targeted interventions that address root causes rather than symptoms for students with complex emotional, behavioral, and mental health challenges.
Personalizing Rotations for Academic and Behavioral Success
Engagement by Design
Individualized rotations create a structured yet flexible framework that balances grade-level instruction with personalized supports, allowing educators to meet diverse academic, behavioral, and emotional needs in self-contained and alternative education settings. By using data to inform grouping, pacing, and station design, teachers can transform standard rotations into responsive systems where students receive targeted interventions, technology-enhanced learning opportunities, and support for IEP goals while maintaining access to grade-level content. This approach not only maximizes instructional effectiveness but also builds student independence, confidence, and engagement by ensuring equitable access to resources across academic, social-emotional, and functional domains.