"Check This out!" Teaching Students with Disabilities to Recruit Contingent Attention in the Classroom‪.‬

The most important role of a special education teacher is designing, implementing, and evaluating instruction that helps students with disabilities acquire, generalize, and maintain knowledge and skills that improve the quality of their lives in school, home, community, and workplace--now and in the future. Increasingly, students with disabilities--many of whom have limited social repertoires in addition to deficits in academic skills--are expected to learn in regular classrooms with their typically developing peers. To increase the likelihood of attaining success in these inclusive settings, students need to learn to use a repertoire of classroom survival skills such as listening, following directions, and completing assignments. Learning when and how to ask for feedback or assistance is an important classroom survival skill useful for increasing independence. Teaching students to recruit attention from adults and their peers is one way to promote success in the regular classroom because it increases the likelihood the student will fit in socially and improve academically. **********