Pedagogy, Practice, and Pride in Secondary Education: Introduction of the Critical Five

The Division for Learning Disabilities (DLD) of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) is dedicated to improving outcomes for individuals with specific learning disabilities (LD) through research, professional development, and resource dissemination for members. Individuals with LD are typically identified during early schooling and are supported by a host of evidence-based practices in reading, writing, and numeracy. For a searchable set of resources, including these and others, please go to https://www.TeachingLD.org. However, DLD also recognizes that LD is a lifelong issue, affecting individuals in secondary and postsecondary settings as well as later life. The context of secondary schools presents students with LD with an increasing set of demands, which in turn require educators to implement a unique set of practices to ensure student success. To complicate matters, secondary educators are beset by external pressures, such as high-stakes testing and increasingly complex standards (for more see Scheuerman et al., 2009). These collective challenges often result in a mismatch between the characteristics of adolescents with LD and the reality of secondary school expectations. To support secondary educators by directly addressing this mismatch, the 2021 DLD Showcase during the CEC L.I.V.E. Conference featured a panel of experts who presented crucial features of evidence-based instruction in secondary settings. In what follows, we summarize the first four critical areas—explicit instruction, modeling, data-based decision making, and formative assessment—before concluding with an invitation to you, our readers, to engage by suggesting the final element.