Remedial and Special Education, Ahead of Print.
Special educators often work in school contexts that are not oriented toward their students’ strengths and needs, resulting in tension–misalignment between their responsibility to students and their schools’ resources and expectations. Using grounded theory, we explored five teachers’ experiences of tension when serving students labeled with emotional/behavioral disorders in self-contained classes. We found teachers experienced tensions regarding students’ belonging, their academic instructional roles, and their roles supporting students’ behavior. Tensions reflected ways schools were not oriented toward students’ strengths and support needs. Yet, teachers’ perspectives on tensions varied greatly. Grounded in humanizing perspectives on students, some teachers experienced tension with colleagues who resisted including students and honoring students’ support needs. Other teachers held deficit-based, legalistic views of students, which underlay their acceptance of (or even advocacy for) exclusion. Findings indicate the centrality of educators’ conceptions of disability for how they conceptualize and fulfill their roles in serving students with disabilities.

Remedial and Special Education, Ahead of Print.
Instructional coaching is one way to support teachers’ implementation of evidence-based practices, but gaps exist in knowledge about effective coaching interventions to support teacher learning at the secondary level. In this article, we first introduce an adaptive intervention model (AIM) for coaching, AIM Coaching, a coaching model designed for middle school instructional leaders to use to support teachers as they implement evidence-based literacy instructional practices across a Tier 1 school-wide literacy model. We also describe the theory of change that guided our work, a description of the accompanying professional development instructional leaders received, and the literacy practices that are linked to the Model for the purpose of this work. Second, we describe the challenges we encountered and decisions we made during the development process, solutions that addressed those challenges, and implications of those solutions.