What the Data Tells Us: Special Education in Nashville’s Charter Schools
The full program study is available now. Read it here! Nashville’s charter schools have changed significantly over the past decade. Most are fully grown now, with experienced leaders, stable communities, and students who have been with them for years. For many of those schools, the question has shifted from how do we build a special […]
Why Good Retention Strategies Don’t Always Stick and How to Address It
If you talk to almost any school leader who serves students with disabilities or multilingual learners, you’ll likely hear some version of the same teacher retention story. They tried a new onboarding process, stipend, or a restructured planning block. For a while it worked, or seemed to, but then the school year picked up, priorities […]
From Root Cause to Action: Building a Teacher Retention Model
Three years ago, the Diverse Learners Cooperative published a teacher retention report that named what many schools already felt: special educators and multilingual learner educators were leaving at rates the field couldn’t sustain. The report identified the conditions that made it possible for educators serving students with the most complex needs to stay, thrive, and […]
You Collected the Data. Now What? A Case Manager’s Guide to End-Of-Year IEP Progress
The final weeks of school are a lot between testing schedules, classroom celebrations, transition paperwork, and the general beautiful chaos of the end of a school year. For special education case managers, there’s one more thing that deserves a dedicated spot on your calendar before you close out: a purposeful review of your students’ IEP […]
No Gaps in Support: A Case Manager’s Guide to Student Year-End Handoffs
The end of the school year is a season of celebrations, closeouts, and chaos. For special education teachers, there’s one thing that can make or break how a student starts their next school year: what you hand off, and how. Every student is about to experience a transition. New teachers, classrooms, schools. For students with […]
When Co-Planning Is the System, Not the Exception: IGNITE Partnership
Most schools want general and special education teachers to collaborate, but fewer have built the systems to make it actually happen. The IGNITE Nashville Network exists to close this gap. Launched in summer 2024 through a national partnership between the DLC, TN SCORE, and Marshall CoLab, IGNITE Nashville supports co-planning implementation across ten Nashville charter […]
Testing Season: Am I the Calm? (Part 2)
In Part 1, we talked about the emotional weather teachers set during testing season and how the before and during phases of a testing window are shaped by adult regulation as much as student readiness. In this post, we’ll discuss a third phase that most schools move through without ever pausing to name it even […]
Testing Season: Am I the Calm? (Part 1)
Testing season has a way of shifting the air in a school building. The schedule tightens, reminders multiply, and hallway conversations between adults start circling around data targets, readiness benchmarks, and which students still need “one more push.” And somewhere in all of that urgency, the students are watching, absorbing every shift in tone, every […]
Behind the Scenes of DLC’s Coaching Collaborative
Instructional coaches, coordinators, and deans are often the connective tissue of a school. They bridge classroom practice with schoolwide goals, support teachers through change, and hold space for both celebration and challenge. But who supports the coaches? That’s the question at the heart of the Coaching Collaborative, a professional learning experience from the Diverse Learners […]
DLC Annual Report: Supporting Diverse Learner Educators and Students
Meeting the Moment Across the country, educators are being asked to meet more complex student needs with fewer resources, less time, and increasing pressure. This is most visible in classrooms serving students with disabilities and multilingual learners. And the result is predictable, almost always resulting in: Educator burnout and turnover Students receiving inconsistent access to […]