The Sheppard Pratt School in Rockville, Maryland, provides a supportive and structured environment, integrating specialized academic instruction, counseling, transition services, and behavioral modification specific to each student’s needs.
Students can be referred to the Sheppard Pratt School in Rockville by their local school system’s special education placement office when complex disabilities prevent academic progress in their regular academic settings.
The Sheppard Pratt School provides a safe and supportive environment in which students feel comfortable expressing themselves in safe and acceptable ways, in small classes taught by certified special education teachers that work to meet the academic needs of each student.
We spoke to Kristen Knutson, Curriculum Instruction and Assessment Coordinator, who has used Science Bits with her students at Sheppard Pratt for over three years.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work at the Sheppard Pratt School?
My name is Kristen Knutson. I am the curriculum instruction and assessment coordinator at the Sheppard Pratt School, and I have been teaching for 19 years. Our school is located in Rockville, and that’s in Montgomery County, Maryland. I think the most important thing about our school is that we’re really an inclusive and progressive community. Everybody is working together to support the students.
How many students do you have? Do you have any specific challenges?
We have about 100 students in our school. We use the Montgomery County Public Schools curriculum to address the Maryland College and Career Readiness standards. Our school is a 100% special education school.
All of our students at the school have an IEP and are receiving special education services. We also have some students who are English language learners. An IEP is an individualized education plan: it’s written to address any learning needs a student might have to access the general education curriculum.
Do you have any classroom stories or funny student comments you can share?
I’ve always worked in special education, and we are a special education school. A lot of my students have individualized plans of reinforcement, and we provide them with support to promote positive behaviors. A lot of times that looks like rewards—so we might give students chips if they earn all their tokens for having safe behavior during class, or something like that.
When I was a new teacher, we did a unit on the ocean. We took the students to the aquarium, and we were watching the Dolphin Show. The trainers were giving the Dolphins fish after they did the different tricks, and my student said to me, “The fish. It’s sort of like our chips!” and I said, “Yeah, I guess so.”
How do you create individual education plans and tailor learning for each student?
Our class sizes are very small, with a maximum of six students per classroom. Our students need that smaller class size and that individualized attention. Our staffing ratio spans from two students to every one staff member—it’s very individualized. There’s a lot of adult support to help the students.
Because we have very small classes, many of our classrooms are self-contained. What that means is that the students stay with the same teacher for all their classes. The same teacher is responsible for teaching science, social studies, reading, and math. Also, because our school is small and classrooms are small, our teachers often teach multiple grades within one classroom.
Very often, those self-contained teachers are not only teaching all subject areas, but they’re also teaching Grade 6, Grade 7 and Grade 8—all middle school kids—within one classroom. In order to provide that instruction, it really requires a teacher to delve really deep into all subject areas, which can be very challenging. Teachers also have to consider the interests of the students.
A lot of our students haven’t had the instruction they need to access the curriculum. They might have gaps in their learning from past school years, and the teacher has to individualize not only to address those gaps in learning but also to get the student engaged.
So, I think engagement is one of our biggest challenges when we first meet a student. They’re already sort of experienced a lot of failure, often before they’ve come to our setting. This is like a new start or a restart for them, and we really have to get to know them—their interests, their skills—so that we can individualize that instruction.
In some cases, we may have to teach how to follow directions from an adult: those are our first-level things. The curriculum is almost like icing on the cake.
How did you find Science Bits? What do you like most?
I think it was an ad on Facebook! I really like the Interactive Virtual Labs. Because we are a smaller school, we don’t really have a science lab or the tools that maybe a larger school or certainly a public school would have for science instruction.
As the curriculum coordinator, I’m tasked with supporting teachers and finding what to use to meet the curriculum standards. For a handful of our classes at the Sheppard Pratt School in Rockville, MD, we selected Science Bits to be used with our middle school classrooms.
I spent some time using the curriculum, learning more about it, seeing how it addressed the standards, and I felt like it was one of the most comprehensive but also engaging curriculums that I could find for students. So, teachers are using this as their primary curriculum and science.
For a lot of other subject areas, teachers have to make their own curriculum to address the students’ needs. They take what is in the textbook or the curriculum they’re using, adapt it, make slide decks, pick and choose what they’re gonna use, and then create something that they can present to the students.
With Science Bits, they choose what they want to use, and they can log on and just present the lesson. They don’t have to make a whole other lesson; it’s all there for them. And that’s been very helpful. Science is not one of the subject areas where I hear, “I need help with lesson planning,” because it’s all there.
How do students respond to Science Bits?
I think the students really enjoy it. The teachers do a great job of breaking things down and taking parts of Science Bits in different sections of the 5Es to keep our students engaged.
All of our lessons are about 30 minutes, so in a class period, our teachers will take part of an Engage lesson, a little bit from the Explore lesson, and use bits and pieces to make it really engaging for our students. Our students might not want to start a lesson off sharing background knowledge.
Students might have background knowledge, but it can be a hard ask when they’re coming into a lesson. So, we can use an Explain lesson to get them to activate that background knowledge, maybe review something that they have learned in a previous grade or in a previous week.
After that, then going into the Engage lesson has been really helpful for our students because they have a frame of reference.
In what other ways do you differentiate to impact your students and improve outcomes?
I’ll talk about this in two separate sections. First, I’ll explain about our school and our classrooms and how decisions are made. Obviously, our classrooms can be based on students’ grades, but oftentimes it’s also based on student abilities.
Not all students are working towards a high school diploma. Some of them will be in school past graduation, up until the age of 21, and they’ll be receiving a certificate of program completion. We’re also a 12-month school and have school all year round.
We have a week or two off in the summer, winter break, and spring break, but our school year starts on July 1st, and we have rolling admission. We add students throughout the year. At the end of June, we reconfigure to meet the needs of graduating students and any students that came in over the past year.
When we have our new classrooms in July, we select curriculum based on what students are in that classroom—what their needs are, whether they’re working towards a diploma or a certificate, whether they’re learning from the General Ed curriculum or the alternate standards, what their interests are.
We try to group kids. We have a lot of kids who might be interested in SpongeBob and Supermario, and we’re gonna try to put them together. We have some students who are reserved and some students who are more social, and we try to mix those kids together so that everybody has opportunities.
Some of our students are non-speaking. Some of our students are verbal. We try to also have students together so they have good peer models. So, we look at our classrooms and select what each teacher will use based on what that group of six kids looks like.
And from there, the teacher is then tasked with taking those materials and getting them understood by their students. That might mean they have to modify some of the language in a lesson, or they might have to add more videos or visual supports to explain things to students in a way that doesn’t require language. Many of our students have issues with language. The teacher is tasked with doing those things; the teacher presents the lesson, and teacher aides are there to support student understanding.
As part of their work, aides may provide visual supports—they may redirect student attention to the teacher if attention has gone elsewhere. They’ll know when a student is making multiple errors so that we can go back and reteach those topics. A lot of students require prompting to learn new content.
So, it might be that the teacher says, “This is the lesson in biodiversity: ‘bio’ is of the Earth, and ‘diversity’ is different.” The teacher might then say, “What does diversity mean?”, and they might say it means ‘different’ so that the student can then repeat it. A lot of our students need repetition to learn things.
Everybody needs repetition to learn things, but sometimes our students need more repetition, and we don’t set our students up for failure. So that’s where this prompting comes in. We’re prompting students because we want to support them and we want them to feel successful.
So, the aides in the classroom are there to provide that, working with the students every day and sitting right next to them. They’re there to provide students with the amount of support they need to be successful.
That means students are not repeatedly being told, “No, try again!” or “That’s wrong!” We want to say, “Yeah, you’re right!” to build that confidence again. If that means somebody’s giving them the answer, that’s fine. We’re gonna do that until we don’t have to do that anymore. It’s about support.
What are the things you would recommend to other teachers about Science Bits?
I really like the visuals, there’s a lot of visuals on every slide, and language is kept to the minimum. Sometimes, in other resources, there’s more language than pictures. I would say on almost every page of Science Bits lessons, there is as much visual as there is language.
On many pages, there are more visual supports than there is language, and that’s really helpful. Also, there are many examples. So, maybe you have a page of vocabulary terms, but there are picture examples you can flip through. And it’s not just one picture—when you click on the picture, there are multiple pictures that you can go through. Multiple examples are given.
I also really like the little assessments (related activities) that go along with each page, which have a level of one, two, three stars. You’re sort of constantly evaluating, but it’s designed in such a way that you’re able to use those to evaluate your student without it being overwhelming for them or for you.
So, you can provide those questions, one two three at a time, at the end of each lesson to gauge learning, and you can adjust your instruction accordingly so that you’re not getting to the end of the unit and realizing they didn’t get any of this, and I have to reach the entire unit.
So, with Science Bits, you can reteach each single day, based on what you’re presenting to your students and what students had trouble with. You can see what students had trouble with. Science bits is a comprehensive solution that is engaging, and as a teacher using it, it’s enjoyable to use.
The way it’s set up is very intuitive, which is really helpful as a teacher. Once you start using it, it’s very intuitive, and it makes teaching, I think, more fun because there are so many visuals. You have the option to add additional things into the platform, but we don’t find the need to do that.
It’s really comprehensive, and I learned things every single day using it that I didn’t realize, so I think it’s a wonderful solution. I would highly recommend it. I really appreciate the support that you guys have provided. Although we are a very small school, you guys are always available to communicate with!
The support we’ve received feels very individualized and personalized. Anytime I say that there’s a new teacher, you say, “Can we help teach them about this program?” and that level of customer service has been super appreciated. Thank you.
