- General education curriculum depth and breadth impacts teacher planning and delivery of content including the quality and quantity of accommodations and adaptations.
- Three research-based programs are described that focus on building into the design and delivery of instruction factors that may minimize not eliminate the need for students with mild disabilities to have accommodations and adaptations. The concept of universally-accessible content is defined and serves as a foundation from which teachers can scrutinize the curriculum, target essential and important content, design meaningful instructional activities, and use flexibility to engage diverse learners.
- Accommodations for students with mild disabilities are more meaningful with examination of the context in which such accommodations are necessary. The context includes the content for which the accommodations are needed (i.e., the curriculum), the instructional formats (i.e., the teacher’s planning, delivering, and assessing of the curriculum), and specific students’ learning characteristics.
- Teachers’ flexibility and proficiency with how many students and how many accommodations they feel they can develop and use across the course can be dependent on how much content there is to be covered in the course the curriculum.
- Some general educators are both willing and skilled with providing accommodations for students, but feel conflicting and competing messages from school and state personnel who seem to be saying: "Accommodate, but cover everything with everyone at a high level."
- Some educators commonly use textbooks as the driving force for curriculum sequence and content. Yet textbooks are not necessarily well-organized, do not explore content in depth, make few if any connections across or among chapters, and contain few suggestions for differentiating instruction, assignments, or assessments (Lerner, 1998; Mayer, Sims, & Tajika, 1995; Tindal & Nolet, 1996).
- Learners with mild disabilities may have problems making connections that are inferred but not explicit, receiving new information when presented in one way, and showing what they know and can do in only one way.
- Teachers must be experts in their content area in order to analyze their curriculum. If a teacher is not well-grounded on the content they are teaching, it is more difficult for them to analyze the curriculum and discern the essential or foundational information that learners with and without mild disabilities need to learn (McCleery & Tindal, 1999; Tennyson & Cocchiarella, 1986; Wilson & Wineburg, 1988).
- What teachers should expect to do with curriculum is to repackage it and further develop it so that it is clearer to both teachers and students what the learning is about.
- How well teachers can conduct a curriculum analysis is dependent on how well they know their content area (Ball, 1991).
- There are six curriculum design principles that, when built into the planning and delivery of content, enhance learning for all students, including students with mild disabilities (Burke, Hagan, & Grossen, 1998; Kameenui & Carnine, 1998; Kameenui & Simmons, 1999; Simmons & Carnine, 1996).
- From the Strategies Instruction Model, the Course, Unit, and Lesson Organizers focus on how teachers prioritize and sequence critical curriculum outcomes (Lenz, Bulgren, Schumaker, Deshler, & Boudah, 1994; Lenz, Marrs, Schumaker, & Deshler, 1993; Lenz, Schumaker, Deshler, & Bulgren, 1998). The Organizers are not just planning tools; they are also used in delivering instruction so that learners who have difficulty seeing the links or making connections among all the instructional content have more explicit and visual information available (e.g., using graphic organizers).
- Also from the Strategies Instruction Model are the Content Enhancement Routines. These routines can be used to target BIG IDEAS, provide explicit instruction, and help students to organize and remember critical aspects of new concepts.
- A phrase used by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST; see web site at http://www.cast.org) to describe instructional and assistive technology that can be used with and by learners with and without disabilities is Universal Design for Learning (UDL) (Rose & Meyer, 2000; Rose, Sethuraman, & Meo, 2000). Rose and Meyer are clear that UDL is not a one size fits all enterprise. Rather, the focus is on how technology can be used with the curriculum so that alternatives for students’ learning are available, flexible, and individualized based on the specific student’s needs related to the learning outcome.
- An early version of universal design applied to instruction categorized around three areas in which teachers could design and use flexibility (Orkwis & McLane, 1998). The three areas are how a teacher represents content to students, how student engage in practice toward proficiency with the content, and how flexibly students could express what they have learned.
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