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Directed Questions
Curricular Design
Directed Questions for Lesson 4:
Universally-Accessible Content
Multiple Choice
Attention: ONLINE RESPONDING IS DISABLED
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1.
Describe how curriculum, instruction, and learner characteristics interact and impact each other. Relate your response to the content you teach and learners with mild disabilities.
example:
I teach 12
th
grade English literature, and the first thing I think about is how the curriculum (i.e., 12
th
grade English literature) and projects/assignments require a great deal of reading, writing, and higher-order thinking skills. The traditional expectation-and subsequently, my instruction-is to assign reading and writing assignments with the presumption that 12
th
graders can read independently and write well. Consequently, my expectations and instructional methods impact students with learning disabilities who cannot read the literature as most 12
th
graders can and have problems with written projects or responses (e.g., an essay on comparing/contrasting). So the impact for me and students with learning disabilities is how I can maintain the integrity of the content/curriculum (e.g., students demonstrate proficiency with English literature) in what I would now consider "nontraditional" ways, such as having a student listen to the literature from a book-on-tape.
2.
Analyze how you currently plan for instruction, and describe two ways that are new for you via this Lesson. Ensure your description relates to your content and to learners with mild disabilities.
example:
I currently plan for one group of learners in my 11
th
grade World History class. Although I try to use different levels of instruction, the truth is I don´t usually use IEPs or Section 504 accommodations as a guide unless it´s really evident a student is failing. What struck me as I read this and subsequent lessons is not only the need to find out what accommodations and adaptations students with IEPs or Section 504 plans require, but also to what extent using such methods benefit other students in the class. For example, using the Unit Organizer is a new way for me. I could use the Unit Organizer as a way to structure, sequence, and prioritize the World History content so that the semester is planned in a long-term manner makes sense to me. I could still use the text chapters, but I might use them in a different sequence, and I probably need to use more resources than is currently recommended in my teacher´s guide for the textbook. A Unit Organizer would help me do long-range planning and connect the more important topics within World History. This would help me with my planning and delivering of instruction, the learners with IEPs and Section 504 plans who require more visuals and graphics, and students in general who benefit from in ´knowing where we´re going´ and connecting the important topics. The second way that was new for me from this chapter was the idea of using curriculum analysis and rating scales to determine, in advance, what areas of the curriculum need to be strengthened. I have usually just taken what´s been given to me to teach-whether from the text, my school system´s social studies curriculum office, and the state tests-and tried to fit everything in. It´s been such a pressure to just cover the topics, and I´ve realized that more students could ´get it´ if I spent more time on topics, but I´ve never thought about how I could take the curriculum and ´whittle it down,´ so to speak, to the most important concepts and teach those well. I´m realizing that´s a time-consuming task, too, and there´s never enough time to do all I´d like to do. What I´d like to do is meet with other teachers who teach this same content and see if we could come up with some ´big ideas´ or ´critical concepts´ and ways to teach them-maybe using the Concept Mastery graphic.
3.
Identify and describe universally applicable instruction. Relate your response to specific instructional methods you can use with all learners, and describe how those methods also benefit students with mild disabilities.
example:
Universally applicable instruction has to do with the teacher´s identification and use of varied ways of presenting, practicing, and assessing content such that more students in the class are likely to ´get´ the information and show what they know. If a teacher uses some of the universally applicable instructional methods, then the need for more specialized and individualized accommodations and adaptations are minimized-but not eliminated, as some students will need more specialized and individualized methods. For example, the use of ´primed background knowledge´ for students in my 10
th
grade Algebra II class can take the form of a pretest so I know how much they remember from Algebra I, and I´m even considering inserting into the pretest a rating scale so students can indicate to me whether they ´don´t remember at all,´ ´need some review,´ or ´have never been taught the information before.´ I will also use in the pretest questions that ask students to provide the principle that underlies solving the problems-the ´big ideas.´ This is in addition to answering the pretest questions that they can answer, and it will give me an idea of how much/how many students need review, reteaching, or teaching or prerequisite skills. That idea takes me immediately into how to divide the students into groups, with the presumption that from Day One I will have learners who are beginning at different levels with the content and that, even with the different levels, students will need varied amounts of review/reteaching/teaching to get to the point of learning Algebra II. So the two universally applicable methods I´ve described are primed background knowledge and big ideas-both of which I can get an idea about for all students by using a pretest. This benefits learners with mild disabilities because they would become part of the whole group receiving the pretest, and I may find that they fall into different groups than I normally may have put them in. That is, if my presumption coming in for IEP or Section 504 students was that they were all at a low level of knowledge, a pretest like this could help me see whether more students have similar needs. I also am realizing that some students with mild disabilities are very good in Algebra II, so the idea of stereotyping them as needy students is not fair nor accurate for some.
4.
Describe three strengths you would look for in analyzing a curriculum. Describe three different items that would be weaknesses. Describe how to enhance those weak areas.
example:
One strength I would look for is the sequence of information, specifically related to how connected topics are to each other. Another strength I would look for is how well the topics align with my school system and state testing programs. A third strength is visuals and graphics that pictorially illustrate the content. The first weakness I´ve noted in some curriculum-especially the textbook that my school system has as its adopted text-is that strategies and processes (such as developing a timeline or filling in a cause-effect relationship among events) are not explicitly taught within the text, nor within the teacher´s guide. To enhance that area, I would need to set aside teaching time and develop lesson plans to model those processes that are frequently used in my content area so that, as the semester progresses and I practice that more and more with students, they are more likely to be able to do it on their own later on in the semester. A second weakness in my textbook is the number of examples of concepts provided. There are so many mentioned, but their characteristics are not real clear, and it´s not real clear the major category of the concepts that some fit into. To enhance this area, I plan to explicitly target the major category, explicitly teach the characteristics of the examples and nonexamples that fall in this category, and then use that ´umbrella´ as guide for categorizing other concepts so that it´s more concrete which terms ´fall under´ the major category and which terms do not. I really liked the concept mastery graphic device (in one of the readings) as a format for doing this. The third weakness somewhat follows the second weakness, in that there is so much information to be covered, and in Lesson 4 it was clear that many teachers feel the same thing I do-too much to cover in too little time. What I gathered from Lesson 4 is that I need to look carefully at all of the curriculum and determine the essential information students need to learn. It was reassuring for me to read that many teachers feel overwhelmed with the amount of content they´re expected to cover, and that I can exercise more control by more thoughtful planning about what I teach during a course.
5.
From the six curriculum design elements from NCITE, target one and describe how you will use it related to content you teach. [Note: Use this lesson´s text, the Burke, Hagan, and Grossen (1998) article, and the supportive handouts on the six curriculum design elements as sources for developing your response.]
example:
I´ve already used some of this content in previous responses for this lesson, so I´ll focus here on one of the six curriculum design elements I mentioned in Question 4 response but did not describe how it relates to my content: BIG ideas. I had never really thought about teaching students the major categories of horticulture, such as perennials and annuals, as that seemed to me to be basic information. I realize now that for new learners to this content, identifying plants and designing gardens is built on several BIG ideas, among them determining which plants to plant. And a decision-making piece of determining which plant to plant is whether a plant is a perennial or annual. So I need to really look at the basics, as I tend to think of the BIG ideas, and be sure that I´m teaching those concepts first and well. The better that students know that initially, the less time we´ll need to revisit that later and, also, students will be more likely to begin independently figuring that out when designing a garden rather than relying on me to tell them and/or remind them that they need to consider that in their design.
6.
From the universal design for learning from CAST, which focuses on technology, describe one technological item in terms of how it could be used in your classroom for students with mild disabilities. [Note: Use this lesson´s text and the article written by Rose and Meyer (2000) as sources for this response.]
example:
The technological item that intrigues me from the Rose and Meyer article is the electronic book. Because my textbook is really written at a high reading level (even though it´s a ninth-grade text, it´s written at a higher level of reading), it would be great for students who have mild disabilities in reading (actually, some of these students read at a 3
rd
or 4
th
grade level) to have the electronic book to use. Moreover, the idea that an electronic book would have highlights that highlights main ideas or provides organizational supports (like a graphic to complete, or a visual to study from) is appealing in that I wouldn´t need to be the one to create the materials, they would be built into the electronic book. I have several students with mild disabilities (and some students without disabilities) who would really benefit from more visuals and prompts that CAST describes for electronic books.
7.
You had choices for one set of Lesson 4 required readings. From the reading you selected, describe one instructional technique you learned and tell how you plan to use it in your teaching with your content.
example:
I chose the De La Paz, Owen, Harris, and Graham article titled ´Riding Elvis´s motorcycle: Using self-regulated strategy development to PLAN and WRITE for a state writing exam.´ I would like to use the PLAN and WRITE strategy at the beginning of my course so that we (me and the students) can all ´talk the same language´ in referring to the processes for writing. The idea of using cue cards with students, as shown in Figure 2, and teaching the strategies well (sounds like ´conspicuous strategy´ from the six curriculum design elements from NCITE!) initially to all students sounds like a good use of time for me and the students in the long run. In particular, I liked the way the explicit teaching of the strategies had built into them the movement from the teacher evaluating students´ writing samples to students´ self-regulation. That appeals to me because, although initially it make take more time for me to teach the students the strategy, across the course students should be assuming more responsibility for correcting their work or improving their writing prior to turning it in to me for a grade. This serves the students well, too, because for state tests I am not the scorer, and students really need to be able to self-regulate their writing when they take these tests.
