Three Steps to Gain Access to General Education Curriculum for Learners with Disabilities
King-Sears, M.E. (in press). Three steps to gain access to general education curriculum for learners with disabilities. Intervention in School and Clinic.
Abstracted by Barbara Higgins-Dover
In this article, the author discusses a process for determining how to access the general education curriculum. There are three steps included for teachers to use as a guide: 1) analyzing the general education curriculum, 2) enhancing areas of general education, 3) accessing modifications of outcomes. Examples, checklists, and rubrics are included to guide teachers through this process. Suggestions are also provided for strengthening and modifying the curriculum and at the same time enhancing the learning of students with and without disabilities.
Analyze: When analyzing the curriculum decide which features permit more accessibility for learners with disabilities, consider what learners should know at "specific grade levels," what materials are available for "diversifying instruction," and how many Universal Design Elements there are within the curriculum. One way this can be accomplished is by using a checklist that asks for examples and non-examples of the characteristics of the curriculum (see table 1). Additionally, manuals, curriculum packages, and guides are available for teachers to use when analyzing the adequacy of curriculum content (McLaughlin (1993) developed such a guide (see table 3)). Six Universal Design Elements are included to consider when analyzing the curriculum: big ideas, conspicuous strategies, mediated scaffolding, strategic integration, judicious review, and primed background knowledge.
Enhancing Curriculum: Students with disabilities can access general education curriculum more easily if it is well constructed, if resource materials are available, and teacher collaboration occurs. Table 4 can be used as a guide for determining which features of the curriculum need to be enhanced and which do not. Some areas of the curriculum may not contain descriptive strategies, or the standards may seem too vague. In such cases, teachers will want to enhance the curriculum by including and elaborating on relevant and necessary information. It is suggested that teachers will want to conduct brief and varied reviews of previously taught content, and gain an awareness of the learners' background. This enables the teacher to better understand curriculum enhancements that might be necessary.
Accessibility with Minor and Major Changes: Some students may need curriculum delivery or expectations changed despite enhancements. These changes may vary depending on individual student characteristics, IEP content, and the level of teacher experience with "differentiation."
In this article the author discusses four types of curriculum changes that might be made. Included are, accommodations with changes to the method of input and/or output, adaptations where standards can be changed slightly, parallel where there are "major changes to the outcome within the content," and overlapping curriculum where student involvement remains the same and goals appear different.
Using the techniques described throughout this article, students may more readily achieve the goals set forth in their IEP's, and teachers may find that curriculum enhancement and changing creates better and more productive learning environments for students with and without disabilities.
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