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=Boardmaker Studio Resource Page = Creating Access to the General Education Classroom

What is the General Education Curriculum?

The design and implementation of the general education curriculum is increasingly driven by external standards that are adopted from statewide or national school reform initiatives. Developed by national, state, and local curriculum writing groups and by subject area experts, standards aim to articulate clearly the knowledge, skills, and understandings all students should gain in a particular subject, with more specific benchmarks of achievement by grade level. Standards articulate what schools value and, therefore, what teachers teach and assess. Under IDEA, students with disabilities are to be educated in the general curriculum and aspire to the same standards and expectations as their peers. This means that all four components of curriculum—goals, media and materials, teaching methods, and assessment—need to apply to all students. One of the biggest obstacles to ensuring this across the board application is that the general curriculum today is largely inflexible, because the printed textbook remains at its core. The medium of print has long dominated communication and therefore education and curriculum design. Once material is committed to paper it cannot be adjusted and changed: the text is one size and available only to those who can handle the physical book, see and decode the text, and understand the concepts necessary to interpret it. Because printed text has been the standard and the only viable way to convey information, teaching and learning have been configured to accommodate this medium, and approaches to teaching students with disabilities have proceeded with printed text as a given. Consequently, students who for varied reasons are not able to learn effectively from printed texts have been unable to truly "access, participate, and progress in the general curriculum."
 * 1) goals and milestones for instruction (often in the form of a scope and sequence),
 * 2) media and materials to be used by students,
 * 3) specific instructional methods (often described in a teacher’s edition), and
 * 4) means of assessment to measure student progress.

Special Education and a Special Curriculum The key problem with the special curriculum is its separateness from the general curriculum, with its attendant implications for students. The notion that separate schooling helps students "catch up" or "be fixed" and then return to the regular setting is flawed on the face of it. If students are missing the presentation of essential subject area content and skills, year after year, it is unlikely they will ever truly be able to make up lost ground. Further, the separation of students with disabilities reinforces the idea among general educators that they are in some way lacking what it takes to participate in the mainstream. This applied most obviously to students with low incidence disabilities such as sensory and motor disabilities who were often in separate classes or placements, but also to students with behavior difficulties, learning disabilities, and other learning challenges. In fact, research evidence shows that for most students a separate, highly individualized education does not realize its promise to help them catch up or reunite with their peers and function well in regular education settings.



=Unpacking Content Standards for Students with Complex Support Needs: When Does Instruction Hit the Target? =

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[|The story of Jack and where presumed competence fits.]

Boardmaker Studio - Getting Started

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