(funky upbeat music)
- [Narrator] Welcome to our video
for High Leverage Practice Number 13,
Adapt Curriculum Tasks and Materials
for Specific Learning Goals.
There are 22 High Leverage Practices for special education
spread across four domains.
Adapt curriculum tasks and materials
is included under the instruction domain.
The content for this video is from
the HLP in Special Education Book published
by CEC and the CEEDAR Center, and the chapter
by Shelia Alber-Morgan and her colleagues
in the HLP for Inclusive Classrooms book.
This video is split into two parts.
In Part 1, we explain how adaptations
to curriculum tasks and materials can best be explained
by introducing accommodations and modifications.
In Part 2, we elaborate and demonstrate examples
of each within real classrooms.
Part 1: Definition and Rationale.
Broadly speaking, an adaptation is a change
made by the teacher to some aspect of the curriculum.
There are a number of ways that general and special
education teachers and other stakeholders
can provide adaptations to curriculum tasks
and materials to help all students,
including those with disabilities.
Many of these can be made informally.
However, in this video, we refer to two types of adaptations
specifically for use with students with disabilities:
accommodations and modifications.
Let's start with accommodations.
An accommodation is a change in the way
that a student with a disability
accesses information or demonstrates learning.
The purpose of an accommodation is to help the student
access the general education curriculum by working around
or overcoming a specific challenge
or barrier caused by their disability.
However, with an accommodation in place,
the student with a disability
still completes the same learning task,
assignment, or assessment as peers without disabilities.
In other words, students with disabilities
who use accommodations are held
to the same high expectations as peers.
Accommodations can be categorized by purpose.
For example, presentation accommodations provide
alternatives for presenting information to students.
Presentation accommodations for a student who has difficulty
reading might include listening to audio recordings of books
or getting verbal directions instead of written ones.
There are also response accommodations, which provide
alternatives for ways that students demonstrate learning.
These can include using speech-to-text technologies,
using a spell checker, or a calculator.
Setting accommodations make changes
to the physical environment, such as providing a small group
testing situation or seating the student
in an area of the classroom with the best acoustics.
Timing and scheduling accommodations provide students
with extended time for tests or assignments
or permit needed breaks.
IEP teams can help support a student's success
by matching the student's disability-related needs
to appropriate accommodations.
Here's an example of how accommodations
can help a student with a disability.
This student has ADHD and gets distracted by things
that he sees and hears in the classroom.
As a result, he often has incomplete assignments
and does not finish tests.
A setting accommodation that helps him work
around these issues allows him
to take tests in a quiet, alternative location.
This helps him avoid seeing or hearing potential
distractions like other students, ambient noise,
or other anxiety producing or attention consuming stimuli.
He takes the same test as his peers,
he just takes it in a different location.
For some students, accommodations can be faded
over time to move the student towards independence.
In other instances, accommodations will always be needed
to help a student access content or complete
a learning or behavioral task.
IEP teams determine which accommodations are necessary
to support a student's success
and in what types of situations they are to be employed.
The accommodations are then documented in the student's IEP.
In contrast to accommodations,
modifications change a learning objective or assessment.
This goes beyond changing how the student learns
or is tested and instead changes what the student
is learning or being asked to do.
The more significant the disability,
the more likely that modifications to assignments,
assessments, and other tasks will need to be made.
Modifications can also be categorized by type.
For example, an assignment modification might mean
a student answers fewer questions on a test,
or completes an alternate assignment.
A curriculum modification might mean the student
will learn different material
than what might be considered grade appropriate content.
An assessment modification could involve measuring student
achievement using a different standard and scale
than students without IEPs.
Modifications can be faded out over time,
as student proficiency increases.
For others, modifications may always be necessary.
Here's an example of how a modification can work:
A student with an intellectual disability in the 7th grade
may complete an alternative statewide assessment,
such as a portfolio of performance,
rather than the standard grade level assessment
to evaluate her annual growth.
Any teacher working with students with disabilities
needs to understand both types of adaptations
and be ready to implement them appropriately.
Required accommodations or modifications should help
the student complete learning or behavioral tasks,
make relevant progress, and should be listed
in the student's IEP or 504 Plan.
Teachers should collect data on student performance
to determine whether formally designated accommodations
or modifications are effective.
To conclude Part 1: Accommodations and modifications
are two types of adaptations to curriculum tasks
and materials that teachers can make to support
students with disabilities.
Accommodations help a student work around the challenge
caused by his or her disability,
but do not change expectations for the student.
In contrast, modifications alter the learning goal,
task, or assessment.
Both accommodations and modifications are determined
by the IEP team and are documented in the IEP.
Part 2: Components of this HLP.
In Part 2, we highlight three components of this HLP
that can guide practitioners as they make key adaptations
for students with disabilities.
The components are:
identify accommodations and modifications
that are necessary, given a student's unique needs,
and how those needs intersect
with various aspects of the curriculum.
Two, use content enhancements in combination
with traditional accommodations to support student needs.
Three, evaluate to determine whether adaptations
are having the intended impact.
The first component of this HLP is to identify
accommodations and modifications that are likely
to support student success given the goals and objectives
listed in the IEP, and areas of the curriculum
where the student is likely to struggle.
Other HLPs that are relevant here include
HLP 11, setting short and long-term learning goals
and HLP 12, systematically designing instruction
towards learning goals.
If appropriate goals and objectives are in place,
and teachers are providing systematically designed
instruction aligned with goals,
the next logical consideration is adding needed
accommodations and modifications
to help support student success.
IEP teams' work to implement HLPs 11 and 12
provide a roadmap for how HLP 13,
provide needed adaptations, will be utilized.
Adaptations for instruction are individual
and content specific.
A student with a print-based learning disability
may need to utilize a text-to-speech accommodation to access
the text-based content during social studies class.
However, that accommodation would not be appropriate
during reading intervention when the purpose
is to improve decoding skills.
Teachers may identify the accommodations or modifications
that are needed by being familiar with the student
and having a firm understanding of the lesson objective.
Accommodations listed in the IEP should always be used,
but teachers should also be flexible in identifying
other options for making adaptations
that may be useful.
The second component of this HLP is to use content
enhancements in combination with formally designated
accommodations to support student needs.
Graphic organizers and guided notes are examples
of content enhancements that can help students
see essential connections between
and among content being taught.
Mnemonics also have a long history of supporting
learning and achievement for students with disabilities.
These powerful tools can help
student success across academic content areas.
In addition to supporting student success
with learning standards or other curriculum items
with which they are likely to struggle,
content enhancements should be utilized
in service of students' IEP goals.
These types of general adaptations do not always
need to be recorded in a student's IEP,
though they can be used in conjunction
with documented accommodations.
For example, the teacher could opt to provide
the student with a graphic organizer
that is already complete, or help scaffold instruction
so he can fill it out under the watchful eye of the teacher.
In this next clip, Ms. Cindy Lavender is working
with two students struggling in reading.
She is working on inferencing skills to help the students
develop strategies and capacity to use context clues
to infer the meaning of unknown words.
She is using a graphic organizer as a content enhancement
to guide their work.
The use of this content enhancement is in service
of the students' IEP goals related to inferencing.
- Now what did we have to do?
What did we have to do in order to figure out
what these words meant?
I could read the words, you could read the words,
but did we know the meaning?
- No. - No.
What did we have to do Brianna?
- We had to read the story.
- And look at...
- The context clues.
- And with what we what?
- No.
- What we already have up in our head, our schema.
So we took our schema, what we already knew
and the context and we made a what?
- [Brianna] Inference.
- We inferred the meaning
of these words that we didn't know.
So here's what I'd like for you to do.
Whenever you are reading in your display books,
and both of you have your display books,
okay, you are going to start keeping track
of some unknown words that you might come across
as you're reading.
Remember yesterday we talked about that.
I come across words all the time
that I don't know the meaning of so I have to do
the same thing that you all are doing and using clues, okay?
So this is inferred meaning.
This is what you think the word means
by using the clues, okay?
Just like we did right here.
So after we read we took the clues to figure out
what that meaning might be.
So we're gonna write the inferred meaning here
and then the clues that led
to the inference about that word, okay?
So as you are reading for the next few minutes,
silently in your book, start jotting down
some of these words and I'm gonna help you
figure out what those meanings are.
- What if it's like our front page.
- If there's a word on your cover that you're not sure of,
yes let's write it down because somewhere in that text
we're gonna look for clues
and find out what that word means, okay?.
- [Narrator] One assumption often made by IEP teams
and teachers is that all accommodations and modifications
are equally needed and effective.
I might think, "if I provide an accommodation
"or modification, it must be good."
However, if the list of accommodations and modifications
listed in the IEP are derived from a pre-written list,
or thought up on the spot,
it's possible that either the selections
could be incomplete, or even unnecessary.
Therefore, the third component is to evaluate
whether adaptations are having the intended impact
on student performance.
IEP team members, particularly general
and special educators, use data from various assessments
and other sources to predict areas within the standards
and curriculum where students are likely to struggle.
Teachers should use curriculum-based measurements or CBMs,
or other high-quality assessments on an ongoing basis
to evaluate the student's progress
toward meeting his or her goals.
The data collected can then be used to make data-based
decisions on whether to continue use of the accommodation
or modification, or if changes are indicated.
This prevents the ongoing use of ineffective adaptations.
In conclusion, an essential practice for all teachers
is to use accommodations and modifications
to help students with disabilities access the curriculum,
perform learning tasks, or demonstrate their learning.
Teachers and other stakeholders should carefully match
needed accommodations and modifications
to learning goals and evaluate the impact.
Thanks for watching, and please continue
using resources from our library
on High-Leverage Practices in Special Education.