Accommodating the Needs of All Students

You do the best you can and you accept the fact that you can’t perform miracles. What I did in a very wide-ranging class (Grades 1 and 2 rural, ages 5 to 8, reading levels K to 3 at beginning) was:
- group teaching of phonics, reading, spelling, and math (review never hurt a good student, if it is kept to a reasonable amount and not all day),
- group oral reading by grade level (and fast kids *never* allowed to make fun of slower ones),
- totally individual work through well-planned workbooks at every student’s own pace in phonics, reading, and math books,
- supervised individualized work — it’s a work period, not talk time,
- reading aloud to the class from good literature (I am all for this but it is NOT the reading teaching part of the curriculum),
- “silent” (mumbling at this stage but that’s OK) reading with free choice from books labelled by difficulty level,
- and free-form shared reading groups (formed by kids themselves) during “silent” reading.

All of the kids made great progress, many of them two or three times what previous grades would have led to expect (1.5 to 3.2 for example). I didn’t reach all the kids I would have liked to. One boy, Grade 1 age 7 slow learner, was not getting as far as needed in the class and another teacher’s wife, herself a former teacher, volunteered to give him extra tutoring because I just couldn’t manage in a class atmosphere.
And there was constant conflict because I was doing things “wrong”, the definition of wrong being different from the parent’s hazy memory of their own elementary years and/or different from last year’s teacher (who had been pressured out of the school by the constant conflict, but oh well.)

Keep your eye on the goal of teaching, get good time-tested materials and scientifically-validated programs, make the calss a place of study and learning, and do the best you can.

I would read information on the following topics:
Universal Design
Muliple Intellgences
Unit Organizers
I prefer to think that we don’t have ‘smart kids’ and ‘not so smart kids’ but we have some students who WRITE very well, others who READ very well, etc. take yourself through all 8 intelligences and ask yourself how each of these could be best taught….. how could they display their knowledge?

I have been working with learning disabled children for 15 years. I do believe that our goal as educators is finding how each child learns best and allow them to do what they need in order to learn. My students are not ‘dumb’ although by the time I finally get them in middle school, many are convinced they are.

I have *huge* problems with the stuff I have read about Universal Design. The authors I have read have absolutely no contact with the real world and suggest things that are demonstrably ineffective. Always ask yourself if a modification is actually improving the way you communicate the academic material, or if it is a way of avoiding teaching.

Universal design is an architecture concept, the planning and designing of space, buildings, etc. that have multiple usage characteristics and can be used by many people with various limitations, etc. A good example would be a ramp which can be used by people in wheelchairs, by parents with strollers, by kids with skateboards, etc.

I have seen a couple websites where they try and take an architectural concept and turn it into an educational one. Nice idea but, say,wouldn’t sky scrapers be a great educational idea? Sky scrapers look important and stand out so this might make education stand out and seem more important. Just make everything really tali. Big tall schools, books, desks, letters in books, math problems could be long and high, etc. :-)

UD has applicability in computer use and school design but I don’t think with curriculum. You can just take an idea so far.

—des (tongue firmly in cheek but with a point to make anyway).

One of the examples I saw with so-called Universal Design was to make kitchen countertops lower so that they could be accessible to people in wheelchairs. Sounds great, right? Only if you never cook anything. Anyone who actually does any cooking will already tell you the standard 36 inch countertop is a little low — this standard was set in the 1940’s for the average woman of the time, and as the population gets taller and more men cook, it’s a bad fit. Working at a low countertop is bachache central. So we are going to send 95% of the population to the doctor or chiropractor with major back pain in order to try to help the small proportion of people in wheelchairs — and last time I heard, they weren’t demanding low countertops be installed everywhere anyway. I bet this was a man whose wife did all the cooking who came up with this one.
Ramps are another story, good for my broken ankle too as well as all those other things des mentions, and people are asking for them. There’s a difference between entering a public building, where ramps are definitely needed, and a private kitchen used by one or two people.

In schools, the examples I saw of so-called Universal Design consisted mainly in watering down the curriculum. They suggested never having essay exams, only multiple choice — a known problem if you want to ever teach people to write and do anything in depth; never having students take notes, providing ready-made notes to hand out to them — a known problem if you want to teach analytical skills and prepare students for college and the business world, not to mention keeping their attention on the class (why listen if the packet to memorize is in your hands?); and other similar approaches.
Unfortunately these articles were in the magazine of the International Dyslexia Association, around a year to two years ago, so this is being accepted by the powers in special ed, not just a few outsiders.

Check out www.cast.org for excellent articles about Universal Design for Learning. The point is to remove the barriers to learning for all students and provide access to the curriculum for ALL students.

Some of this on CAST seems applicable, but not all schools are so plugged in as others, sad to say.

—des

I had done a quick Google search:

education “universal design”

The teachers who have adopted such a philosophy have really surprised themselves with the successes of the students with various learning differences.
One of my favorite articles to share with the reg. ed teams:

Don’t Water Down! ENHANCE, Teaching Exceptional Cildren, Vol. 32, No. 3, pages 48-56, 2000 CEC

Using graphic organizers is just one technique…

But graphic organizers weren’t invented by UD proponents to my knowledge. They also wouldn’t exactly be “universal”. Kids who are
not good visualizers woudn’t be helped much by them.

—des

I work on a national center (the Access Center funded by U.S. Dept. of Education) - we developed materials regarding helping students with disabilities learn using the same kind of content as all other children. We have found that there are some universal design principles that can be incorporated into curriculum and strategies that can help all kids learn. Here is a link to some of our free materials…

http://www.k8accesscenter.org/training_resources/UniversalDesignPage.asp

Hope this is helpful.