An overview of six curricular design issues that help ensure appropriate inclusive teaching.
Adapt Lessons to Reach All Students
Principle | Criteria/Feature |
I. Big Ideas Concepts, or principles that facilitate the most efficient and broad acquisition of knowledge | - Focus on essential learning outcomes
- Capture rich relationships among concepts
- Enable learners to apply what they learn in varied situations
- Involve ideas, concepts, principles, and rules central to higher-order learning
- Form the basis for generalization and expansion
|
II. Conspicuous Strategies Useful steps for accomplishing a goal or task | - Planned
- Purposeful
- Explicit
- Of medium-level application
- Most important in initial teaching of concept
|
III. Mediated Scaffolding Instructional guidance provided by teachers, peers, materials, or tasks | - Varied according to learner needs or experiences
- Based on task (not more than learner needs)
- Provided in the form of tasks, content, and materials
- Removed gradually according to learner proficiency
|
IV. Strategic Integration Integrating knowledge as a means of promoting higher-level cognition | - Combines cognitive components of information
- Results in a new and more complex knowledge structure
- Aligns naturally with information (i.e, is not "forced")
- Involves meaningful relationships among concepts
- Links essential big ideas across lessons within a curriculum
|
V. Judicious Review Structured opportunities to recall or apply previously taught information | - Sufficient
- Distributed over time
- Cumulative
- Varied
- Judicious, not haphazard
|
VI. Primed Background Knowledge Preexisting information that affects new learning | - Aligns with learner knowledge and expertise
- Considers strategic and proximal preskills
- Readies learner for successful performance
|
For a summary of the
Six Principles of Effective Curriculum Design.
*Excerpted from
Toward Successful Inclusion of Students with Disabilities: The Architecture of Instruction by Edward J. Kameenui, and Deborah Simmons(1999).