Excerpt from Cast.org FAQ's....
Please read and pay special attention to the highlighted area as it pertains to my response
Q 3: How does UDL help guarantee students equal opportunities to learn?
Both IDEA and NCLB recognize the right of all learners to a high-quality standards-based education. The laws preclude the development of separate educational agendas for students with disabilities and others with special needs. They also hold teachers, schools, districts, and states responsible for ensuring that these students demonstrate progress according to the same standards.
Neither law adequately addresses the greatest impediment to their implementation: the curriculum itself. In most classrooms, the curriculum is disabled. It is disabled because its main components—the goals, materials, methods, and assessments—are too rigid and inflexible to meet the needs of adiverse learners, especially those with disabilities. Most of the present ways to remediate the curriculum’s disabilities—teacher-made workarounds and modifications, alternative placements etc.—are expensive, inefficient, and often ineffective for learning.
By addressing the diversity of learners at the point of curriculum development (rather than as an afterthought or retrofit), Universal Design for Learning is a framework that enables educators to develop curricula that truly "leave no child behind" by maintaining high expectations for all students while effectively meeting diverse learning needs and monitoring student progress.
My response:
As a classroom teacher who works with curriculum and teacher guides everyday I have a different opinion. Because so many students are being recognized with special needs publishing companies have begun to make more modifications for students with unique needs in their curriculum. This school year our school adopted the GO Math program and I was impressed with the amount of resources they offered for students with unique needs. They have built in and provided resources for RTI (Response to Intervention). Each tier was given a workbook page, lesson, and a way for the teacher to address student’s confusion immediately in the teacher guide. I think programs will be offering the same type of materials as standard practice in the near future. I will say the programs do not offer resources for students who have more severe needs. This can be challenging for the classroom teachers as they are continuing to be left to their own devices when instructing students with severe special needs.
As a fourth grade teacher, I struggle with the curriculum and assessments being appropriate for all of the students. Although I do agree that there are programs such as GO Math providing ideas for modifications in instruction, there are no alternative assessments. Our 4th grade math assessments are all in word problem format which is difficult to access for many of my students. I think it would be helpful to also provide alternative forms of the assessment that go along with the RTI model.
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