What should Ms. Begay know about creating effective lesson plans?
Page 14: Curriculum Planning Guidelines
What are Curriculum Planning Guidelines
Curriculum planning guidelines can be defined as the guidelines followed by teachers to accomplish what has been set forth by the standards-based curriculum. When teachers make their plans, teachers should take care to consider such things as the need to analyze the general curriculum to determine the adequacy of the curriculum for all learners, the availability of support materials, and strategies used to teach material to students.
Why Use Curriculum Planning Guidelines?
Planning guidelines should be used in order to ensure that students with disabilities receive the same curricular content as their peers without disabilities as is required by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Amendments of 2004 (IDEA ’04).
Curriculum planning guidelines:
- Help teachers to improve instruction
- Help educators to make placement decisions regarding students with disabilities to determine whether the general education curriculum is appropriate or whether it needs to be modified
- Prompt teachers to actively plan
Implementing the Use of Curriculum Planning Guidelines
Many teachers like Ms. Begay are concerned about helping their diverse learners to benefit from what they are being taught. The table below outlines six curricular design guidelines that can be used to make instruction as accessible and effective as possible. These are intended to support the greatest possible understanding or acquisition of content by learners. A byproduct of their implementation is that teachers learn to be much more strategic in their lesson planning.
| Principle | Definition | Example |
| Big Ideas | Ideas, values, or rules that help students to access and acquire knowledge (i.e., the essence of what all students need to learn from the lesson or unit) | Students have different learning strengths and needs that we can most easily accommodate if we build in flexibility at the beginning of the school year. |
| Conspicuous Strategies | Explicit steps for completing an objective or assignment (e.g., a paraphrasing or test-taking strategy) taught directly to students and built into subsequent lessons for maintenance | Mnemonic devices (memory aids) can help students to memorize a list, complete the steps in a math problem, outline the procedure for taking part in a group discussion, or specify how to create an outline. Such devices should be clearly taught so that students are also able to use them independently. |
| Mediated Scaffolding | Instructional support imparted by teachers, peers, materials, or tasks, and faded as the learner’s proficiency grows |
Your students are required to memorize a list of spelling words. You can support those students who need it by:
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| Strategic Integration | Weaving in key terms, ideas, or events at appropriate points to move students towards higher-level learning | Students must discover and describe how changing conditions affect various aspects of survival (e.g., physical, cultural, economic, cognitive). Use video clips, field trips, and mini-lessons to demonstrate changing weather conditions. |
| Primed Background Knowledge | Tapping into students’ past experiences to connect old information and expertise to new learning, thus setting them up for success | Ask students to talk about their experiences with economic change or family mobility, in preparation for a class discussion, text reading, and report writing. |
| Judicious Review | Regularly creating situations in which students are asked to recall what they’ve learned with the goal of enhancing their long-term memory or the use of previously acquired concepts or skills | Having taught estimating skills in math in October, design a math probe for estimating skills. Use it in word problems at least once a month and continue to use it throughout the year, ending with a project due in March. |
Listen as Veronica Nolan talks about her methods of implementing content standards to allow for multiple ways for students to demonstrate what they have learned (time: 1:02).
Transcript: Veronica Nolan
I do it in a variety of ways, and I think this is beneficial for; I’ve gotten great feedback from the parents in that it’s not just a whole blanket curriculum on how the children show their learning. I did that by allowing or providing a variety of techniques or ways for the children to show their learning. Whether it’s through video or computers, or drawing, acting, playing, every child has that choice, of how they want to present what they’ve been taught. And it’s like I said: It’s not a blanket, and everybody does the same storybook report everybody does the same activity. So I feel that is how I feel I tap into their own individual skills as far as learning and being able to access them. That way not only do I access them but their peers access them also, so they know that their feedback they’re going to get not only from the teacher but from their peers. The feedback from the teacher and the feedback from the peers, they coincide, which has been real interesting.
Activity
Select one of the guidelines or principles from the table above and brainstorm three instructional applications for your class.
