Is it reasonable to ask special education teachers to modify general education curriculum for their classroom? Consider the top five challenges to doing so.
Top 5 Challenges to Modifying General Education Curriculum
#1 Unrealistic Expectations for Curriculum Design
Gen ed teachers aren’t required to write their own curriculum, so why should special ed teachers? Most don’t have specialized training and/or degrees in curriculum design like professionals at curriculum companies have.
#2 Difficulty in Aligning to Standards and Retaining Rigor
While many extended standards are based on gen ed standards, they do differ. When modifying gen ed curriculum, teachers may not get the standards alignment and/or the academic rigor right for FAPE.
#3 Lack of Ready-Made Instructional Materials and Resources
Students benefit most from active learning through appropriately modified and differentiated materials, and teachers’ time is best spent teaching, not making or adapting content and resources.
#4 Need for Assessment and Progress Monitoring
When an educator modifies lesson plans and instructional resources/materials from a gen ed curriculum, they must also modify assessments to match learning objectives and ensure standards alignment.
#5 Inconsistent Implementation or Modification
Curriculum inconsistency across teachers or schools means students are not able to pick up where they left off, slowing their progress. And administrators cannot accurately analyze a curriculum’s impact on test scores across a district.
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