Lessons

Lessons are designed with the end in mind so that standard-based criteria for success are clear for students. 

have an idea? submit a picture or lesson plan if you think you have an exemplar of this idea. 

Facilitate Personal Coping Skills & Strategies

Providing a model of self-regulatory skills is not sufficient for most learners. They will need sustained apprenticeships that include scaffolding. Reminders, models, checklists, and so forth can assist learners in choosing and trying an adaptive strategy for managing and directing their emotional responses to external events (e.g., strategies for coping with anxiety-producing social settings or for reducing task-irrelevant distractors) or internal events (e.g., strategies for decreasing rumination on depressive or anxiety-producing ideation). Such scaffolds should provide sufficient alternatives to meet the challenge of individual differences in the kinds of strategies that might be successful and the independence with which they can be applied.

Provide differentiated models, scaffolds and feedback for:

• Managing frustration
• Seeking external emotional support
• Developing internal controls and coping skills
• Appropriately handling subject specific phobias and judgments of “natural” aptitude (e.g., “how can I improve on the areas I am struggling in?” rather than “I am not good at math”)
• Use real life situations or simulations to demonstrate coping skills

• Providing a learner with a tool is often not enough. We need to provide the support to use the tool effectively. Many learners need help navigating through their environment (both in terms of physical space and the curriculum), and all learners should be given the opportunity to use tools that might help them meet the goal of full participation in the classroom. However, significant numbers of learners with disabilities have to use Assistive Technologies for navigation, interaction, and composition on a regular basis. It is critical that instructional technologies and curricula do not impose inadvertent barriers to the use of these assistive technologies. An important design consideration, for example, is to ensure that there are keyboard commands for any mouse action so that learners can use common assistive technologies that depend upon those commands. It is also important, however, to ensure that making a lesson physically accessible does not inadvertently remove its challenge to learning.
• Provide alternate keyboard commands for mouse action
• Build switch and scanning options for increased independent access and keyboard alternatives
• Provide access to alternative keyboards
• Customize overlays for touch screens and keyboards
• Select software that works seamlessly with keyboard alternatives and alt keys

Use Multiple Tools for Construction & Composition

• There is a tendency in schooling to focus on traditional tools rather than contemporary ones. This tendency has several liabilities: 1) it does not prepare learners for their future; 2) it limits the range of content and teaching methods that can be implemented; 3) it restricts learners ability to express knowledge about content (assessment); and, most importantly, 4) it constricts the kinds of learners who can be successful. Current media tools provide a more flexible and accessible toolkit with which learners can more successfully take part in their learning and articulate what they know. Unless a lesson is focused on learning to use a specific tool (e.g., learning to draw with a compass), curricula should allow many alternatives. Like any craftsman, learners should learn to use tools that are an optimal match between their abilities and the demands of the task.
• Provide spellcheckers, grammar checkers, word prediction software
• Provide text-to-speech software (voice recognition), human dictation, recording
• Provide calculators, graphing calculators, geometric sketchpads, or pre-formatted graph paper
• Provide sentence starters or sentence strips
• Use story webs, outlining tools, or concept mapping tool
• Provide Computer-Aided-Design (CAD), music notation (writing) software, or mathematical notation software
• Provide virtual or concrete mathematics manipulatives (e.g., base-10 blocks, algebra blocks)
• Use web applications (e.g., wikis, animation, presentation)

Vary Demands & Resources to Optimize Challenge

• Learners vary not only in their skills and abilities, but also in the kinds of challenges that motivate them to do their best work. All learners need to be challenged, but not always in the same way. In addition to providing appropriately varied levels and types of demands, learners also need to be provided with the right kinds of resources necessary for successful completion of the task. Learners cannot meet a demand without appropriate, and flexible, resources. Providing a range of demands, and a range of possible resources, allows all learners to find challenges that are optimally motivating. Balancing the resources available to meet the challenge is vital.
• Differentiate the degree of difficulty or complexity within which core activities can be completed
• Provide alternatives in the permissible tools and scaffolds
• Vary the degrees of freedom for acceptable performance
• Emphasize process, effort, improvement in meeting standards as alternatives to external evaluation and competition