Access to the General Education Curriculum for ALL Learners

All education professionals must enter the teaching profession having foundational values and beliefs that welcome and support ALL learners. These beliefs are demonstrated through specific practices such as collaboration to meet the needs of each and every learner, designing for universal access, and valuing and respecting each students’ diverse profile, strengths, and needs. Beliefs in the potential of ALL learners sits at the heart of our work as educators. These essential beliefs and practices are the roots that ground our work in providing high quality, equitable, and accessible instruction and assessment. “Root work” can be developed by engaging in specific learning, activities, and resource exploration throughout this learning space.

Some examples of content targeting this “root work” can be found in:

• Chapter 1: Ensuring Inclusive Dispositions and Presuming Competence
• Chapter 2: Focus on Tier I Aligned with General Standards for All Learners
• Chapter 3: Designing Inclusive Learning Environments & Rich Tier I Instruction and Assessment

As a collective state-wide group of education professionals, we are all responsible when it comes to meeting the needs of diverse and complex learners. Integrating supports that represent ALL learners, across all levels of the state-system, is a daunting task. This means we will have to work collaboratively across licensure areas, offices, and other silos of practice to ensure that ALL learners receive the expertise we each individually bring to the field. As a collaborative group, we will need to rely on strong guidelines and processes to planfully connect supports and implement to improve learner outcomes. Some examples of these structures within our system include academic learning standards, the assess, plan, teach cycle - Ohio Improvement Process (OIP), Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS), Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS), etc.

Some examples of content targeting this “trunk work” can be found in:

• Chapter 2: Designing Rich Tier I Instruction and Assessment: Overview
• Chapter 2: Sorting and Clustering Standards for Instruction: Integrated Units
• Chapter 4: Language and Communication Access: ALL In!
• Chapter 10: Curriculum Screening, Audit, Selection, and Deselection

One target for educators is to ensure the use of content and learner specific supports to meet the full range of students in every district, in every building, in every grade across our state. In order to integrate diverse supports and services, we must know about a wide array of evidence-based and research-based practices/strategies that can be used during instruction and assessment. When evidence-based practices/strategies are put into practice, results in skill development and future outcomes for learners can skyrocket. We welcome you to check out the many evidence-based practices/strategies outlined within this learning space.

Some examples of content targeting this “leaf work” can be found in:

• Chapter 2: Unit Literature: Gathering Text Sets
• Chapter 3: Integrating Literacy into the Classroom Environment
• Chapter 6: Phonological Awareness with an Emphasis on Phonemic Awareness
• Chapter 6: Early, Basic, and Advanced Phonics
• Chapter 7: Read Alouds
• Chapter 7: Teaching Vocabulary to Diverse Learners
• Chapter 8: Adapting Methods and Materials for Standards-based Instruction