Accommodating student needs
03-Mar-2020 22:34
Instructional Accommodations [Teacher Tools] [Case Studies] Great Expectations An important theme across all areas of this website is one of "great expectations" for ALL students.All of the tools and strategies that you will discover on this website begin with the expectation that, with research based strategies for instruction and support, all students can learn toward grade level academic content standards, and all but a small percentage of students with the most significant disabilities can achieve proficiency on those standards.Students who use accommodations will generally also need them at home, in the community, and as they get older, in postsecondary education and at work.Students need to have opportunities to learn to use accommodations in classroom settings, and they also need to be able to take classroom tests using accommodations.Decisions about which accommodations to use is very individualized and should be made for each student by that student's IEP team.
Defining Instructional Accommodations One of the ways to increase student access to academic content standards through instruction in the general curriculum is by using instructional accommodations.
Accommodations are changes in the way a student accesses learning, without changing the actual standards a student is working toward.
Using accommodations can be complicated - the goal is to find a balance that gives students equal access to learning without "watering down" the content.
That said, this section addresses one of the important pieces of the learning puzzle accommodations.
Nolet and Mc Laughlin (2000) describe instructional accommodations as "a service or support that is provided to help a student fully access the subject matter and instruction as well as to demonstrate what he or she knows" (p. These accommodations do not change the content of instruction or expectations for performance.A student with difficulty reading print because of a learning disability may use no accommodation, a human reader, a cassette tape or compact disc, or a screen reader.