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Modifying for Students with Special Needs
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by Diane Downey
North Eugene High School
Eugene, Oregon
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| | The great teacher doesn't circumscribe students' achievements with low expectations and limited curriculum. She brings all students to their highest levels by presenting them with the greatest challenges. Rather than be discounted for their special needs, students appreciate being respected for what they can do. Including special needs students in AP English does just that. It means demanding they do more than they have done before. The special needs students get the same instruction and assignments as others, and they do their best work in completing them. This may mean, for instance, that the special needs student writes a well-developed paragraph or two, while other students each write a 700-word essay. However, over the course of the year we saw our special needs students' literacy grow by leaps and bounds. Students who in the beginning of the year wrote no more than a paragraph at a time were by the end of the year writing multiple-page essays. As students meet challenges, their confidence in themselves grows. Here are some of their thoughts, written in June 2006:
- "I never thought I would be able to do it if I was not put in the class."
- "My time in this English class has shown me a lot about me and the world around us. I have learned to adapt to lessons that I half understood because going in I knew I was not at this level. I have learned more in this English class than all of my others combined."
- "AP lit has made me a better reader. I'm not quite at the level I want to be yet but this has helped me along."
- "I wrote wonderful poems for our class that changed the way I think about writing and poetry. . . . I would like to keep writing poems for just the fun of it."
- "I just take it all in and I like it that way."
We created simple guidelines for modification that serve the needs of nearly all our special needs students:
- A special needs student who completes all assignments to the best of his or her ability as verified by the teacher and support staff earns a "Pass" in a course called "American Literature" (not AP) on his or her transcript. By this plan, special needs students experience AP curriculum and instruction and are included in AP classroom activities. At the same time, AP instructors deal with minimal differentiation, maintain the integrity of the AP curriculum, and honestly report what students have achieved.
Special needs students are concurrently enrolled in AP Support (see "Providing Support for Struggling Students").
- Special needs students are issued "easy to read" texts and the same edition as the rest of the class, using each as they see fit.
- Special needs students are not penalized for completing work late. In addition, teachers give "Incompletes" at the end of grading periods to students still working toward passing.
Modification is only for students officially identified as having English language learner or special education needs.
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