Module 2: The B.C. Curriculum and Students with Complex Needs
Steps to Build a Connection to the B.C. Curriculum
To start, you must first know your student. As with all students, the key is to begin with what you know about your student as a learner, both informally and from information in their file. A useful tool is the Inclusion Outreach assessment called Stepping Stones for Translating Cognitive Development into Educational Skills (PDF).
This document can help determine the academic skills your student could be working on. Gathering all this information will give you a starting place for your planning. A good guiding question for planning is, “How do I make this meaningful and achievable for my student?”
With the student’s learning profile in hand, start by looking at the Big Ideas using grade-level curriculum. A commonly misunderstood practice using the old curriculum would have you going back to earlier grade levels for choosing your student’s learning objectives. Remember that the learning objectives that your student is working on are those in their IEP. The Big Ideas are there to provide context for how the learning will occur. Your task is to determine where the places are within the Core Competencies, Big Ideas, or Essential Concepts for including meaningful learning activities for a student with complex needs. This will be your access point—the learning objective that connects your student to the curriculum. We will talk more about the “access point” in the next module in this course.
Ask yourself, “Is there a connection to prior knowledge?” and “What is meaningful for my student?” Let’s have a look at how learning activities can relate to Essential Concepts and Big Ideas.