Teaching Every Student: Chapter 1 - A School District in Transition

A School District in Transition

Hatching baby chicks is a regular part of the 2nd grade curriculum in the Concord, New Hampshire, public school system. But this year, instead of writing reports about the activity, 2nd graders are expressing what they are learning in many different media: creating clay sculptures, drawing and coloring pictures, recording the chicks' sounds, and writing text. Some students are using computers as they draw, record, or write; others use paper or conventional recording devices. At the end of the project, all work will be digitized and incorporated into the class "Chicks" Web page.

In a neighboring Concord high school, students with widely varying skills read The Catcher in the Rye in English class. The book is available in both traditional paperback form and as digitized text, which the computer can read aloud at varying rates. Prompts embedded in the digital version offer support for reading-comprehension strategies such as predicting, questioning, and summarizing. Some students take advantage of those supports, others use the digital version without supports, and some students opt for the printed text.

The students' assignment is to choose a chapter from The Catcher in the Rye, synthesize the important elements, tie these elements to their own lives, and present their ideas to their classmates. How they choose to fulfill this assignment is up to them. Students create videos, posters, written papers, oral reports, and collages. One student, a recent immigrant to the United States, is concerned that her English isn't fluent enough for an oral presentation. Her teacher helps her develop an animated scene on the computer using a software package called Hollywood (see Figure 1.1). The student carefully writes each character's part, and when it is her turn to present before her classmates, she shows the animation with just a few words of explanation.

- Figure 1.1 -
Scene From a Student's Animated Presentation

At another school in the district, parents, teachers, and students volunteer in Concord's Scanning Center, where they digitize printed text, including materials from the regular education curriculum and special project-based content. The newly created resources-ranging from texts that can be read aloud by computers to multimedia science experiments-are placed in a digital library, where they are available to all district personnel. Throughout the year, individual teachers access the materials and customize them to meet the needs of individual students. Some teachers in the Concord system will not even consider using a unit of curriculum unless it is available in digital form.

Example: A school leader describes the importance of digitized curriculum materials.

These public schools in Concord, New Hampshire, share a district-wide commitment to maximizing every student's opportunity to learn by building flexible curriculum methods and materials. Their objective is to provide:

Carefully conceived classwide learning goals, inclusive of all students.

Individualized approaches for reaching those goals, including customized supports that change as learners progress.

Assessments that measure ongoing progress and provide teachers and students with useful feedback.

Concord's model for change is Universal Design for Learning, a research-based set of principles that forms a practical framework for using technology to maximize learning opportunities for every student. UDL actualizes the opportunities inherent in two great challenges facing today's educators: the challenge of learner diversity and the challenge of high standards.