Instructional Planning, Curriculum, and the Expanded Core Curriculum
Instructional Planning, Curriculum, and the Expanded Core Curriculum
This domain tests how you plan instruction that gives students access to the general curriculum while teaching the disability-specific skills sighted peers learn incidentally. Expect items on the nine ECC areas, IEP goal quality, task analysis, and strategies for tactile and experiential learners.
The Expanded Core Curriculum
- Nine areas: compensatory and functional academic skills, orientation and mobility, social interaction, independent living, recreation and leisure, career education, self-determination, assistive technology, and sensory efficiency.
- The ECC is not a separate program bolted on. It is embedded in routines, classes, and community experiences and assessed like any other need.
- Access to the core curriculum requires accommodations (large print, braille, tactile graphics, preferential seating), modifications when needed, and Universal Design for Learning. UDL does not replace direct instruction in the ECC.
Planning and instruction
- Start from the general education standard, then ask what access the lesson needs and what ECC skills it can carry.
- Concept development needs real objects and repeated experience: a student who has never held a quarter cannot understand "25 cents" from a worksheet. Move from concrete to representative to abstract.
- Use task analysis, systematic instruction, a planned prompting hierarchy (verbal, gestural, model, physical), and data collection on independence.
- Embed skills in natural contexts: money in the cafeteria, O&M on the route to the bus, self-advocacy in the science lab.
- Write measurable, skill-based IEP goals ("reads 60 contracted braille words per minute with 95% accuracy") rather than accommodational ones ("will receive large print").
Worked example
A second grader with low vision is included in general class but cannot find materials or use a magnifier independently. Reasoning: this is not a "try harder" problem. Task-analyze the routine into locate, orient, focus, scan, and read. Teach each step in the actual classroom with a consistent home for materials, a labeled magnifier spot, and a prompting hierarchy. Collect data on prompts needed across a week. The goal targets independence in the routine, and the magnifier becomes a tool the student owns rather than an adult-managed accommodation.
Traps that cost marks
Writing goals that describe accommodations rather than skills; teaching the ECC only in a pull-out room; assuming a student understands concepts never experienced; over-prompting so independence never develops; ignoring the ECC in transition planning; planning for the average rather than the specific student.