Can you name the entire alphabet? What if I showed you a picture of a red fruit? Can you identify that it is an apple? These skills, along with many other ones we take for granted, were taught to us through our pre-school or early elementary curriculum. Joan Lieber, a University of Maryland professor in the special education department, worked with a group of researchers across the country to develop a curriculum that could be used for children at risk for school failure. “At risk” students include children from low-income families, children whose first language isn’t English, or children with disabilities.
“Children’s School Success (CSS), was a curriculum that we implemented in Head Start classrooms to help at risk children with academic and social skills,” said Lieber. The Head Start program has transitioned from an eight week summer program in 1965 to a full school year (either half day or full day) today. It was developed as part of Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” to give low-income children a head start on what they needed to know before kindergarten.
CSS teaches social skills like many of the competing curricula, but it also puts an emphasis on science and math activities. Some of the science concepts include measurement, color, and light. The math concepts include teaching numbers and pattern thinking. The targeted social skills include emotional literacy, friendship skills, and interpersonal problem solving. After the teachers implemented CSS for a year, Lieber and her team of researchers compared children that received the curriculum with children that didn’t. In math activities and social skill measures, children that had CSS did better. Also children with English as their second language scored better, using the CSS curriculum. However, they found that children with disabilities, as a group, did not do better with CSS than any other curriculum. “What we are doing now is, we are adapting to really focus on children with disabilities. We are using the Universal Design for Learning to structure the curriculum so that everybody can learn in their own way,” said Lieber.
Universal Design for Learning was inspired by the universal design movement in architecture. This architectural movement stated that instead of constructing a building and having to add on to it later in order to accommodate everyone, such as people confined to a wheelchair, they should initially be built to accommodate the widest group of people. This way people can walk up a ramp and people in wheelchairs can easily access an entrance. Universal Design for Learning relays the same concept. Curriculums should be built to accommodate all kinds of learners. The researchers are doing just that. They are currently working on CSS plus, a new curriculum that takes the successful parts of CSS, and adding on another layer in order to help children with disabilities succeed in the program.
Lieber and her team went back to each teacher after the school year was over to get their reactions about the CSS curriculum. Although there were only five teachers that fully implemented the curriculum the following year, the team was satisfied with their first examination of the question, “Is this curriculum sustainable?” Many of the other teachers have taken specific pieces of CSS that they liked best and implemented them the following year. Lieber attributes the discontinuation of the curriculum in total by 12 teachers to the their low implementation throughout the year and some school administrators decided to go with another program.
