Teaching regular classroom educators to do curricular adaptations

Abstract

The present work aimed to evaluate regular classroom teachers’ abilities to adapt activities for curricular adaptation based on a continued education course. To achieve that, a script was created breaking down the hability to perform adaptation into six items: identify the student’s adaptation needs; describe the course’s specific content; describe its goals; describe the activity; describe the strategies used to allow its execution; and point out performance criteria. This logic was designed to enable the measurement of the teachers’ skills before and after the course. There were eight regular classroom teachers from different school subjects with no previous knowledge on curricular adaptation. The course took place weekly during five educators’ meetings. These meetings were divided in pre-course data collection, assessment concepts, assessment proposals organization, adaptation concepts, and after-course data collection. The results indicated that the course was efficient for teachers to learn some curricular adaptation skills according to the targeted students’ needs highlighted by the school, but not enough to develop the complete set of skills in all participants. For example, before the course six out of eight teachers showed less them 50% of the desired skills and, after that, half the group achieved 80% of them. Procedures discussion and limitations are presented.