C3 in a special education setting

This is the first in a two-part blog from special education teacher Lauren Burda with her social studies colleague Heather Vivan. Part two is available here

As a high school special education teacher, I have grown to know, understand, and anticipate the diverse needs and challenges faced by my students. Understanding special education has allowed me to individualize my instruction and challenge my students to accomplish tasks that people tell me “can’t be done in the special education setting.”  What do I do that’s different? My approach is to use the same lessons and activities with all students. That’s right, whether my students are on an IEP, in a sheltered environment, in honors classes, or somewhere in between, I try to set high expectations for all students.  I believe it’s just good practice to have high expectations for all students.

Now, I’m not saying I would throw complex activities like a Document Based Question at my special education students without any support. No, all of this comes with a lot of work, sweat, and tears (all mine of course). While I jump at the opportunity to apply what I know about special education perspective (and as a loud Long Island transplant teaching in Virginia, I can make my voice heard!), I could never do this alone. As a member of a collaborative learning team, I get to work with expert teachers at all levels, honors included, who help me apply the newest and most exciting approaches to teaching. In fact it was one of my team teachers, Heather Vivian, who came along with me on my latest adventure to learn about the C3 Framework and the unique approach to inquiry that it suggests.

Heather is an amazing teacher with lots of experience. She teaches in our International Baccalaureate program, so you can imagine that her favorite approaches for teaching history focus on primary sources. Heather saw the potential in the C3 inquiry model right away, with its focus on questions and sources from the disciplines. Together, Heather and I started a journey and in this blog we would like to share our story.

Heather Vivian in the classroom
Heather Vivian in the classroom

Last summer, I had any opportunity to participate in a summer curriculum project for using performance-based assessments in the classroom. My state of Virginia recently mandated performance-based assessments, so we are all anxious to learn as much as possible about them. Since some of my students do not perform well on multiple-choice type assessments, I was excited to learn about performance-based assessments as an alternative approach. Through this new curriculum project, I was introduced to the C3 Framework inspired Inquiry Design Model (IDM). I was excited, but realistic. I knew that my students would need lots of support to complete the style of inquiry that is suggested by IDM. I kept wondering to myself, how am I going to help my students to work with sources and answer the kind of questions that drive an inquiry? I knew that students would need lots of scaffolds to work with the sources typically featured in these inquiries. But, I was undaunted, and in collaboration with Heather, we came up with what we think is a pretty solid approach. In our next post, we share the strategies we developed for an inquiry on global trade.