Special Education Within CMP
Examples of Classroom Materials
Special Education Within CMP
Connected Mathematics can be and has been successfully implemented in classrooms that include special education students. We believe that Connected Mathematics provides all students, even those with special needs, with opportunities to engage in cooperative learning, to take leadership roles, and to enhance self-esteem and self-acceptance.
Making Accommodations
Some may claim CMP offers more of a challenge for special education students due to its language- based curriculum; however, many suggestions by researchers in the field of special education for assisting in making mathematics accessible to special needs students are already incorporated within the CMP curriculum. The CMP Special Needs Handbook for Teachers contains a wealth of samples of accommodated materials. Further accommodations will most likely still need to be made for special education students. Those accommodations should come from each students' Individual Education Program (IEP) and additional accommodations that you, as a teacher, feel are beneficial to the students you serve.
Please keep in mind that the guidelines in the Special Needs Handbook are suggestions. Not all suggestions are applicable for every student, nor will every suggestion work for all students. It is important to have good communication with your students' special education teacher and other providers, as well as his/her parents to enable that the maximum benefit from learning is being carried through.
Embedded Special Needs Strategies
The curriculum of the Connected Mathematics Project is already embedded with many of the strategies that researchers and practitioners indicate as beneficial to special education students. The conceptual framework upon which CMP is built involves sound teaching principles and practices for students, which is essentially the same foundation for working with special education students. To begin with, CMP was developed with the belief that calculators should be made available to students, which aligns with many accommodations that special education students are given in terms of calculator use. Furthermore, the CMP curriculum involves manipulatives. While it is stressed within the framework of CMP that manipulatives are to be used only when they can help students develop an understanding of mathematical ideas, it should be clear that special needs students may need to use the manipulatives to help develop their understanding more often than general education students.
CMP uses real-life problems, a pedagogical technique repeatedly stressed in reaching special education students in mathematics classrooms. An emphasis on significant connections, which are meaningful to students, among various mathematical topics and between mathematics and problems in other disciplines, assisted in guiding the development of CMP. Maccini and Gagnon (2000) demonstrated that the embedding of problems within real world contexts improves the motivation, participation, and generalization for special education students.
Other practices that help to facilitate teaching mathematics to students with special needs already within the framework of the Connected Mathematics Project include: repetition and review, keeping expectations high, teaching conceptual knowledge, and cooperative or group activities. The student materials of CMP enable repetition and review. The ACE section at the end of every Investigation allows students to tackle additional exercises from the unit as well as to work on problems that are connected to earlier units. Furthermore, the end of each book includes a Looking Back and Looking Ahead section, which summarizes through problems the learning students have completed in the particular Unit, and also connects it to earlier units.
The Connected Mathematics Project holds high expectations for its students-all of its students. This belief is reflected in the ideology and the overarching standard of the curriculum:
All students should be able to reason and communicate proficiently in mathematics. They should have knowledge of and skill in the use of the vocabulary, forms of representation, materials, tools, techniques, and intellectual methods of the discipline of mathematics. This knowledge should include the ability to define and solve problems with reason, insight, inventiveness, and technical proficiency.
CMP teaches conceptual knowledge and skill. As in the above definition, skill means not only proficiency, but also the ability to use mathematics to make sense of situations. CMP helps students to understand the methods, algorithms, and strategies they use.
Cooperative Learning Groups Connected Mathematics provides opportunities for students to work in small groups and pairs, as well as whole class, or individually. Research in the field suggests that cooperative groups can be beneficial to special education students; however, some attention should be paid to the groupings to ensure that students with special needs are able to actively participate. Merely placing a student within a group does not result in that student becoming a part of the group. While studies have shown that cooperative learning has positive benefits on students' motivation, self-esteem, cognitive development, and academic achievement, the very dynamic of these learning methods may exclude special education students due to their disparities in skills, such as knowledge of content, communication, and social skills (Brinton, Fujiki, & Montague, 2000). In discussing the structure of cooperative groups, researchers stress the importance of providing opportunities for children with special needs (or any diverse learners) to actively participate.
Examples of Classroom Materials
For each Investigation in CMP2, the Special Needs Handbook contains a sample modification of an ACE exercise. Taken together, these nearly 100 samples illustrate the wide variety of accommodation techniques that may be applied to individual students as needed.
ACE Accommodation
The Special Needs Handbook also contains a sample modification of one assessment tool for each CMP2 Unit.
Check- UP Modification
