Guide
Understanding the Expanded Core Curriculum
The Expanded Core Curriculum empowers students with disabilities to access their education and make their own choices throughout life.
During a typical school day, Millie takes a full academic course load, which includes math, science, and social studies.
As a student with a visual impairment, though, her school day differs slightly from that of a public school student. On top of academics, Millie’s day is full of classes for building life skills — things like learning to use a white cane to get around with limited vision, performing household chores and other tasks for living independently, career education, and assistive technology.
This emphasis on life skill building is known as the Expanded Core Curriculum. Tailored to the needs of every individual student, the Expanded Core Curriculum is vital for setting children with visual impairments, including those with deafblindness and multiple disabilities, up for success after graduation.
Here’s what you need to know about the Expanded Core Curriculum, why it’s so important, and how you can advocate for a child in need — your own or one in your community.
What is the Expanded Core Curriculum?
The Expanded Core Curriculum is built around nine core components. Students take classes dedicated to building these skills, and teachers also build these skills into academic lessons.
Here are the nine key pieces at a glance:
1. Compensatory and functional academic skills, including communication modes
Compensatory skills are the skills students need to have to learn academic skills—students who are blind must learn braille, for example, to learn how to read. Other examples of compensatory skills include tactile symbols and sign language.
2. Orientation and Mobility
These classes help to orient children who are visually impaired to their surroundings and give them the travel skills they need to move independently and safely in their environment. Navigating with a white cane, trusting a sighted guide, and occasionally working with a guide dog all fall into the Orientation and Mobility category.
3. Social Interaction Skills
Since sighted children learn nearly all social skills by observing their environment and people, this area is where students with vision loss need careful, conscious, and explicit instruction. Things like circle time, where students learn concepts like sharing, are helpful for young kids. For teenagers, allowing time to just hang out with one another is vital.
4. Independent Living Skills
People who are visually impaired need to organize their daily lives in specific ways to live independently. This area includes people’s daily tasks and functions to optimize their independence — skills such as personal hygiene, food preparation, money management, and household chores.
5. Recreation & Leisure
Recreation and leisure skill building ensures students’ enjoyment of physical and leisure-time activities, including making choices about how to spend leisure time. This area includes keeping physically fit as well.
6. Career Education
Students with vision loss benefit most from an experiential learning approach. Structured visits to community sites and discussions with people who perform various jobs enable them to understand concepts and specific skills needed to succeed in those jobs. Considering the national unemployment rate or underemployment of working-age adults who are blind is disproportionately high, this area needs attention throughout the school years to help students with vision loss develop marketable job skills.
7. Assistive Technology
Assistive technology is a powerful tool that can empower students with vision loss to overcome some traditional barriers to independence and employment. Things like screen readers, for example, enable children who are visually impaired to access information online.
8. Sensory Efficiency Skills
These skills help students use the senses, including any functional vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, to access literacy and concept development skills.
9. Self-Determination
Becoming an effective advocate for themselves is critical for students with visual impairments and complex disabilities. Self-determination skills are developed based on a student’s needs and goals.
Why is the Expanded Core Curriculum so important?
The foundational skills children with disabilities need for daily school life, at home, and in the community must be strategically taught and integrated into all aspects of their education. The reason is simple: The payoff for this work lasts a lifetime.
Think of a student with disabilities who could grow up and be able to live truly independently. What do they need to succeed?
- A job
- The ability to advocate for any workplace accommodations
- The skills to get to and from work independently
- The skills to navigate the grocery store
- The ability to write a check or pay bills online
The Expanded Core Curriculum covers all that. And the curriculum’s focus is just as important for kids who need more intensive, lifelong support. They manifest differently.
For example, a graduate might go on to an assisted living facility, so they will need to know how to advocate and speak up for themselves in whatever manner best suits their abilities. In this case, a self-advocacy skill might be picking up a spoon to signal that they’re hungry.
No matter a child’s disability, building life skills as part of their formal education is all about setting students up to lead the most whole life possible after graduation. That’s critical for creating a truly inclusive world.
How to advocate for the Expanded Core Curriculum
Every child we serve on campus, throughout the country, and worldwide benefits from the Expanded Core Curriculum. However, many visually impaired students in public school systems are only receiving academic instruction. They need more than that.
For parents
If your child isn’t receiving Expanded Core Curriculum instruction, here’s how you can advocate for your child:
- Meet with your educational team and request a documented assessment of your child’s skills in each of the nine components of the Expanded Core Curriculum.
- This assessment should include their strengths and areas of weakness.
- Ensure your team updates your child’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP) team to create new goals per that assessment.
As a parent, you’re your child’s best advocate, and it’s your and your child’s right to start the conversation!
For other advocates
Getting involved with our work is the best way to ensure more children receive instruction in the Expanded Core Curriculum. We bring the Expanded Core Curriculum to millions of children daily, an effort made possible only by our community of friends and supporters.
