Demographics
I teach at River Terrace Education Campus, a Title I public school in Washington, D.C., where I previously served as an English Language Learner (ELL) teacher and will be transitioning into the role of Reading Specialist. River Terrace serves a diverse population of multilingual learners and students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, complex communication needs, and medical fragility. Every student receives special education services through an Individualized Education Program (IEP), and many come from multilingual and immigrant families whose languages, cultures, and lived experiences enrich our school community.
My students bring tremendous strengths to the classroom, but they also demonstrate considerable variability in how they access, process, and communicate information. Reading comprehension, expressive language, executive functioning, and background knowledge vary widely, requiring instruction that is both highly scaffolded and intellectually rigorous. Many students benefit from explicit vocabulary instruction, visual supports, predictable routines, repeated practice, and opportunities to engage with content through multiple modalities. These supports are not designed to lower expectations. They provide equitable access to the kind of historical inquiry that all students deserve.
These instructional realities shaped every aspect of this curriculum unit. Rather than relying primarily on traditional textbooks, students investigate history through photographs, maps, artwork, oral histories, memoirs, poetry, government documents, and other primary and secondary sources. They learn to analyze these materials like historians by asking who created each source, whose perspectives are represented, what evidence is presented, and what questions remain unanswered.
Although this curriculum was designed with multilingual learners and students with intellectual disabilities in mind, its instructional principles benefit all learners. By embedding accessibility into every lesson, the unit demonstrates that rigorous historical thinking is not reserved for a select group of students. When provided with meaningful scaffolds and authentic opportunities to investigate the past, all students can analyze evidence, construct historical interpretations, and participate in thoughtful conversations about fairness, identity, community, and belonging.
Comments: