PROJECT Bace: Curriculum & Instructional Practices
Where Structure Meets Success and Independence Blossoms
Transform your life skills classroom with a curriculum designed to meet students exactly where they are - and guide them toward where they can be. The Curriculum & Instructional Practices strand offers specialized educators a roadmap for nurturing independence in students with cognitive disabilities, intellectual delays, and autism through evidence-based approaches that actually work in real classrooms.
This strand empowers teachers with practical tools including SMART goal frameworks, learning trials that strengthen stimulus-response connections, and function-specific behavioral interventions. Physical wellness activities build confidence while community engagement opportunities allow for real-world skill application. Through consistent implementation, thoughtful planning, and data-driven decision making, educators create supportive environments where students gradually transition from dependence to independence - fading supports as students gain mastery and ultimately achieving greater autonomy in both classroom and community settings.
This strand empowers teachers with practical tools including SMART goal frameworks, learning trials that strengthen stimulus-response connections, and function-specific behavioral interventions. Physical wellness activities build confidence while community engagement opportunities allow for real-world skill application. Through consistent implementation, thoughtful planning, and data-driven decision making, educators create supportive environments where students gradually transition from dependence to independence - fading supports as students gain mastery and ultimately achieving greater autonomy in both classroom and community settings.
PROJECT Bace
What's in the Curriculum strand?
Curriculum Components
Structured Success
Structured Success focuses on developing essential life skills including vocational persistence, functional academics, conflict resolution strategies, and effective communication techniques. The content emphasizes creating supportive environments where skills like persistence are recognized and rewarded, while teaching practical approaches to conflict management through negotiation, compromise, and appropriate help-seeking. Communication instruction covers both verbal and non-verbal elements, including "I" statements, active listening, body language, and facial expressions, all designed to help individuals maintain appropriate behavioral repertoires for long-term success.
Identifying and Setting Goals
Goal Getters
Goal Getters focuses on developing essential life skills through effective communication strategies, goal-setting using the SMART framework, and empowering students to take charge of their own learning. The content emphasizes building physical health through fitness activities while fostering self-confidence and positive associations with physical wellbeing. The module also promotes community engagement through organized field trips to local parks and recreation centers, providing students with opportunities to apply their newly acquired skills in real-world environments.
Instructional Methods and Approaches
Learning Architecture
Learning Architecture presents a learning model centered on the critical relationship between stimuli and responses, emphasizing how these connections form the foundation of effective learning processes. Learning trials are presented as a key framework that distinguishes between correct and incorrect responses, with feedback serving as an essential mechanism for reinforcing desired learning outcomes. The instructional content highlights repetition and contrast as fundamental pedagogical techniques that strengthen learning by providing multiple opportunities for practice while clarifying distinctions between concepts.
Prompting, Proximity, Shaping, and Fading to Promote Independence
Fade to Freedom
Fade to Freedom focuses on behavioral intervention strategies that shift away from reliance on negative behaviors for interaction toward fostering more positive and structured means of connection. The content appears to address function-specific interventions related to attention and includes reinforcement techniques with surveys for identifying effective auditory and visual reinforcers. Success with these behavioral strategies depends on consistent implementation, thoughtful planning, and ongoing data collection to guide decision-making.