Strategies For Students With Severe Disabilities

In the educational world, there are countless programs, curricula, strategies, manipulates, and resources for teachers to pull from in order to aide in the teaching of concepts and learning of students. Whatever method(s) a school or district has deemed best practice, or adopted as their curriculum, tend to be the instructional practices or resources utilized the most by those teachers. Additionally, teachers will also have preference to teaching styles, resources, and materials they use for their students. While autonomy in any classroom is important to students’ academic growth, one must also be careful to select and implement instructional with great intention and purpose. Consideration to students needs is equally important as the mandate of teaching standards and demonstrating proficiency amongst students. Even when teaching non-disabled students, it can be time consuming and overwhelming to plan lessons so just how much more is involved when planning for students with significant disabilities (SD)? Better yet, what are appropriate instructional strategies to use for students with SD? Regardless of the instructional setting, these are considerations that must be given when teaching students with SD in order to maximize their learning opportunities to learn

From your perspective, what exactly, are we talking about when we say “special education curriculum”? At first I was a little confused about this question. I was thinking about special education curriculum in the terms of an adaptive curriculum. After reading the articles form this module and locating my own article, “special education curriculum” refers to what educators are doing to make the general education curriculum accessible to students with disabilities. Although there have been many changes related to the education of students with disabilities, there is still a noticeable gap in achievement between students without disabilities and students with disabilities (Aron & Loprest, 2012).

With every classroom you are able to see a dynamic between students and their teacher. It takes a strong teacher to really make everything accessible to all students including student with learning disabilities. The class that I watched was Christina Hilliker’s second grade. The disabilities that were part of this great dynamic were Downs, Autism, ADHD, auditory processing and behavior issues that cause learning difficulties.

Note* other States and Territories within the Commonwealth have separate legalisations and Acts which have been passed in by their representing government.

All students in the study maintained the newly learned skill 2 weeks later regardless of which strategy was used. Not only did this video show the importance of using task analysis and visual supports with students with intellectual disabilities, but it also showed the importance of teaching for generalization and maintenance from school to other environments. As noted by Heward (2009), community-based instruction is an excellent way for students to increase likelihood of the generalization and maintenance of a new skill. Once simulation training is done in the classroom, teaching in the actual setting with real stimuli helps students become more independent. It is also important that skills are taught and practiced over and over with feedback that is, “specific, immediate, positive, frequent and differential” (Heward, 2009).

This essay presents research-based instructional strategies commonly used in classrooms for students with intellectual disabilities. Students with intellectual disabilities learn differently and slower than students without intellectual disabilities. They have trouble learning in school and trouble with everyday life skills. However, they can learn and do learn when taught with the best practices, instructional strategies and principles as presented in this essay.

I do believe that general education students, who want to participate in extracurricular activities, should be held accountable for their GPA. Participating in these activities is a luxury and should be treated as such. For students with disabilities, however, I think that their participation in these extracurricular activities should be based on the individual student. In my opinion, it is hard to group all of the students with disabilities under one large umbrella GPA, especially with the numerous amounts of disabilities that the students are facing. Instead, I believe that the student’s intellectual ability should be taken into account with the students with disabilities. For example, if a student with a specific learning disability has

Bottge, Kwon, LaRoque, Rueda, & Serlin (2007) looked at the use of Enhanced Anchored Instruction (EAI) to help boost problem solving skills of students with disabilities in the area of math. EAI immerses students directly in problems that are delivered in a combination of multimedia and hands-on contexts (Bottge et al. 2007). EAI contains three main parts, probing questions by the teachers to guide student understanding, students working together in small groups to discuss and find solutions to problems, and explicit instruction on skills and concepts by the teachers as the students need them. During this particular study of EAI on math instruction, 100 students were divided into groups. One group received math instruction using EAI methods while the other group received instruction using the teachers’ typical methods. A pre-test was administered to both groups to gain a baseline of math experience and knowledge. The math instruction using the EAI method used a video anchor to enhance instruction. The use of technology in EAI provides students with learning disabilities access to a wide range of math tasks that previously were unattainable due to learning deficits (Maccini & Strickland, 2010). The video gave students a visual representation of the types of math problems they were working

The third research sub-question in this study described special education teachers’ instructional strategies for using the iPad as an instructional tool to enhance the teaching and learning process for elementary learners with intellectual disabilities. Students with intellectual disabilities poses a vast range of challenges to special education teachers when using the iPad as an instructional tool to enhance the teaching and learning process in classrooms. Using the iPad as an instructional tool to enhance the teaching and learning process for students with intellectual disabilities requires many teaching strategies, most of which are chosen through trial and error. The answer to this final research sub-question was well-versed specifically in theme one: desire for knowledge and theme two: desire for support and guidance.

Students with learning disabilities often experience more motivational problems than their peers, and by teaching goal setting, students will have access to a strategy they can use to achieve greater motivation and success. The researcher expects the participants to experience increased motivation and self-efficacy, and improved performance in the areas of reading, math, and behavior after learning how to set short-term goals for themselves. If the goal setting strategy proves to be effective, the strategy will be continued beyond the time of the study.

According to Instruction of Students with Severe Disabilities (1993) by Martha Snell and Fredda Brown, there is no single definition of severe disabilities. The 2004 Individuals with Disabilities in Education Improvement Act, or IDEIA does not include a category for severe disabilities (Ryndak and Taub, 2014). Nevertheless, throughout professional research, the term severe disabilities is used liberally. Therefore, researchers must establish their interpretation and definition of severe disabilities, to effectively eliminate reader misunderstanding. While severe disabilities are not specifically defined in federal legislation, according to IDEIA, a student is said to have multiple disabilities if he or she has many combined exceptionalities that will cause the child to require accommodations in multiple areas (Ryndak and Taub, 2014).

The aspect of education that I have chosen is Classrooms. The reason I chose to do disabilities within a classroom is because I believe that there are a various amount of disabilities within a classroom which are not noticed as much as they should. It also gives everyone an insight off the different types of disabilities within a classroom as we have all once been sat in a classroom and whilst being sat in the classroom.

As educators of students with a wide range of abilities, teachers realize the enormity of their role, to cater for, instruct and guide all students within the classroom. While there will always be students who need remediation and specialized learning programs specific to their particular situation. What research has highlighted, is that there many effective teaching principles, methods, and practice that can be applied to support and teach students with numeracy difficulties

There were two instructional approaches, Enhanced Anchored Instruction (EAI) and text-based instruction (TBI), compared in this study. Both teaching methods were used to teach sixth-grade middle school students how to solve math problems in technology, special education classes and math classrooms.The purpose of this study was to compare the students math achieves in different academic settings regardless of a disability.

Throughout my years at Lehigh, I have proclaimed that I have a passion to teach, to show students that mathematics is not difficult, and that they are able to understand mathematics. However, when it came to special education students, my philosophy changed, due to their learning disability. I was ignorant to the special education movement of inclusion, because I feared the idea of teaching students who were not “normal”.