I am a student in my methods courses at Salisbury University and will begin my student teaching next semester. I am currently taking a class called Education for the Mildly Handicapped and I have a question. As a new teacher, how do I treat the inclusion kids versus the kids without disabilities? Do I slow down the pace of my class to accomodate the few or do I teach for the good of the rest of the class? Please give me advice, for I will be needing it shortly!!
Thank you
Re: teaching kids with disabilities
Thank you for the pointers, I will be sure to keep them in mind when planning my lessons in the future! This is all very new to me and any advice is welcome.
-Roxanne
Your message assumes that children with learning disabilities learn more slowly than other children. That’s not true. Children with learning disabilities learn differently than other children.
You don’t need to slow your kids down. You need to include methods and approaches and lessons that include the children with learning differences. You need to make modifications to the curriculum so that the tasks asked of children are within their learning profile. You need to make accomodations in how you test them to gain a fair assessment of what they know.
There are some basic dos and don’ts that help inclusion teachers.
Read Mel Levine’s Educational Care for a thorough treatment of how best to work with children with learning differences.
Until then basic dos and don’t would be:
Don’t make children copy long notes from the board as it burdens children with writing differences.
Don’t use textbooks that are too often incomprehensible for children with reading differences.
Allow them to word process and use Spellcheck.
Don’t set time limits on tasks as children with learning differences can use more time than other children to complete tasks.
Don’t lecture. Plan hands-on activities.
Don’t assign great amounts of homework as completing it may take a child with learning differences a great portion of their evening.
Good luck.