Raven's Guide to Special Education: Teaching

Teaching - 2

Planning | How to start teaching | Organizing instruction
Presenting lessons | Specific methods | How to motivate

Specific teaching methods

Teaching expectations. What you expect of students will affect how well or how poorly they perform in your classroom. To maintain positive expectations for your students, consider the following:

Give them adequate time to answer your questions, and give them cues that will help them answer correctly.
Criticize their answers but do not criticize them.
Give them questions that will bring out their opinions and ideas.
Reward them for improved performance and effort.
Include all students in whole class activities and reinforce positive peer interactions.

Learning how to learn. This method teaches students study skills, such as organizing, note-taking, questioning, summarizing, and generalizing. Start by having the students select an appropriate learning strategy before they begin an assignment. Monitor them during the assignment, and then check the results of their work to decide if the strategy worked. The following steps summarize the method:

Identify the strategies the students fail to use to complete assignments, for example, taking notes, writing well-organized paragraphs, or using a dictionary.
Decide which strategy to teach them, then describe it to them and the reasons it is important for them to learn.
Break down the strategy into its basic steps and go through each step with them.
Have them explain the steps orally, practice the strategy using simple materials, and then practice with classroom materials.
Test them to see if they have mastered the strategy.
Have them try the strategy in other classrooms and then report back to you on the outcome.
Periodically review the strategy with them to ensure they are using it correctly.

Direct instruction is provided by the teacher to the student. It focuses on what the teacher, rather than the students, should be doing during instruction. It emphasizes teaching specific skills required for academic tasks, increasing correct student responses, and measuring progress to decide if you should modify what you are teaching. Consider the following lesson strategies:

Tell the students the objectives of the lesson, and describe the activities they will have during the lesson. Review any previous day's activities that were relevant to the current lesson.
Demonstrate the lesson by giving several examples of each concept you present. Then have the students discuss the concept while working on a task to develop the concept. Have them explain and justify the methods they use while working on the lesson. Ask questions and give prompts to help them focus on the task.
Monitor their work and help them correct their mistakes. Have them repeatedly practice the correct learning strategies associated with the concepts you are teaching.

Mastery learning is based on the assumption that all students can learn the basic curriculum (or a curriculum modified according to their disabilities) although some students may take longer than others. The steps in this approach are as follows:

Analyze the content of the curriculum for an academic area, such as math or social studies, and organize the content into two-week teaching units.
Divide the units into learning objectives, and make tests to measure mastery of the objectives.
Teach the students each unit, have them study it, then test them for at least 80 percent mastery of the unit's content.
Give enrichment activities for students who pass the test and corrective help for those who do not pass.
Retest the students after you have given them additional instruction and study.

Cooperative learning. This method emphasizes cooperation rather than competition by having students work on learning activities in small groups and receive grades or rewards based on the group's performance. This approach helps students depend on one another in positive ways. It also teaches them individual accountability and how to work together to get a job done. Successful cooperative learning activities involve the following steps:

Explain the learning activity, the materials needed, and what the students must do to accomplish it.
Make sure they understand your reasons for having them do the activity and what you expect them to accomplish.
Place students in different learning groups based upon how well you think they will work together.
Monitor each group and, when needed, answer questions and help them work effectively with one another.

Peer tutoring. You can use the following procedures to ensure positive results when you have students tutor other students:

Give academic tasks that are well structured and that require simple rather than complex responses.
Involve different students in tutoring so that a student with academic problems is not singled out as being different.
Pair students so they will get along with each other and stay on task.

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