How to Teach Adults?

Adults entering a new learning environment bring with them a variety of backgrounds and experiences, needs and abilities, concerns and motivations. Educators and trainers must be able to accommodate these adult learners in their instructional environment and help them to achieve their goals. The courses in this certificate program will give educators and trainers the skills necessary for meeting the needs of adult learners as well as provide them with a deeper awareness and understanding of the special needs education issues involved in adult learning.

Any teacher, instructor, educator, or trainer who presents information to adults will benefit from completing this program. This includes, but is not limited to, individuals who conduct training sessions in their workplace, computer instructors who have all the technical skills but lack teaching abilities, college instructors who are knowledgeable in their subject but again who lack teaching skills, individuals who deliver presentations or present seminars, and anyone who is interested in the field of adult education.

Not only will participants of this program learn valuable teaching skills and instructional strategies to facilitate adult learning, but they will also gain recognition as trained adult educators which could lead to a promotion in their workplace.

Hyperactive Children

Rather than use Ritalin, we opted to have our son, now 11 involved in intensive sports activities. In addition, he was an adopted special needs child with behavior problems which involved oppositional defiance. We also have him involved in an alternative school where the concentration has been on finding his good qualities and looking past all his problems to find them.  They still work on his behavior but work on his academics as well. However, there is also an obvious respect given to him which he did not get in a regular school. This has in itself made a lot of difference.

In school, he is now in class with 14 year olds. This has already improved his behavior. This simple solution could not have happened in a regular school. One good sport to have him involved in has been judo. It is very physical, very intense, and requires constant movement. Also, the instructors will tolerate no nonsense. It has also helped him a great deal to focus. He is now involved in a number of tournaments which require him to focus all day long on the sport of judo.

As part of the alternative school, there is also a lot of involvement in Special Olympics. This has put our son on the skiing team, the swimming team, etc. For him, the more physical activity, the better! We still have to monitor his special needs education activities and his behavior, but the improvement has been quite noticeable.

How to provide child care for children with special needs?

As of January 1992, the national Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) require all child care programs to make reasonable efforts to accommodate children with disabilities. Unless doing so would be excessively difficult or expensive or would change the basic nature of the program, every child care program is required by law to admit and serve disabled children in a way that meets their particular needs. The following are some examples of such services:

Making a schedule change for a child who takes medication and/or naps in the morning; Having staff who are trained in sign language, or hiring an interpreter; Putting signs in Braille on the personal belongings of a child who is blind; Removing physical barriers which block access to the program by disabled children or offering alternative means of access, if this can be done without a great deal of difficulty or expense

The Health Department offers the following suggestions to prevent errors in the administration of medication: The first dose of any medication should be given at home. Read the label carefully before giving any medication.  Bottles often look the same.  Make sure that you have the right child and the right medication and that all the instructions match. An accurate measuring spoon should be used.  Avoid using unmarked teaspoons or tablespoons.  Do not administer medication through a baby’s bottle. Wash your hands before and after giving medication. Also need to take care in the special needs education.

Safeguards for Children with Special Needs

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Medicaid managed care services for children with special needs, focusing on the: (1) extent to which states are enrolling children with special needs, as defined by the Balanced Budget Act (BBA), in capitated managed care plans; and (2) scope and effectiveness of the safeguards states are implementing to ensure that children with special needs receive appropriate care within Medicaid managed care.

GAO noted that: (1) following the general trend of serving more Medicaid beneficiaries through managed care delivery systems, many states are enrolling a range of children considered to have special needs education in capitated managed care programs; (2) however, the number of children involved is uncertain, because many of the states could not readily report the number of affected children; (3) the 36 states GAO surveyed enroll some or all of the BBA categories of children in capitated managed care: (a) 14 states mandated enrollment; (b) 11 states allowed families to make a choice between capitated managed care and some form of fee-for-service coverage; and (c) another 11 states had both mandatory and voluntary enrollment for children in different categories or in different parts of the state;

(4) of the 6 categories of children with special needs identified by the BBA, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) children are the most likely to be enrolled in capitated plans; (5) between 1996 and 1999, the number of states enrolling SSI children in capitated health plans increased from 17 to 31; (6) Katie Beckett state plan children were the least likely to be enrolled; (7) adoption and implementation of safeguards for these children vary significantly across the 36 states GAO surveyed; (8) some types of safeguards have been more widely adopted by states than others; (9) 31 of the 36 states have at least one measure designed to ensure adequate pediatric provider capacity; (10) however, 18 states do not inform health plans of the presence of special needs when enrolling children, and 18 do not require health plans to conduct a needs assessment soon after enrollment; and (11) additionally, some safeguards may be less effective because states have made them optional rather than mandatory, have not adopted rigorous approaches in their design and use, or do not target the safeguard
specifically for children with special needs.

Inclusion and the Benefits for Students

Each year the reg ed kids’ education has been considerably more diminished because of the inclusion of the sped kids.  Right now, we have 9/25 who is special needs kids in one class!  This is 36%. I tell the administration that this % is defeating the purpose of the inclusion classroom. They simply chastise me for “not wanting those kids in the classroom.” Anymore, I just shut up and let them pour the kids in. The quality classroom experience has been ruined for ALL kids, and I am powerless to do anything about it. I just have to try to contain the damage and squeeze out as much learning as I can for those kids who have not been classified as sped. The reg ed kids in the inclusion classroom do NOT get the same experience as their peers who have not been assigned to the inclusion class. I’d advise you to stay away from inclusion as long as you can for the sake of the reg ed kid. Someone needs to start caring about what has happened to them.

Inclusion is a strategy for the children with special needs education. Its success has been well documented for many children. Where school districts refuse to offer this option, they should find their way to court, quickly. However, inclusion is not an end all to be all strategy. Our children are unique individuals.

Speech Recognition for the Deaf

Speech to text in real-time is needed in the classroom and at meetings. At business meetings, this conversion is currently done by stenographers, the text typically being displayed to the deaf person on a VDU. Of course employing a stenographer is expensive, and cannot generally be afforded in the classroom. As you say ASR should be advantageous. However, most commercial ASR systems are sold for dictation purposes, or for command input, where the user can immediately correct and disambiguate. Nor is response time critical. Therefore such systems are not applicable in the classroom or meeting room.

Researchers at Cambridge* have developed real-time ASR with a tactile output. Tactile output has the advantage that the deaf person can be watching the lips of the talker at the same time as receiving tactile stimuli. The delay of ASR must not be more than a fraction of a second; otherwise the tactile stimuli will be too much out of synch with the lips. The researchers are using phonetic output rather than ascii. The system is still at a prototype stage I believe, without deaf user feedback as yet.

If a high enough accuracy can eventually be achieved, real-time ASR could be used by people who are deaf and blind, and who therefore cannot obtain reinforcement (i.e. validation, disambiguation or error correction) from lip reading. Real-time ASR is best with a single speaker who can “train” the system - so I would hope it could be applied in the classroom context where the single speaker might be a special needs education teacher – wearing a suitable microphone.

Training needed for Teachers in Special Needs Schools

Many teachers and other staff in regular classrooms are not trained or equipped to handle special needs children and often are denied help, even when it clearly violates the letter and the intent of federal law. Many special needs education do not employ a sufficient number of medical personnel to care for medically fragile children, and inclusion places these children in greater medical danger and inappropriately places increased responsibilities on untrained teachers and paraprofessionals. .

Even placements of special needs students in general classes is appropriate, P.L. 94-142 and IDEA entitle education staff to comprehensive training. Many regular classroom teachers are not being trained and in some instances are told by the school board that watching a video will suffice.

Teachers are extremely frustrated with the schools’ inability to effectively discipline disruptive special-needs students. Moreover, inclusion is placing too many special needs students in one classroom who have disabilities far beyond the regular classroom teacher’s abilities to cope.

Aims of SchoolNet

SchoolNet aims to enhance educational opportunities and achievements in elementary and secondary schools across Canada by making national and international education resources available to Canadian teachers and students no matter where they are located. The SNE White Pages will contribute to this effort by developing National and International directories of resources related to special needs education.

The Special Needs Education Network also recognizes that educational planning for students with special needs is very individualized in nature, and that many essential learning needs are directly related to the particular community in which a client resides. In response to these needs the SNE is developing a model for multi-disciplinary networking at the community level, the Ottawa-Carleton SNE Community Project (O-CSCP). One of the first initiatives of the O-CSCP will be the building of an O-CSCP White Pages directory, which will allow users to efficiently locate local services related to the education of children with special needs.

Community Oriented Education: International Management Program

I would like to bring to your attention a unique opportunity for professionals in the field of Education and Community Development. Galillee College, the leading management institute in Israel, is holding a special international training program: Management of Community Oriented Education.

This course, which is designed to fulfill the special needs education criteria, utilizes professionals and community activists with career goals in improving primary and secondary education and community development. Tuition scholarships are available for candidates from Developing and transitional countries worldwide.

The program includes lectures, workshops, and study tours, enabling participants to gain further knowledge in their professional field and learn from the Israeli experience, while networking and exchanging knowledge with colleagues from other countries world-wide. We can have lots of visits to physios, hospital visits, talk of drugs, then later possibly special needs education in nursery school

It is good that you got a positive assessment to present in response to additional information.  Hopefully the opinion addressed issues such as likely costs in terms of hospitalization, medication, treatment, therapy and prospect for development.

FUNDING FOR PRIVATE SPECIAL SCHOOLS

Once these schools start getting Federal money you are opening the question of if they can or cannot violate Constitution provisions on equality. Private Universities accept Federal contracts these contracts come with a number of strings attached. When Federal money always demanded that we comply with a state drug free policy (which we all opposed as essential unjust and unconstitutional) our department had to follow strict policies concerning gender and race of new graduate students, and the entire University was now liable and could have its books checked by Federal investigators at any and all time.

A voucher system would open private high schools for special needs education to the same level. The Catholic schools system (the largest private system) would either have to accept non-Catholics or not get the money. In most urban areas the private schools that can service poorer children are almost all Catholic. In Chicago the vast majority of private schools being Catholic would elect to have nothing to do with a program which would inevitably invite government investigation and control. They pay they make the rules. The few private schools that existed that could service working class people and would be willing to do so (most would not take underperforming children for a voucher) are already filled with enough students and plenty on scholarship.