Innovative programs in special education Essay

Special education departments have introduced a variety of groundbreaking designs for children with sensory impairment ( deafenness, hard of hearing, and blindness). There has been a good subscribe to of success in opening access to regular school experiences to preadoles centime people with sensory impairments and in educating their peers about the special concerns for children who be deaf and/or blind. There is a supposeable body of evidence that modernistic designs for instruction drill and spell skills to children with disabilities should be both multi-sensory and ph matchlesstic and that this guinea pig of teaching privy benefit most children in any var. at most wooden legs.These be usu entirely(a)y schedules that ar highly bodily unified. They put forward be seen as essentially free-standing and bath form a aboriginal broker of the overall strategy for teaching children with disabilities. There be numerous much(prenominal) chopines, often they have a slightly different focus, with different types of materials and strategies but they all accommodate multi-sensory element and metacognitive aspects. The range of innovative course of studys for children with disabilities is impressive, and this drill allow succeed nigh of the various types of programs and strategies that can be employ in special education.Most innovative programs carry some or all of the following principles and mountes multi-sensory over- study and automaticity highly structured and usually phonically based concomitant and cumulative. Multi-sensory manners utilize all available senses simultaneously. This can be summed up in the phrase hear it, say it, see it and write it. These methods have been utilize for many an(prenominal) years and have been further refined by Hornsby and plume (1980) in phonic structured programs that incorporate multi-sensory techniques.Over- encyclopedism is deemed necessary for children with dyslectic difficulties. The short- and semipermanent keeping difficulties experienced by dyslexic children mean that goodish reinforcement and repetition is necessary. The structured firees evident in programs of work for children with disabilities usually provide a linear progression, thus enabling the learner to complete and check a particular skill in the workout or learning process to begin with advancing to a subsequent skill. This implies that learning occurs in a linear developmental manner.Although at that place is evidence from learning surmisal to suggest this whitethorn be the case, there is still some discredit in the case of meter reading that mastery of the component subskills results in good reading. In reading, a number of cognitive skills such as memory and ocular, auditory and oral skills interact. This fundamental interaction is the key feature so, it is authorised that the skills atomic number 18 taught together and purposefully with the practice of reading as the focus. Sequential approaches are usually allot for children with dyslexia beca habituate it may be necessary for them to master subskills forwards moving to more than than advanced materials.Hence a sequential and cumulative approach may non only provide a structure to their learning but alleviate to concur learning more pregnant and effective as sanitary. Programs based on the Orton-Gillingham approach have blend in a central focus for multi-sensory teaching (Hulme & Joshi 1998). The programs offer a structured, phonic-based approach that incorporates the total speech experience and focuses on the earn sounds and the blending of these sounds into syllables and haggling. The approach rests heavily on the interaction of ocular, auditory and kinaesthetic aspects of language.Orton-Gillingham lessons always incorporate card drills, spelling and reading and usually include activities such as card drills, word lists and phrases, oral reading selection, spelling of phonetic and no n-phonetic oral communication, handwriting, and composition. at a time the child has get the hang the earn name and sound, the program then advances to gateway of blending the garner and sounds. This begins with simple three-letter words and the child repeats the sounds until the word is utter without pauses betwixt the constituent sounds.The visual-kinesthetic and auditory-kinesthetic associations are formed by the pupil tracing, saying, write and writing each word. Reading of text begins after the pupil has mastered the conformable-vowel-consonant words to a higher automatic level (i. e. , when the pupil can recognize and use these words). The initial reading material is taken from the program and contains words the pupil has learnt from the instructors manual. The program gives parcel outable assist to the learning of dictionary skills as well as development of pen language from pictographs to ideographs and eventually to the first rudiment.The program does appear to be more desirable to a one-to-one situation, and it would be difficult to integrate the program deep mickle the school curriculum. As in many of the program derived from the Orton-Gillingham approach, the key principles of over-learning, automaticity and multi-sensory approaches are very apparent. In the USA, Morgan Dynamic Phonics have produced a serial publication of phonic programs that focus on user-friendly approaches employ the principles of Orton-Gillingham, which includes the use of humor and interaction (Hulme & Joshi 1998).The following programs are based on the Orton-Gillingham method Alpha to izzard, The Bangor Dyslexia inform arrangement, The Hickey Multisensory linguistic communication Course, Dyslexia A Teaching Handbook, Units of Sound. Letterland, developed by Lyn Wendon, lie ins of many different elements. The materials are extremely reclaimable for teaching reading, spelling and writing, and for growing and sustaining motivation. The programs are inte rnationally renowned, as well over 50 per cent of all primary schools in England and Ireland rely on this program (Gersten, Schiller & Vaughn 2000).Letterland encompasses a number of teaching elements based on recognized and essential components of the teaching of reading. The major elements are language, with an emphasis on listening, speaking and communicating phonic skills whole word recognition skills sentence awareness comprehension reading and spelling connections and preliminary skills in creative writing. The materials consist of teachers guides, wall-charts, code cards, flashcards, wordbooks, cassettes and song- books, photocopiable material, workbooks, games and elections, software, videos, and materials specifically designed for use at home.The program may withal be seen as a preventative approach, since it is appropriate for early intercession and may also facilitate the reinforcement of important developmental concepts in learning, such as object constancy. The Lett erland system essentially grew out of close observations of helplessness readers, and the materials reinforce the importance of a reading-for-meaning orientation to print (Gersten, Schiller & Vaughn 2000). Letterland focuses on letters and sounds, and by exploitation pictograms encourages children to appreciate letter stages and sounds, thereby reinforcing both mould and sound of letters and words.Integrated within this, however, are the programs and exercises on whole-word recognition, reading for meaning, spelling and creative writing. Spelling is not presented as a series of rules, but instead by a tier approach, focvictimization on the Letterland characters. Progress through the Letterland program is by a series of go. These steps can provide the teacher with choice and flexibility, and the program can be implemented to the whole class, in small groups or individually. There are a number of aspects about Letterland that provoke it useful for some children with specific le arning difficulties.These include the use of pictograms which can be particularly undecomposed to the learner with difficulties in phonological awareness and auditory skills. The use of the story approach to reading and spelling that encourages the processing of in orderion using long-term memory is particularly beneficial to dyslexic children whose short-term memory is mainly weak. The range of activities incorporating different approaches allows the learner to develop imagination and creativity in the use of letters and words.Other useful aspects include the focus on the context aspects of reading and the use of syntactic and semantic cues. Alpha to Omega is a phonetic, linguistic approach to the teaching of reading and can be used as a program or as resource material. It is highly structured and follows a logical pattern of steps that make headway the acquisition of phonological and language skills. There is an emphasis on learning the 44 phonemes from which all English words are composed. These consist of the 17 vowel sounds and the 27 consonant sounds.There is also an emphasis on the acquisition of language structure, focusing on content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) and impermanent words (prepositions and participles). There is, thence, an emphasis on using words in the context of a sentence. The program provides a highly structured format for the teaching of sentences and for grammatical structure. There are also three resultant and very useful activity packs designed for different stages. These packs provide appropriate back-up exercises to reinforce the teaching program.There is also an extremely useful program of learning gamesbefore Alphathat can be used with children on a lower floor five. These games are in a series of structured stages, are multi-sensory and set out to foster language development and other(a) pre-reading skills such as visual and auditory perception and discrimination, fine-motor control, spatial relationships and is sueledge of color, number and directions (Gersten, Schiller & Vaughn 2000). The Hickey Multisensory Language Course recognizes the importance of the need to learn sequentially the letters of the alphabet.The trey edition of The Hickey Multisensory Language Coursewas now incorporates aspects of the National Literacy strategy and the requirements of the Literacy Hour. The dyslexic child, however, will usually have some difficulty in learning and remembering the names and sequence of the alphabetic letters as well as understanding that the letters represent speech sounds that make up words. The program is based on multi-sensory principles and the alphabet is introduced using wooden or plastic letters the child can look at the letter, plectron it up, feel it with eyes open or closed and say its sound.Therefore, the visual, auditory and tactile-kinesthetic channels of learning are all being utilise with a common goal. These programs involve games and the use of dictionaries to help th e child become old(prenominal) with the order of the letters and the direction to go (e. g. , he needs to know that T comes before K), the letters in the first half(prenominal) of the alphabet and those letters in the second half. The alphabet can be further divided into personas, thus making it easier for the child to remember the section of the alphabet in which a letter appears, for example A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z.The Hickey language data track includes activities related to sorting and unified the capital, lower case, printed and written forms of the letters practicing sequencing skills with cut-out letters and shapes and practicing positioning of each letter in the alphabet in relation to the other letters (this involves determination missing letters and going backwards and forwards in the alphabet). The course also indicates the importance of recognizing where the accent falls in a word, since this distinctly affects the spelling and rhythm.R hyming games can be developed to encourage the use of accent by placing it on different letters of the alphabet. This helps to train childrens hearing to recognize when a letter has an accent or is distressed in a word. The course includes reading and spelling packs that focus on securing a relationship between sounds and symbols. This process begins with single letters and progresses to consonant blends, vowel continuations and then to complex letter groupings.The reading packs consist of a set of cards on one side, the lower case letter is displayed in bold with an upper case (capital) letter shown in the tail assembly right-hand corner in order to establish the link between the two letters. The reverse side of the card indicates a keyword that contains the sound of the letter with the actual sound combination in brackets. Rather than providing a visual image of the keyword, a space is left for the child to draw the image. This helps to make the image more meaningful to the chil d and also utilizes and reinforces visual and kinesthetic skills.The spelling pack is similar in structure to the reading pack. On the front of the card the sound made by the letter is displayed in brackets, while the back contains both the sound and the actual letter (s). Sounds for which there is a choice of spellings will in time show all the possible ways in which the sound can be made. cue words are also given on the back as a prompt, in case the child forgets one of the choices. Spelling is seen as being of prime importance by the authors of the program since they view it as an all round perceptual experience.This process involves over-learning and multi-sensory strategies. The Bangor Dyslexia Teaching Systemis a structured, sequential teaching program developed for teachers and speech and language therapists convoluted in supporting children with dyslexia. A useful aspect of this program is the partition between primary and secondary pupils. Although it is acknowledged tha t some secondary pupils are still beginning readers and need to go through the same initial stages of acquiring literacy as beginning readers in the primary school, the program makes some special provision and adaptations for secondary students.This helps to make the secondary material more age appropriate. The canonical philosophy of the program is not unlike that of other structured, phonic programs. It focuses on phonological difficulties and the problems dyslexic children have in master the alphabetic code. The program attempts to provide children with some competence, at the earliest stage possible, in recognizing and categorizing speech sounds. It is not possible for children to benefit from top down language experience approaches to reading if they have not mastered the basic principles of literacy. around of these principles, which the program for primary aged children focuses on, include the teaching of basic letter sounds and the structure of words, long vowels, common w ord patterns, irregular words, alphabet and dictionary skills, grammatical rules and silent letters. The program shares the same principles as that utilize by other similar programs for dyslexic children. It is highly structured and the teacher has to proceed systematically through the program. The aspect of over-learning is acknowledged to be important, and therefore revision of material already learnt occupies an important place in the implementation of the program.One of the difficulties inherent in following the principle of over-learning is the aspect of boredom, which may result from repetitive revision of material already learnt. This program acknowledges that colliery and suggests ways of overcoming it through the use of games and other adapted materials. The multi-sensory teaching element is also crucial in this program. Some of the exercises attempt to engage all the available senses simultaneously, thus acknowledging the accepted view that dyslexic children benefit fro m multi-sensory learning.The program also utilizes the particular benefits of mnemonics for dyslexic children as well as the persuasion of reading and spelling as an integrated activity. Some emphasis is also placed on further dyslexic children to use oral language to plan their work. It is felt that such verbalizations help children clarify their thoughts and planning before embarking on a course of action. The secondary component of the program provides useful advice on dealing with the problem of teaching basic literacy to older students.Some effort is made to ensure that the student is familiar with polysyllabic words in order that the potential for creative writing is not unduly restricted. At the secondary stage the aspect of reading for meaning is of heavy(p) importance in order to ensure sustained motivation. The Bangor Dyslexia Teaching System acknowledges this and suggests a range of techniques that can help to support the student through the decryption difficulty in o rder that maximum meaning and joyousness can be derived from the text.Such suggestions include supplying difficult words introducing the story and the books background and characters pointing out clues such as capital letters and titles encouraging fluency by reading from one full stop to the next omitting words that are difficult, thus encouraging the use of context to obtain meaning practice and reading rhymes and limericks that avail sound and syllable awareness. The key principles found in the majority of individualized programs for dyslexic children-multi-sensory techniques, automaticity and over-learning-are all found in the Alphabetic Phonics program.Additionally, the program recognizes the importance of breakthrough learning. Opportunities for discovery learning are found throughout this highly structured program. The program, which stems from the Orton-Gillingham multi-sensory approach, was developed in Dallas, TX, by Aylett Cox. Alphabetic Phonics provides reading in t he development of automaticity through the use of flash cards and over-learning through repetitive practice in reading and spelling until 95 per cent mastery is achieved. The program also incorporates opportunities to develop creativity in expression and in the sequencing of ideas.DISTAR (Direct statement System of Teaching Arithmetic and Reading) was originally designed for socially disadvantage children in the USA as part of the Project Follow by means of scheme launched by the US government in 1968 (Hulme & Joshi 1998). The program is oriented to achievement in basic attainments and tasks and skills to arouse effective learning. Some of the features of DISTAR include the transfer of learning from specific examples to general concepts continual, positive reinforcement to enhance motivation and success and the monitoring of progress through the use of banner referenced assessment.In addition to reading skills, the current DISTAR program covers language, spelling and arithmetic . Evaluation studies display impressive progress in attainments among students undertaking the DISTAR program results that appear to continue through to secondary education. Some criticism, however, has been raised that the teachers manual is too prescriptive and places too much lying-in on teachers. The focus of the program on transferring skills from the specific to the underlying general task concepts is, indeed, commendable and can make the DISTAR materials a useful resource. iii recent studies trained phonological awareness in children with reading disabilities using the Lindamood Auditory Discrimination in Depth program ( tally), a method that first encourages awareness of the articulation of speech sounds. Two studies used no control groups, but reported good progress for students who had made small(a) progress with other programs. The third study used matched groups of children with severe reading disability at a private school.The control group authoritative the schools well-reputed program, which included auditory training and strategies for encoding and decoding written symbols. The trained group spent 6 weeks learning work before merging it with the regular program. All children improved substantially by the end of the year. The ADD group did not gain significantly more than controls on standardized tests of reading and spelling, although trends favored the ADD group. Compared to controls, ADD children did make significantly greater improvement in the phonetic quality of their errors in spelling and nonsense word reading.Besides being a well-structured phonemic-awareness program, the ADD approach holds theoretical interest because of its strong emphasis on exploitation concrete articulatory (speech-motor) representations to distinguish phonemic differences. The program includes associating articulatory labels, pictures, letters, and sounds, and using these articulatory concepts in phonological awareness work and manipulating letters and sound s in reading and spelling exercises. This work described some of the innovative programs that may be utilized in special education. The programs are logical and consist of small steps.They also incorporate elements of all the modalitiesvisual, auditory, kinesthetic and tactile. Teaching is not only about providing information, but about accessing useful and transferable skills as wellfor example, phonological awareness skills can be later transferred and utilized in writing skills. Essentially, the approaches involve thinking about thinking and the learners with disabilities consider how a particular response was arrived at. Children with disabilities is a whole-school concern, and not just the function of individual teachers.Innovative programs require an established and accessible policy role model for consultancy, whole-school screening and monitoring of childrens progress. It is important to consider the rationale for using particular programs and strategies. Within the areas d escribed here of individualized learning, support approaches and strategies, assisted learning and whole-school approaches, there are many effective means of dealing with disability. Therefore, the criteria for selectionthe context, the assessment, the curriculum and the learnermust be carefully considered.It is important to link programs and strategies together because, while there are a considerable number of well-evaluated and effective commercially produced programs in special education, it is very rarely that the program can be used by untrained teachers. eve if a program has clear instructions, there is some skill connected to implementing such programs. Therefore, the teacher needs to be aware of strategies that can be used to reinforce the program and to evaluate the effectiveness of the learning that can take place through the use of the program.One of the main challenges set about teachers is the need to find varied approaches to learning that will motivate children an d will provide the key elements that the child requires as well. If the child does not act to a structured program, the teaching program should then be reevaluated. This would help to decide whether it is the most appropriate program to use. It is also important to consider other factors as the child may not be responding because she or he may only need a longer flow rate to achieve the objective of the program. References Gersten, R. , Schiller, Vaughn, S. (2000).Contemporary Special Education Research Syntheses of the experience Base on Critical Instructional Issues. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Mahwah, NJ. Hulme, C. , Joshi, M. (1998). Reading and Spelling reading and Disorders. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Mahwah, NJ. Hornsby, Shear. (1980). Alpha to Omega. Heinemann Educational Books. London. Lindamood, P. , Bell, N. , & Lindamood, P. (1997). Achieving competence in language and literacy by training in phonemic awareness, concept imagery and comparator function. In C. Hulme & M. Snowling (Eds. ), Dyslexia Biology, cognition and intervention (pp. 212234). London Whur.