Essay On Supporting Children With Disabilities

Before planning how to support a student with severe and profound disabilities in my classroom, I need to first educate myself about the student and his/her disability. Without the knowledge about whom the students are and their needs that are needed to accomplish their goal is impossible to support the students. Once I am able to learn about my students, I will then start to plan different support to help the students achieve their potential as much as possible.

When working with students with disabilities you are faced with multiple challenges that make the task extremely difficult. Dealing with the day-to-day needs of this population, their parents, their paperwork, attending the meetings that go along with the job, can mean that there often isn’t a lot of time to interact with other students and teachers. It can be isolating and that can be hard. Limited operating budgets present additional challenges for special needs classes. You may have to do with fewer materials, and resources due to budget constraints. These challenges are all equally difficult and when combined, as they often are on a daily basis, almost impossible to juggle. There is the variablility of student’s needs; you will see students

As they initiated this six-week experiment, the experimenters started first with a two-week baseline test. Then two weeks when they adjusted the sound of the classroom and finally another two weeks when they adjusted the lighting. As they conduct this experiment they used the same children and monitored them throughout each class day. The experimenters also took responses from the students about how they felt after each adjustment. During the first sessions without any adjustment made in the classroom, several students reported discomfort due to the lights and the sound that was emitted from the classroom. After they took their responses and collected all their data they went into the classroom and installed, sound-absorbing walls and then halogen lighting. After the experimenters installed the needed modifications for the students they instantly noticed a difference. The children's attentiveness and their overall ability to

Involving parents is a positive level and essential to ensuring academic success. Family engagement confers benefits to all students, those with disabilities often require more parental involvement to be assured of receiving the same level of instruction as the general student population. Children with disabilities often face multifaceted classroom challenges requiring special attention from instructors and active engagement from their families. Who’s playing several supporting roles, as advocates and as people who can provide valuable insight into their specific needs of instructors

Children with disabilities show negative behavioral problems that disrupt class and students learning. This happens when parents are registering their child and choose not to inform the social worker of the child disability. Therefore, the staff cannot be informed of how to interact with the child until these behaviors are shown.

Lerner, J. & Johns, B. (2015) Learning Disabilities and Related Disabilities. Stamford: Cengage Learning. 432- 457

The Training for Parents/Guardians and Families of Children with Disabilities sessions provides support and training strategies to help reduce the stress, demands and challenges to successfully raise children with disabilities. The training sessions include a focus on techniques on parenting children with and without disabilities, keeping family balance and harmony in the home, and effective communication. Parents/guardians, siblings and other family members are taught how stress affects individual family members and the family unit, and techniques that can be used to work through difficult and stressful times.

Quite often, people with disabilities are treated as if they are retarded, child-like, or incapable of taking care of themselves. This is incorrect almost all the time! Most people with disabilities have or would like at least some degree of independence, and many disabilities have little or no effect on mental processing. There is a severe stereotyping problem with people with disabilities.

One way for teachers to support families is to try to understand what it would be like to raise a child with a disability. Imagine yourself as the parent in one of the three scenarios below:

Educators and parents sometimes have very different views on the education of their children and the best approaches to classroom process. Educational initiatives since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has led to increasing focus on providing parents with adequate data for decision-making and promoting positive parent/teacher interactions. For children with learning disabilities, the team approach based on interactions between parents and teachers is one of the most effective in addressing student needs.

Technology surrounds us everywhere we go, life without it is not even an option anymore. When you walk into restaurants you can now pay, order your food and even play games on a tablet at your table. Walking around a college campus, you see everyone sitting on their phone, now even elementary kids are learning with the help of an iPad or a tablet. Some schools have yet to find a fund to get the iPads in their classrooms. Using iPads in a classroom can help keep the students stay engaged, and learn in a fun way. Research has shown that iPads have increased kids testing scores dramatically. They help the school save money by not having to pay for books, paper, calculators, etc. Now that iPads hold all those materials needed. It gets the teachers engaged with how the students are learning, and doing class activities to get everyone more involved. Also, iPads have been a great benefit for children with disabilities. They have created apps for schools to download that help them with cognitive learning problems, and now iPads also have where they can read things to you. I think technology in the elementary schools would benefit the kids and teachers in many ways. We need to come to realize technology will take over, and adapt to the changes coming.

There is a numerous amount of disabled children and disabled students around the nation, who are in need of care. Most of them understand that receiving a good education is a key factor of happiness and success. At the same time, the issue of the importance of including disabled students to the schools for normal children is very questionable, and there are quite a few cons and pros.

It is incredibly important to always respect the feelings and rights of parents. Having been exposed to parent-educator interactions in new ways, I have seen first-hand that “listening to families is key in working with them as partners in supporting the learning and development of their child with special needs” (Ray, Pewitt-Kinder, George). Communication is crucial in creating respect and trust, sentiments that greatly ease the process of finding ways to best educate a child with special needs. The relationship that parents have with their children and the observations they make of their children outside the classroom makes them great resources; they ideas and knowledge that support educators in benefiting students to the best of their abilities.

"Education is one of the most effective ways to break the cycle of discrimination and poverty that children with disabilities often face." (Fund Education, Shape The Future, n.d.) There are approximately one billion people in the world who have a disability and 1/10 of these are children with 80% living in developing countries. These children are often excluded not only because they have a disability but also because of their lack of understanding and knowledge of how to accept themselves as a unique individual. Girls who have a disability are at a double disadvantage as they have to face traditional gender roles and cultural barriers in some countries. Because of this children with disabilities are less likely to start primary school let alone secondary school and getting a job. This is caused by schools denying the enrollment of a disabled child as they don't know how to teach or care for them. But because of this act, they have taken away a disabled child's right to education which will impact them in the future. This should be changed in policies that all students should participate including children with disabilities.

A child’s development through their learning experiences are critical in knowing where a child’s standpoint is throughout their proper development stages. It is important to know the variety of disabilities and their characteristics in order to ensure the best quality of education for each child. In Module 5, a chart was made for comparing and contrasting disability characteristics in regards to different disorders. The disorders illustrated within the chart were specific learning disabilities, social, emotional, behavioral disorders, and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The creation of this chart can assist a teacher in preparing individually appropriate lesson plans by knowing each of these disorders characteristics.