EDSPX505.IWL - Instruction with Learners Who Experience Significant Multiple Disabilities
Course Description
Number of Credits: 1
Over three, 2-hour sessions in this course, you will examine three primary areas: adaptations for facilitating academic instruction, addressing learners’ challenging behaviors, and supporting paraprofessionals who work with learners who experience significant multiple disabilities. Participants will gain knowledge and skills for more adequately and effectively supporting these learners in general education classrooms and other interactions with their peers who are typically developing.
Session 1: Identifying Appropriate Adaptation Strategies to Support Academic Learning
This first session will present the curriculum and instruction approach introduced by Michael Giangreco and his colleagues in COACH: Choosing Outcomes and Accommodations for Children: A Guide to Educational Planning for Students with Disabilities. The presenter will briefly discuss educational accommodations and modifications in general, as well as explain the major elements and five instructional levels introduced in COACH. Participants will interact to identify possible instructional activities appropriate for each level/type of teaching included in the COACH structure.
Session 2: Creating Support Strategies for Managing Challenging Behaviors from an Instructional Perspective
The second session in this series will focus on learners’ challenging behaviors. The presenter will discuss the “management” of challenging behaviors from an instructional perspective—that is, how to teach both educational team members and the learners, themselves, to recognize behavioral triggers and shape more desirable behaviors. The presentation will include examination of the “Incredible 5-Point Scale,” originally introduced by classroom teacher, Kari Dunn Buron.
Session 3: Providing Appropriate Supports for Paraprofessionals Who Work with Learners Who Experience Significant Multiple Disabilities
In the final session of this series, the presenter will discuss the skill areas and activities on which teachers and related services staff should focus in regard to the paraprofessionals with whom they work. Major topics will include the development of schedules, for both the learners and a paraprofessional; strategies for encouraging active learner participation during instructional sessions; and considerations for effective communication between the paraprofessional and other educational team members. Undergirding all these areas will be ideas for providing necessary training for the paraprofessionals.
Instructor Information
Valerie Aker-Player
Phone - (208)-885-8786
Email - akerplayer@uidaho.edu
Course Objectives:
Participants will gain knowledge and skills to:
- More adequately and effectively design practical accommodations and modifications that might be implemented to support the success of learners who experience significant multiple disabilities in the general education classrooms and in other interactions with their peers who are typically developing.
- Explain how a lesson that includes grade-level curriculum could be modified to be facilitate the appropriate engagement of a learner who experiences significant disabilities specifically through the MULTI-LEVEL CURRICULUM approach.
- Explain how a lesson that includes grade-level curriculum could be modified to be facilitate the appropriate engagement of a learner who experiences significant disabilities specifically through the CURRICULUM OVERLAPPING approach.
- Develop an “Incredible 5-Point Scale” for use with a learner who experiences significant multiple disabilities with the goal of improving that learner’s overt behaviors.
- Guide the instructional behaviors of paraprofessionals and provide them with appropriate supervision and feedback.
Grading
This is a Pass/Fail course. Participants must earn an 80% score on all quizzes to pass the course. Quizzes can be retaken until passed. Participants must earn an 80% (80/100) on the final written assignment to pass the course.