It is important to create opportunities and practices to support youths and young adults to help provide an inclusive learning experience. Children with developmental disabilities struggle with many facets, including social and learning skills, and opportunities to communicate. These difficulties can make staying focused and motivated difficult. If you are struggling to retain that attention, here are some things that can help you with teaching and inspiring children with developmental disabilities.
Adjust Your Expectations
One of the things that people working with children that have special needs and developmental disabilities should adjust their expectations. This is mostly going to factor into any timelines, as you have to realize that everything will typically take longer to achieve in terms of progress. You want to monitor progress over months and sometimes over years as opposed to smaller time frames that you would have for other children. The closer you are to a situation, from a teaching standpoint, it can be more difficult to see and recognize incremental changes and improvements. However, over time, you begin to recognize such improvements. There may be more improvement seen from someone that isn’t as present, seeing children maybe once a week as opposed to everyday. Having this tempered set of expectations allows you to progress and work with these children over longer periods of time with less fatigue and frustration as you are not trying to rush to reach specific goals, while being allowed to celebrate small successes. Patience and understanding in the progress and process is key.
Understanding Disruptions Will Occur
Children with developmental disabilities may have outbursts and actively show their frustration from time to time. As someone teaching children that are more susceptible to such interactions, you should come to expect that your lesson plans may not always be followed. Having flexibility to adapt to various situations will allow you to pivot your teaching and your sessions in order to remain present with that child. Being understanding with an ability to adapt will go a long way in making progress and maintaining direction and focus to further help and inspire your kids.
Positive Reinforcement
Emotions play a big role for those with developmental disabilities. This is important to note, as both reactions from the children are common, while reactions from the teachers and caregivers should be careful and cautious. As mentioned, you want to have patience as instant reactions and outbreaks can be frequent to deal with. You must be mindful of your own reactions so as to not worsen any sort of situation. However, positive reactions and reinforcement can have substantial impact on children and their behavior. Children will feed off your energy and social signals. Having large positive reinforcing reactions to things that they are doing well will help encourage more positive behavior with students. Reinforcement should not only be limited to certain goals, but also attempts. This will encourage children to continue to do things even with the chance of failure. This helps counteract the risk and frustration that would be associated with failure and still encourage them to continue trying.
Pivotal Response Training
Children with autism and other developmental issues have a hard time formulating their words in attempts to communicate. It is possible to teach those that struggle, but it can be seen as a task. However, with pivotal response training, it can help motivate them by teaching them how fun it can be to talk and express themselves. Pivotal response training, or prt autism can assist in providing children the opportunity to lead the communication and interaction. By minimizing the teacher’s direction and guidance to allow for children to lead themselves, it provides them the chance to engage how they feel best to do so, and feels less like a chore. It is more fun if they choose themselves.
Task Variation
Maintaining focus and attention can be difficult when it comes to teaching children. Kids get bored and want to move onto other things. The task at hand then becomes stressful and frustrating as there is no more interest in it. This is why it is important to incorporate variety into your teachings. This will allow for children with developmental disabilities to continue to feel more engaged in activities and learning. Altering or remembering to change things frequently to ensure that children and students are not getting bored and wanting to do other tasks aside from learning is important to maintaining direction towards progress.
Everyone deserves an opportunity to learn. Some children may not always be in the same developmental space, so it is important to do what you can to be inclusive of their needs and provide them that same chance. There are many ways society and people can help to encourage that inspiration and growth.