POSITIVE CLASSROOMS
“Children must be taught how to think and not what to think”
This quote summarizes what teaching and learning at The Aditya Birla Integrated School stand for. Students with learning disabilities require appropriate support and intervention to achieve success at school, work, relationships, and the community at large.
It must be understood that learning disabilities are different from learning problems like visual impairment, hearing loss, or intellectual disabilities. These children look perfectly normal, may appear to be bright and intelligent but struggle to perform academic skills of reading, writing, and math expected from children of their age. This gap between their potential and actual performance often makes them feel inferior and less capable than others.
It is thus imperative that these students be provided a learning environment that is suitable and supports their learning capabilities. One important factor in this is the student-teacher ratio. At TABIS the student-teacher ratio is 10:1. This enables the teacher to give one on one attention whenever required. The space is less crowded and thus less intimidating for the student. It provides enough opportunities for each student to interact and answer in class. There are fewer distractors and the student is able to focus well.
Along with the student-teacher ratio, there are various strategies that are practiced at TABIS to create a less challenging and more integrated space for learners.
Classroom Environment
Create a learning environment where the child feels relaxed. This will help the student to feel confident and motivated to participate and interact in class.
Pre lesson requirement
Familiarize the child with the vocabulary being used in the lesson. Include exercises like finding the meaning or making sentences so that the student is able to use it in the correct context.
Ensure that the student knows the basic concepts to understand and take in the new information. For e.g. – while teaching factors and multiples check if the child is well versed with multiplication tables and understands the concepts of multiplication and division.
Always have a set induction to your lesson. It will help the students understand the core concept of the chapter better.
During a lesson
Always support your teachings with an activity. Teaching through activities is a great way to make learning fun as it helps to create a friendly a less formal environment.
Let learning be incidental. To teach students about traffic rules, take them on a car ride around the school, let the students multiply the recipe of one glass of lemonade to make 30 glasses of lemonade to understand how ratio and proportion works, get the students to keep a track of the weather for a week to understand how climate and weather of a location differ from each other.
Making learning incidental not only gives the learner an idea of how these concepts work in actual life but it is a great opportunity to assimilate skills of time management, group cohesiveness, lateral thinking, integrated learning among others.
Post lesson assessment
The regular assessment gives the teacher an insight into how much the student has learnt and retained.
It is important that the test is announced and ample time is given for the student to prepare for the test.
The instructional strategy used should be simple and to the point.
A mixed bag of questions should be asked to test the student’s concrete, conceptual, and application skills.
Feedback
This is the most important and the most feared aspect of learning. Every test must be followed by feedback. The manner in which the feedback is given impacts the learner’s interest in academics.
The feedback should be provided keeping in mind the student’s abilities. The teacher must mark the student specifically on the concept being taught. For e.g. – if it is a geographical or a historical concept, the maximum score should be focused on the facts and less on grammatical and spelling errors.
The use of positive remarks can guide the student to work towards the areas of struggle. For e.g. if the child has lost marks due to spelling errors, the remark should read “Writing 5 words daily help you improve your spelling”
To conclude, learning is not a rat race and everybody learns at their own speed and it is our job to ensure that the momentum keeps going. We need to remember that every child is unique and comes with a set of skills that they can excel at, and it is our job to bring out and polish those skills and let them shine.
Author:
Batool Ghadiyali, Teaching Faculty - Senior
The Aditya Birla Integrated School
Also read:
https://www.adityabirlaintegratedschool.com/blog/looking-for-top-special-schools-in-mumbai
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