Modifying Instruction for Students with Problems
Figure out how to accommodate and modify instruction in ways that meet the needs of students with special and diverse learning needs, thereby ensuring their classroom is a good fit for learners who may have one or more of the following problems:
- Poor Academic Performance: Students often have significant problems in one or more academic areas, such as spelling, reading, writing, math.
- Attention Problems: Students may have difficulty paying attention, working for an extended period of time, focusing on the teacher’s directions, or seem to be easily distracted.
- Hyperactivity: Some students may be overactive, and have difficulty staying seated and completing assigned tasks. Some move from task to task or location to location in the classroom.
- Memory: Some students have a hard time remembering what they were taught due to short-termand long-term memory problems.
- Poor language ability: Some students have language delays, difficulty with vocabulary, difficulty understanding concepts taught, or difficulty using language to adequately express themselves or produce correct sounds.
- Difficulty with Abstract Learning or Thinking: Some students have difficulties understanding abstract language and/or abstract concepts.
- Poor Social Skills: Some students have poor interpersonal skills and experience difficulties solving problems encountered in interacting appropriately with other people in their environment.
- Poor motivation or self-esteem: Due to a long history of failure, some students may have poor self-esteem or motivation. This can lead to some students’ acquiring learned-helplessness.
- Difficulty with Self-Regulation or Control: Some students experience difficulties regulating their own behaviors and/or rehearsing a task.
- Difficulty Generalizing or Transfer of Training: Some students cannot take information learned in one situation and apply it to a new situation where the same information is needed to solve a problem.
- Aggressive behavior: Some students are physically or verbally aggressive. They may hit, kick, fight, or verbally insult or threaten others. Such students get upset easily and cope by acting out.
- Withdrawal behavior: Some students rarely interact with others. They tend to be loners and avoid involvement with others.
- Stereotypical behaviors: Some students engage in very unusual patterns of behavior (e.g. rocking, head-banging, self-mutilation—and withdrawal behaviors at other times—autism).
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