Now that you have your students’ individualized
schedules and work systems in place, it is time to start thinking about the
teaching tasks.
When designing and presenting tasks, these are
questions we ask:
·
Does the task address the
student’s educational goals?
·
Is the task multi-modal?
·
Does the task incorporate
student’s interests and strengths?
·
Are visual cues the task?
·
Are pieces of the task organized
systematically?
·
Is the task designed so that the
student can manage it independently?
·
Has the student mastered the task?
For the next few weeks this blog will discuss each of
these questions. First is ensuring your task addresses a goal on the student’s
individual education plan.
We use formal and informal assessments to determine our
students’ present level of performance. (See 6-22-16 blog entry) We identify their emerging
abilities and develop goals and objectives to teach independence with those
skills. We base our tasks on their goals
and objectives. Look at your students’ individual educational plans and think
about how to design meaningful tasks that will address their goals.
This task requires putting spraying
one squirt of window cleaner on the numeral one or the red dot. This task
addresses the student’s annual goal: develop domestic skills to assist with
chores in the school, home or job site and its short-term objective:
demonstrate 1:1 correspondence to complete a domestic activity. We think it is
very important to merge academic or pre-academic goals with life-skill ones.
This student matches coins to amounts
affixed to the small coin purses and places them inside. To
aid his learning, he can use the “dictionary” as a reference. This
task will address his long-term goal of understanding the concept
of money and short-term objective of identifying value of coins.
This task addresses the annual
goal of reading with comprehension and the short term objective of making
inferences. Using pictures from Just
Grandma and Me by Mercer Mayer with some text deleted, students are asked
to determine what a character might say.