Coming up with personal philosophy about life and other things we value in life is the foundation of coming up with a plan that makes our desires successful. The personal philosophy of education of a teacher acts as a very significant aspect in his or her advance to guiding children along the course of enlightenment.
The students I desire to work with at this point of the course are students who have hearing impairments. This is because students who have mild to moderate hearing problems may at times work in the general education classroom setting with minimum modification. In addition, students with serious hearing losses do exploit total communication which includes formal signs, fingerspelling, facial expressions, informal gestures, spoken words, and body language in the classroom whether the classroom is self-contained or integrated which does not involve a lot of work. Finally, learners with hearing problems are capable of using some speech to communicate. Since they may not obtain the information being put across, the teacher is advised to use another method of communication such as writing out the message or using a different term to attract the student’s attention before speaking to him or her.
Explicit instruction is an important teaching technique used in special education. It provides an explicit framework for students with hearing disabilities to use as they write, study, or engage in group activities. Students with hearing disabilities gain from learning instructions that are explicit and well sequenced. As a teacher, it is important to help the student with hearing disability to learn how to use different strategies to deal with their assignments. Such strategies may involve the use of a graphic organizer that summarizes the important information from a text.
Scientific research has revealed that planning for instructional strategies and decisions on their implementation for students with hearing disabilities are frequently made based on personal philosophies and beliefs and on the ease of their realization. Researchers have examined the learning characteristics of students with hearing losses and their understanding of how these students learn, has made them come up with more advanced instructional strategies. One of such instructional strategies is explicit instruction (Swanson, 2001).
The strength of this strategy is that talented learners with hearing disabilities can systematize their thoughts and plan an approach to solve difficult problems through the use of problem-solving strategies. Based on these and other studies as well as academic models, researchers in special education have extended and certified the use of explicit instructional strategies. A study on this instructional strategy on 10 learners with hearing disabilities 4 (40%) of which were talented, showed that 50% (2 students) of the talented students were able to organize their thoughts and plan an approach to solve difficult problems by using problem-solving strategies.
Implicit instruction is another instructional strategy through which students with hearing disabilities gain from instructions that are well sequenced. The implicit instructional strategy involves learners’ participation in the class activities. Generally, it is a student-centered method of learning. This involves learning that can be found inside or outside the normal class setting. Implicit interaction is an interactive teaching approach that is capable of creating a social environment thus giving opportunities to students with hearing disabilities to be able to interact with other students.
With such interactions, especially the face-to-face interaction among students more communication strategies may be developed. This can affect the nature of the instructional strategy used by the students and also the success of the learning technologies used on the students. In order to enhance the effectiveness of learning of students with hearing disabilities through implicit instructional strategy, there is the formation of students groups in classrooms with access to high technology. The study has revealed that this method is very effective as compared to the mere lecture method.
The strength of this instructional strategy is that it gives the students opportunity to acquire for themselves different communication strategies that they can use and make the instructional technologies applied effective. A study on this instructional strategy on 10 learners who have hearing disabilities showed that 60% (6 students) were capable of acquiring communication strategies through interaction with other students. Out of the 6 students, 4 students that is 66.67% used the acquired communication strategies to make the learning technology effective (Murdick, Gartin & Crabtree, 2007).
The extended professional skills that I would like to acquire are confidence and trustworthiness; this is because confidence will enable me to provide means to seek distinctive solutions for every student and his or her family problems. Being trustworthy on the other hand will enable me to apply efforts to gain the trust of the student with a disability and become sensitive to their susceptibility and that of the families.
These skills I plan to attain through practice in addition to furthering my studies on how to serve and work with students with disabilities. In addition, I can acquire these skills through attending and participating in different seminars discussing matters on how to work and serve students with learning disabilities.
It is usually a difficult task for several people to work with and serve students with disabilities however, having personal and professional philosophy on being and doing is very important as it helps one to easily find means to care for students with disabilities and their families.
Reference
Murdick, N.L., Gartin, B. C., & Crabtree, T. (2007). Special Education Law. (2nd ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill/ Prentice Hall.
Swanson, H. L. (2001). Focus on Exceptional Children: Loooking for the Top Model for Educating Students with Disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 26(2), 358–383.