What kinds of teaching? What kind of intellectual disabilities or learning disabilities? There are some teaching strategies that are specific to teaching certain subjects, and others that are specific to certain disabilities.

I am most familiar with teaching of motor skills. The best teaching strategies here definitely depend on what condition someone has, as well as the type of motor task being taught. Elliott & Weeks have a model for atypical cerebral organization in people with Down syndrome that suggests why people with DS have difficulty organizing movements on the basis of verbal instructions. There's a large body of research that follows up on this that has explored the most effective ways to teach motor skills to people with Down syndrome. For discrete movement tasks, teaching using visual demonstration of skills is most effective for people with DS, for example. A review of this research is at Maraj, B. K. V., Bonertz, C. M., Kivi, J. J., Ringenbach, S. D. & Mulvey, G. M. (2007). Cerebral specialization in persons with Down syndrome: The ongoing development of a model. Down Syndrome Quarterly, 9, 7-16.

By contrast, people with autism have more difficulty with learning movements based on visual observation of someone else performing the task. This is thought to be due to differences in mirror neurons in people with autism.

Dear Genna,

Thank you very much for the info given. It is helpful.

For your info, I am looking into ways to develop children with learning disabilities or slow learners. I have a daughter who is diagnosed with severe intellectual disability. She is 12 but her ability to think is less than half her age.

I am trying to find ways and approaches to help her and children with similar needs to learn. This interest has prompted me to start researching into this area.

Would be grateful if I can get as much input as I can on this subject matter.

I may recommend Vicky Lewis's (2002) _Development and Disability: 2nd edition_ ISBN-13: 9780631234661 as a good starting point for understanding the breadth of research that has taken place on children with disabilities. It asks a series of questions like "What do children with this condition understand about music?" or social skills, and so forth, and gives a very broad overview of just how much can be involved in helping children learn.

I would say that in general, the more sensory modalities and movement you can involve in the learning process, the better. Art Glenberg has some great research on strategies to teach reading and math skills using movement. (See Glenberg, A. M. (w011). How reading comprehension is embodied and why that matters. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education 4(1), 5-18.)

As far as reading goes, there are some debates about whether to teach children through visual memorization of words rather than using phonetics: Some children with intellectual disabilities are able to learn reading skills more quickly when taught using whole word-visual strategies, but it also means they are at a disadvantage when sounding out unfamiliar words, such as trying to read the name of a street sign that they haven't been at before.

I keep running across anecdotes about the benefits of music as a teaching modality, including parents who have said that their child with an intellectual disability is able to process requests and respond more quickly when they sing things instead of speak them. Music involves different parts of the brain than verbal listening skills, though, so it makes sense to me that responses to it may be different as well. I am fascinated by these anecdotes, but currently the research literature on the benefits of music for people with intellectual disabilities is minimal.

There's a large body of work on mastery motivation, which is the drive a child has to explore and master their environment, and how it applies to people with intellectual disabilities. One of the challenges in working with people with severe intellectual disabilities is that they will often not demonstrate the things that they are capable of doing if there is someone around that is willing to do it for them. Sometimes people get frustrated with the amount of time it takes for a person with severe impairments to dress themselves, for example. Especially when the parents are in a hurry, its tempting to want to take over and dress the child rather than waiting for them to complete the task themselves, but this also can take a toll on the child's desire to keep trying to do things independently. I'm not familiar with good references offhand in this area, but "Mastery motivation" is a key term that should head you in the right direction. I find some of the literature in this area hard to read because some authors make it sound like children are just being lazy if they don't show the same level of mastery motivation that they would expect from someone with typical development, but motivation is an important thing to consider when teaching new things.

Dear Genna,

Thank you very much for the information provided. What you shared especially on "Mastery Motivation" described my daughter in detail. Yesterday I found out she may also have DYSPRAXIA. I am still learning about this term. I am doing a few studies in areas that involved my daughter to help her and other children with similar disability. My aim now is to try to gather as much knowledge on the subject matter to help me understand a lot better about it.

When trying to find out more about dyspraxia, you may want to look up "developmental coordination disorder" too. Some use the two terms interchangeably.

Dear Norizan,

thank you for opening an important discussion!

You asked about contributing to the development of children with special needs specifically learning disabilities. I think one of the most important things that supports the child's development is promoting her/his own participation in her/his life's decisions (which I call agency). Several researchers have studied this subject, and we have collected ideas for supporting disabled children’s agency in our literature review: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09687599.2012.679023#.UguvK22d9Io I hope you find it useful!

Dear Johanna Olli,

Thank you very much for your input and literature review. May I ask how early should parents/teachers be involved in promoting the children's participation in their life's decisions?

I am really interested in looking for ways or methods to develop slow learners from an early age [primary school]. I am trying to look into a model that integrates a holistic development for the children rather than separating the academic from the life's survival skills.

Dear Johanna,

Unfortunately I am unable to view your paper as my university has no access to it. Would truly appreciate it if you could email it to me - [email protected] ..... thank you!

Dear Norizan,

I think parents & teachers should promote the children's participation in their life's decisions from the very beginning. Small children can make small decisions, bigger children bigger ones. You know, even newborn baby is able to decide, whether he wants to eat or not, and it is recommended to listen to your baby when breastfeeding. So why not listen to toddlers in their life's decision's, too? Of course I don't mean that children gets to decide everything, not at all. But especially disabled children learn too often to be passive objects for adults' decisions and actions, so it would be important to learn to choose / decide / express own view already as a little child. I have written an article about this, but unfortunately it is only in Finnish. (for Finnish readers: http://www.kuntoutusportti.fi/files/attachments/kuntoutus-lehden_artikkelit/2012/olli.pdf)

One of my favorite references conserning children's right to express their views is this United Nations' ccomment paper on Convention on the

Rights of the Child:

http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/crc/docs/AdvanceVersions/CRC-C-GC-12.pdf

According to it, we "should presume that a child has the capacity to

form her or his own views and recognize that she or he has the right to express them; itis not up to the child to first prove her or his capacity."

That "requires recognition of, and respect for, non-verbal forms

of communication including play, body language, facial expressions, and drawing and painting, through which very young children demonstrate understanding, choices and preferences."

I''ll gladly e-mail you my review article, which is actually recently chosen to Disability & Society's first Virtual Special Issue on childhood & Disability: http://explore.tandfonline.com/content/ed/cdso-virtual-special-issue-childhood-and-disability. There's lots of other very interesting articles, too!

It also might be possible for you to read my article through my ResearchGate page: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johanna_Olli/publications/