Mental Retardation Teaching Strategies
Mentally retarded (MR) students need to have their tasks broken down into small steps and the steps need to be introduced one at a time to avoid overwhelming the student.
MR students learn better visually so teaching using charts, pictures and graphs is recommended.
Teachers should give MR students immediate feedback in order for the students to make connections between their answers, behaviors or questions and the teacher's responses. Delays in providing feedback may cause the student to lose the connection between cause and effect in the student's mind and the point will be lost.
MR students learn better by doing and completing hands-on tasks and appreciating their work.
MR students have a hard time comprehending lectures. An example would be a teacher teaching on gravity to MR students should most likely act out by dropping an item or having a student drop an item and telling the student the force making the item drop is what is known as gravity versus defining gravity through a lecture.
These strategies of learning were proven through a concept known as Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA). This approach is based on the learning theory and learning approaches which have been proven to work well.
Just like most other disabilities MR students should always be rewarded for responding positively to instruction. Immediate rewards are crucial in motivating MR students to do their work and behave. Rewards can be in the form of snacks, TV time or stickers.
Some harming behaviors should be followed by a consequence. Consequences can include time-outs, loss of preferred play items and activities, and the least intrusive physical restraints.
In summary to successfully apply mental retardation teaching strategies, always simplify the work, give rewards to students behaving well and consequences to the ones misbehaving, make instruction visual, provide activities that are hands on and most importantly be very patient and repeat as many times as is necessary.
