Visual impairment including blindness
5. Deafness
6. Speech-language impairment
7. Hearing impairment
8. Intellectual disability (ID)
9. Emotional disturbance (ED)
10. Orthopedic impairment
11. Multiple disabilities (MD)
12. Specific learning disability (SLD)
13. Other health impairment (OHI)
The term developmental delay is another category local education agencies (LEAs) use for children ages three through nine who need early intervention services because of cognitive, physical, communication, social, emotional, or adaptive delays.
Appendix B (page 247) offers more details about specific legislation.
An Understanding of Students’ Needs
IDEA offers the thirteen classifications previously listed to help educators establish a basic knowledge of a student’s needs; however, this knowledge alone is not enough for teachers to help the student achieve his or her highest potential. Each student with exceptionalities has a unique personality with individual likes and dislikes.
As differentiated instruction expert Carol A. Tomlinson (2014) points out, teachers need to study the students they teach. In any inclusion classroom, students’ levels of competency, rates of learning, and degrees of motivation to acquire concepts and skills will vary. Knowing what your students know is essential.
It is also important for educators to understand how students view themselves and others during learning experiences. For example, students with autism often have excellent prior knowledge and specific interests that teachers can tap. A student with Down syndrome, who also has speech apraxia, may not verbally communicate his or her likes or dislikes, but certainly has individual preferences the teacher should acknowledge. Physical, sensory, emotional, behavioral, social, learning, and cultural differences do not translate into disabilities if educators recognize and capitalize on students’ interests, prior experiences, and stronger modalities.
The following elementary and secondary curriculum-learner scenarios offer connections to IDEA classifications to honor individual student needs. They capitalize on learner strengths, interests, and stronger modalities to advance skills.
If a kindergarten student with a specific learning disability loves music and has difficulty processing information during reading assignments:
• Provide curriculum-related musical videos
• Have students clap out syllables
• Enable closed captioning on videos
• Enlist educational songs and chants to teach new vocabulary
• Create “song storybooks”
• Accompany visuals with auditory instruction, such as recordings on slide presentations
If a third grader with orthopedic impairment is learning place value in mathematics, and he loves animals and working cooperatively with peers:
• Consult with the physical therapist to eliminate room barriers to increase his peer interaction
• Provide a rest period during the day
• Include low-and high-tech technology with resources and strategies, such as dinosaur pencil grips or NCTM’s virtual manipulatives with base 10 blocks
• Use a “round up” cattle game to teach place value
• Offer interactive worksheets with more animal visuals
• Connect word problems to animal themes
If a sixth grader with a health impairment responds well to praise but she has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and difficulty concentrating during a world history lesson:
• Offer nonverbal private signals to reinforce attention
• Increase her self-monitoring to tally on-task behavior during set time periods
• Minimize distractions (for example, seat her away from classroom door or window)
• Set and reinforce attention with informal behavioral incentives and charts
• Model and reinforce positive behavior
• Reinforce time expectations with daily checklists and visual schedules
If a ninth grader with emotional differences who loves sports and technology is often disruptive during English class and has difficulties controlling impulses:
• Allow the student to “publish” his own books using Google tools and sites such as Scribblitt (www.scribblitt.com) and Book Creator (https://bookcreator.com)
• Collaborate with the physical education teacher to offer more movement in class
• Provide stories on athlete models who use sports to channel impulses
• Conference with student with weekly emotional check-ins
• Use emojis and avatars as incentives
• Increase self-confidence with timely and realistic feedback
• Allow student to self-record and graph daily and weekly progress, which is then tallied each marking period
• Offer nonverbal and verbal cues (for example, increased proximity)
English Learners
Inclusion classrooms often consist of English learners from diverse cultures. Local education agencies must identify, locate, and evaluate ELs with disabilities in a timely manner (U.S. Department of Education, Office of English Language Acquisition, 2016). Child study and instructional support teams who have expertise in second-language acquisition, culture, and learning disabilities advise teachers on appropriate instructional strategies. A struggling EL student can be evaluated for a learning disability or another suspected disability, but school teams need to first determine if an English learner’s lack of progress is due to the difficulties associated with second language acquisition before he or she is classified (Burr, Haas, & Ferriere, 2015). Local education agencies must do the following.
1. Offer a valid assessment with oral and written evaluations in a student’s native language.
2.
