COMMUNITY-BASED INSTRUCTIONS

Community-Based Instructions

Community-Based Instructions

Summary of the Chapter

Community-Based Instructions

Teaching skills in the real environment where the skills will ultimately be used is preferable to artificial environments such as the classroom or gym. Students with intellectual disabilities, who need extensive or pervasive supports do not generalize well from one environment to another. In fact, teaching skills in artificial environments often entails reteaching the same skills In community environments. Thus, it is much more efficient to teach skills in environments where they will use. One of the critical steps in the process of teaching skills in natural environments is identifying and prioritizing environments in which the skills will actually; be used. For example, teaching students to access and use community health club facilities, bowling facilities, or community pools prefer to teach these activities in school gyms or pools.

Functional Skills

Students who are blind or visually impaired require a set of unique educational skills, in addition to the general core curriculum. These specialized skill areas, referred to as the expanded core curriculum, are unique to the student's visual impairment and require direct instruction by a teacher of students' with visual impairments. While these teachers acknowledge that teaching activities of daily living, social skills, career development, adaptive technology, orientation and mobility (O&M), and other functional skills is essential, their ability to include these topics in the curriculum limited by time constraints, increased caseload size, and other educational priorities established by the IEP. In addition, many teachers of students with visual impairments re less clear about their students' developmental differences and how vision loss may affect the acquisition and maintenance of a requisite set of social skills and other functional abilities.

Forms of Community-based Instructions

Community-based instruction can take the form of mobility training) participating in community recreational activities, working in the community (paid or volunteering), or shopping at local stores. In understanding what community-based instruction is, it must be recognized what it is not.

Natural Environments

Access to the natural environments is a critical consideration when determining where to teach certain skills. As the student gets ready to leave, the team makes recommendations for after care involves helping the adolescent and his or her family becomes involved, in intervention services in their community, so that treatment can continue and the student supports as he or she returns to home or school. Some treatment settings may have a transnational program designed to ease the student back into independent life. In these programs, students gradually return back to in to the independent life. In these programs, students gradually return to the natural environment, either by returning home but attending day treatment.

Partial Participation

If a student, with intellectual disabilities can acquire some of the skills needed to participate in an activity, the parts of the skills that cannot be performed can be compensated through physical assistance or adaptations of equipment. Often, peer tutors can provide the physical assistance, whereas modified equipment and rule changes can allow students to participate in an inclusive ...