Chapter 4: Changing Instructional Strategies and Methods to Meet The Needs of All Learners

Advanced Organizers; Discovery or Inquiry Learning; Instructional Strategies; Long Term Memory; Mnemonics; Pre-teaching; Visual Organizers

Education is defined and identified by the process of teaching. Heward (2009) suggests that educators consider the issues of who is being taught and how the teaching occurs in their process of examining their own teaching practices. Students with learning disabilities are perhaps the most common and fastest growing group of students with special needs on campus. Processing and producing written information in traditional forms such as papers and tests can present difficulties for these students. Sometimes college instructors present the biggest difficulty to students with varying types of learning disabilities. All students will benefit from college instructors who use a wide variety of instructional strategies, which include the use of cooperative learning groups, learning styles, and multiple intelligences (refer back to Ch. 1 for additional information). Gardner’s (1997) Theory of Multiple Intelligences gives inclusive college instructors other ways of engaging students in course content. From his theory, then, inclusive instructors can expect today’s students with diverse backgrounds will process information in different manners.