Life Success
For Students With Learning Disabilities:
A Teacher Guide
Personalize the Experience
Several authorities in learning disabilities have long stressed the importance of providing learning experiences that are interest-driven and of personal significance. With this in mind, activities aimed at fostering the success attributes should allow participants to personalize the experience by including their own interests, individual beliefs, feelings, and previous encounters relating to the success attributes. This also includes considering ethnicity, cultural background and gender.
Students should be encouraged to share their previous efforts and triumphs with the success attributes or to generate examples from their own lives - whether involving them directly or indirectly. Examples from their lives should not be limited to the school setting and academic domain, but should include all aspects of their lives. For example, if working on goal-setting, have children describe previous successes with setting and reaching personal goals from various domains of their lives (e.g., making the baseball team, learning the times tables, overcoming a fear, making a new friend).
Frequent activities of this kind allow the instructor to become more aware of students’ thoughts, feelings, preferences, and beliefs in an effort to choose better and more pertinent examples and activities, as well as to informally assess their individual progress.
Next: Assessment of the Success Attributes
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