Week 11

How can you prepare to address transition for students who are Deaf/HH?    Even after talking about transition in class, I feel a little bit overwhelmed when I think about it.  I think I feel this way because transition is such a huge adjustment for a student and I want to be sure to provide my student with everything I can to best prepare him or her.  I know that I would use the resources we discussed in class, particularly the PARC checklist and iTransition.  I would also like to focus my lessons on things that will be beneficial for my student in the future.  For example, if my student intends to go to college, I want to have lessons about college (such as setting up an online account for the university, student loan info, living arrangements, student organizations, student resources, etc.). What are 3 pointers you have learned in using instructional strategies?  Has your viewpoint of teaching changed after taking this course?  How or how not? 1.  I was given a huge amount of resources for instructional strategies.  I guess that "pointer" would be to use all available resources--ones that the school has, as well as sharing with other districts and finding awesome ideas online (I was entirely unaware that Pinterest had so many beneficial things on it!!!).   2.  Use a variety of strategies for my students--example, all of the reading materials that were brought to class.  Some had book reading, videos, manipulatives, etc.--i.e. a lot of different strategies could be used. 3.  Think through the lesson before teaching it--clearly, this sounds common sense, but I mean to think it through more than just on the surface.  For example, in a math lesson, the order the student needs to learn should be thought about.  If the student isn't grasping a lesson, the teacher might need to step back to the skills that the current lesson is built on and re-teach those so the student has a solid foundation.  Basically, be incredibly prepared.   I don't know if my viewpoint has changed or not... but I do know that, now, I think about instructional strategies in teaching which I didn't before.  The idea of teaching, while still intimidating, is now less so.  I think that is partly because of the variety of resources we were provided with in this course, the discussions on instructional strategies, as well as "on the spot" teaching of our classmates.  I think that was a fun and beneficial activity.