ESE children reap enormous benefits when they interact with a mixture of students who are the same age, according to Charter Schools Today website. Special-needs children who intermingle only with special-education peers tend to play alone when their classmates are older or younger than them. In integrated classes, the ESE child develops better conversational skills because he socializes with kids in the same age bracket. Likewise, children in regular educational environments learn diversity awareness when their classroom demographics include mainstreamed exceptional students.
Special-education teachers split their workloads with paraprofessionals and other children in an ideal ESE setting. Instructors become overwhelmed when left alone to manage a wide spectrum of developmental needs. Technology teacher Rosemary Shaw explains on the Tech & Learning website that she assigns higher-performing ESE students as study buddies to special-needs kids who have more challenging learning issues. In other public school systems, special-education teachers focus on reading and math lessons and delegate other subjects to paraprofessionals, Education World reports.
Students with special needs often respond well to visual and audio materials used in highly structured environments, teacher Rosemary Shaw writes for the Tech & Learning website. ESE kids thrive in well organized classrooms because they benefit from knowing what is going to happen next, as well as what is expected from them. Within this framework, Shaw guides her students with different presentation styles. She shows them vocabulary words and then discusses their meanings. This allows kids to learn by seeing and hearing.
ESE students need to work at their own speeds in class. Teachers who allow ample time for everyone to complete the lessons see noticeable results, according to the Tech & Learning website. Assignments need to be structured so that students who finish first will go back over the materials and improve their proficiencies. At the same time, classmates who require more time can comfortably move at a slower pace without negatively impacting the faster learners.