Special Education

         Special needs education or special education is the education of students with special needs or with medical, mental or psychological disabilities in a manner that addresses the individual differences and needs of those students. If you are planning to pursue a teaching career and become a special needs education teacher, it is important that you should know the importance or significance of special needs education programmes in schools especially for the kindergarten, primary school and secondary school levels.

         When you know the significance and relevance of having a special education programme in a school, then, you would have an idea about the important role you would play for children with special needs if you continue your plans in pursuing a career as a special needs education teacher. The most important reason for the significance of special education is early intervention for preschool-age children. The special needs education programmes of various school districts would include early intervention components in which preschool children with special needs would receive initial exposure to special needs learning so that they would be well-prepared on entering the kindergarten level under a special needs education class.

         The other reasons for the importance of a special education programme in a school would depend on the particular type of disabilities that need to be addressed by a special needs education programme that should be carried out in a specific school. For example, children with learning disabilities would usually receive individualised education plans because the level of a learning disability would be different from one child to another.

          Therefore, a special needs education plan that is tailor made for a specific child with a certain level of learning disability would make sure that the unique needs of the child is specifically addressed. In addition, children with behavioral or emotional disabilities would also receive special needs education plans based on the particular type of behavioral or emotional disorder.

Special education requires careful planning because its students have learning disabilities that do not allow them to understand lessons as fast and as well as their non-disabled classmates. In designing and planning special education activities, the following factors should be taken into consideration:

• Whether the students have physical or emotional deficiencies
• Whether the students are developmentally disabled
• Whether the students have learning disabilities
• If the students are impaired in vision or hearing

• Be aware that special students may face unique stressors not typically recognised or seen in a normal student. For example, what may seem to be a fun and engaging activity for a mainstream student could be stressful for an autistic student.
• Strictly monitor the incoming sensory stimulation brought about by each activity: hearing new sounds, smelling new scents, recognising new tastes and touching new textures and shapes.
• Always assure the students of their personal safety. Understand that for students with special needs, change can be very difficult to accept because their comfort zone is narrow. Thus, introducing new things and new people can seem intimidating.
• Be mindful about limiting variables in the environment. Special education students easily experience sensory overload, so keep as much of the environment consistent as possible.
• Special education students, as a result of their condition can make difficult situations for a teacher or caregiver. Be prepared for this by keeping a calm and consistent manner. Seeing these traits will build your students' confidence in you when new situations arise.
• Take the time to discuss options with your students. Often, a child with special needs have a perspective that there are only two choices when encountering a difficult situation: fight or flight. Practice them to do compromising activities such as asking help from an adult or going into a hallway when they feel threatened.

Special education is the opposite of general education. It is the opposite of the standard curriculum which is presented using standard teaching methods and without supplemental supports. Detecting special learning needs in children is done at the early stages of life.

• Early Detection – Many children are conveniently detected to have needs for special education based on their medical records. New born children are passed through screening before leaving the hospital after they were born and their genetic condition can indicate whether they have the tendency to develop special needs later. Mental retardation, brain damage, developmental disorder, disabilities of the senses essential in learning and other disabilities can be detected at this stage.

• Models for Detection – Very young learners or students who have or may develop needs for special education can either be screened using discrepancy model and the model of response to intervention. In the discrepancy model, teachers use their observation to notice students who achieve very far from what is expected of what learners of their age usually does. On the other hand, the model using response to intervention encourages early intervention.

• Discrepancy Model – Under the use of the discrepancy model, a child with special learning needs is given the services for a specific learning difficulty or SLD only under the circumstances that he or she has at least normal intelligence and underachieves based on his or her IQ. The discrepancy model has been widely used in years but it is still subjected to a good amount of criticism from researchers because, among others, these critics have asserted that diagnosing SLDs based on discrepancy between achievement and IQ does not predict the effectiveness of treatment. According to them, students who achieve low and also have low IQ also seem to benefit from treatment just like students who achieve low and have normal or high intelligence.

1. Form of Education – The ideal form of this kind of education is that it is a process involving individually planned and systematically monitored design of teaching procedures, adapted equipment and materials, accessible settings and other interventions are designed to help learners who have the special needs so that they can achieve higher level of personal self-sufficiency and success in school and community more than would be at their reach if the student were given only access to a typical or ordinary classroom education.
2. Form of Needs – The most common special needs which are addressed by special education include learning challenges or learning disabilities, communication impairment, behavioural and emotional disorders, physical abnormalities and disabilities and disorders in child and physical development. Learners and students having these different special needs can be better educated through additional educational services like various approaches to teaching, use of technology, specially designed teaching area and resource rooms.
3. Education for the Gifted – Gifted intelligence or intellectual giftedness is a disparity in learning and learning pace. This is also a beneficiary of specialised teaching techniques and different educational programs. However, special education is generally used to particularly refer to the instruction of learners or students who have special needs which reduce their ability to learn independently or in an ordinary classroom environment; thus, education for the gifted is separate and different from education for special children.

• Students with physical disabilities such as blindness or deafness
• Students with mental and emotional disabilities
• Students with autism or speech and language impairments
• Students with developmental disorders

• The barriers to learning that students of special education face
• Government laws and policies affecting the enforcement of special education in a particular country or territory
• How to identify special education students and plan a specialised program or course of study taking into account these needs