Atypical Teaching Strategies - Subconscious Joining and Mental Prompts For Autistic Learners

This page is devoted to my personal opinions and strategies for developing communication skills with a subgroup of individuals - primarily with severe autism. Most are nonverbal, and demonstrate significant motor and sensory impairments. These strategies have also proven effective with those who have some verbal capability but who have difficulty accessing their words.(Mental prompts help with word access as do sentence closure techniques.)

When engaging a child with these obvious challenges, it is important to acknowledge his often overlooked incredible gifts. The gifts referred to are; the ability to join with others at a subconscious level, access the universal field of thought, and pick up on subtle mental prompts. Keep your energy, calm yet assertive. Make sure the child feels safe and protected.

An Effective Teaching Strategy Is Essential For Effective Lessons

There are many new teachers who failed badly in conducting interesting and effective lessons, because they lacked an effective teaching strategy. Being a teacher can be a very challenging and enriching career for a lot of people. To many people who aspire to be one, it may seem to be a simple and easy task to achieve.

However, being a teacher who is able to conduct effective teaching lessons is definitely not an easy task to achieve. This is mainly because it's very difficult to capture the full attention of the students throughout the whole day. For a typical student, the time to concentrate fully can only last up to two hours. This means that schools are spending more efforts to employ teachers who can engage their students in interesting lessons and helping their teachers to learn effective teaching strategies.

The Relevance of Teaching Strategies in the 21st Century

Admittance to a good university or college is not what it used to be. The benchmark to get accepted into post-secondary institutions keeps rising and the pressure to get the high marks that meet the pre-requisites are felt on the parents and students alike. Naturally, parents and students today are well aware of the highly competitive nature of getting into their institution of choice in order to receive a good education and eventually embark on a good career. But what really defines a good education these days? Is it based on the reputation of the school or is it based on how the school's teachers implement their teaching strategies?

Good education includes many different variables such as a proper learning environment, equipment and teaching tools that can enhance or stimulate the learner and one of the most important but often ignored are good teachers. Of course a teacher should be qualified to teach their given subject and to implement a wide range of teaching strategies but that does not define a good teacher. A good teacher knows how to communicate and pass on knowledge and skills to their students. These teachers usually have an honest rapport with their students and know how to challenge them. They know how and when to utilize certain teaching strategies to compliment each class and have good classroom management. Such traits are instinctively recognized amongst teachers but this is not the same case for parents, especially high school parents.

5 Practical Uses for Errorless Teaching Strategies

1) The first time a piece of music is played.

As a musician, I was taught that it is extremely important to play a new piece of music very slowly - which would allow me to avoid making mistakes. The idea being that if I made a certain error, for the first couple of times I practiced a piece, it has more of a chance to become engrained into my future performances. Of course, after the piece is sufficiently mastered at this pace, the tempo should be increased at an appropriate rate.

"The secret of success is 'Practice'... Practice slowly and critically - examine it."- Lloyd J Reynolds

2) When introducing complex concepts such as higher level Physics or advanced Chemistry.

Simple lab experiments or group activities involving a straightforward activity or task are a wonderful way to introduce more complex concepts. While dry-ice and semi-volatile chemistry experiments are usually good attention grabbers - they also offer an easily understandable (and executable) example of the concept being taught. Adding a group element to these teaching opportunities provides even more of an errorless nature - since three or four learners teaming-up are much less likely to miss an important step. The confidence resulting from the successful completion of these mini-experiments will hopefully lead to further explorations into the subject.