Activity 1.3

According to Lerner and Johns in chapter 3 clinical teaching is to tailor learning experiences for the unique needs of an individual student using information gathered through an evaluation and an analysis of the student’s specific learning characteristics (Lerner and Johns, 2012).  Using all the gathered information a clinical teacher designs a plan of instruction for the student.

Clinical teaching can be viewed as a cycle with five stages. The five stages are assessment, planning, implementation, evaluation, and modification.   First the student is evaluated and then work is put together based on the assessment (not a formal assessment) of the student.  After the work is done the student is re-evaluated to see what has been learned.  If the student does well the teacher knows the student has learned the material and moves on but if the student  has not learned the material the teacher modifies the approach and teaches the material again. Different approaches the teacher may use are cognitive processing, direct instruction and mastery learning, and psychotherapeautic teaching.

In this chapter another part that interested me and caught my attention was controlling the instructional variables. The variables that can be adjusted by a teacher are the difficulty level, language, space, and time.   Perhaps one of the most important variables to control is the difficulty level for the student because when work is too difficult they will not be able to do the work and will get frustrated. If you expect too much from the student before they are ready you set them up for failure.  The student needs to be ready and at a certain maturity level before learning tasks.  For example if you have students learn muliplication in first grade before first learning addition the student will not be ready and will likely fail.  If you start multiplication later on after the student has had the chance to learn addition and is older they are more likey to succeed.

The podcast I listened to was titled ”The Social and Emotional World of Children with Learning Disabilities.   This podcast was very interesting and I had to listen to it several times to gain the knowledge I needed from it.  I am not an auditory learner so this was a difficult task for me to just sit and listen and be forced to focus solely on the words.  In this podcast the presenters were discussing strategies and different organizations that can help students with learning disabilities.  One of the strategies was to have students role play out different scenarios at home with family and then critique as a family what was done right and what could be done better in the future.  Other strategies discussed in the video included practicing material that the students struggle with and give plenty of positive encouragement and look at www.ld.org for more information and organizations that may be nearby  and be able to help.