Instructional Strategies for Working with Students with Down Syndrome

- Alright, y'all, let's talk about instructional strategies that you can use in the classroom that are evidence-based. The first one is wait time. Wait time is just you pausing to give your student some extra time to process the information or request that you've just given them. We offer more wait time for our students with Down syndrome because they need a little more time to encode the information we've given them, decipher it and then do something with it. So offer more wait time for any student with an intellectual disability including Down syndrome. You can do this by adding more time after you ask a question or make a request and if you're not sure how much wait time your student needs, a great way to measure that is to ask a student their name and however long it takes for a student to respond is your baseline for how much wait time they need. Another strategy that you can use is chunking materials. That just means that we're gonna take a larger activity or task and break it down into some smaller parts. And we do this because it offers our students a not so overwhelming activity that they need to attack as well as extra support so that they can make sure they're on the right track. You can do this by lessening the time on task, giving fewer parts of the task to do or lessening the complexity of the tasks that you're asking from a student. You can chunk materials by offering teacher check-ins, offering students brain breaks or by giving a student a self-monitoring checklist. Next is to minimize verbal fillers. We've already established that our students with Down syndrome may have hearing impairment and benefit from visuals. They also benefit from us not talking so much so don't say in 20 words something that you can say in two. The next thing is to incorporate physical gestures into your class. You can incorporate physical gestures by pairing the things that you're saying aloud with a physical cue or prompt. And that just partners a visual with the verbal that you're already saying. Pairing the verbal with a gesture just makes it easier to understand the procedures or expectations that you want a student to do. To get that done, you wanna target a key task and break it down to the smaller parts. You'll then pair your gesture with the words that you're saying so a student can understand visually what you're saying verbally. Along those same lines, you're gonna wanna consider using real world connections because we relate to things better when they're something that we know or interact with on a day-to-day basis. There's some great ways that you can do that inside of your classroom and that includes incorporating a student into word problems or math problems so they can see themselves in the situation. You could also include real world situations in the lessons that you do in the classroom like including fast food restaurants or actual things that students interact with on a daily basis. You're gonna wanna use concrete examples and those are things that the students can see, touch or visualize. And the last thing is that you're gonna wanna demonstrate them in a real life setting and not just read about them or write about them. The last instructional strategy is using alternative products. Students with Down syndrome may benefit from a non-traditional way to show what they know. Completing a multiple choice test or a long essay might not be a good way to gauge if your student has learned what you wanted them to learn from a lesson. So allowing them to do alternative products is a great way to assess what a student has learned in a way that's meaningful for the child. Some examples of this might be allowing a student to produce audio or video content to answer long-form questions. You might provide a more kinesthetic way for a student to show what they know. Maybe a more tactile or sensory approach would work. Or you could break down the larger lesson and just allow a student to show what they know on the larger, more important concepts. If you use these instructional strategies, you'll find that students with Down syndrome are more successful in the classroom and are more able to access academic and functional curriculum.