Teaching Self Determination To Students With Disabilities

This teacher-friendly resource offers a variety of instructional strategies for teaching students the specific skills they need for more satisfactory, self-directed lives--skills like: - assertiveness - goal setting - self-advocacy - self-management - decision making - problem solving - self-awareness Practicing and prospective educators will find objectives and key terms at the beginning of each chapter and vignettes and case studies sprinkled throughout, making the book an ideal text. This is an invaluable resource for meeting IDEA 1997 requirements while motivating high school students with disabilities to prepare for successful transitions to adulthood.

This teacher-friendly guide presents research-proven instructional techniques that empower students with disabilities to become their own advocates and use effective choice-making, problem-solving, and goal-setting skills.

Affordable and complete, this book provides evidence-based strategies to promote self-determination, and is the first volume to combine both theory and practice in this area. Because self-determination is a key issue for students with moderate and severe disabilities, this is an ideal resource for middle and secondary special educators, school psychologists, and other school practitioners.

Targeted at special education teachers/special population instructors, work experience coordinators, vocational assessment personnel, and guidance counselors, this guide examines the relationships among career development, transition, and self-determination for students with disabilities. The guide uses a question-and-answer format to identify and respond to key topics that practitioners need to address to promote student self-determination in their service settings, and provides detailed reviews of over 30 curriculum materials and assessment tools in the area of self-determination. Specific chapters address: (1) the importance of self-determination and school and family-based interventions to support the development of self-determination; (2) student involvement in the Individualized Education Program and transition process and specific strategies to prepare students for participation and to increase student participation; (3) assessment of self-determination; (4) instructional practices that promote self-determination and family and school administrator roles in promoting self-determination in students; (5) self-determination instructional materials review; and (6) key issues and future directions in self-determination. Curriculum and assessment resources available to educators and service providers are described throughout the guide along with appropriate contact information. In addition, an appendix includes an annotated bibliography of recent articles and books written on the topic of self-determination. (Each chapter contains references.) (CR)

This practical text (written by Martin Agran with original chapters contributed by a number of experts in the field) provides an in-depth focus on strategies classroom teachers can use to help students with mild to severe disabilities learn how to manage their own behavior in the classroom. Agrans approach is based on current research that shows that self-management can be as, if not more, effective as teacher-directed instruction because it empowers students by allowing them to be actively involved in their own instruction and educational decision making. At the same time, it can reduce hostility and conflict between teacher and child. Self-determination or student-directed learning is one of the major paradigmatic shifts in special education, and this book is one of the first to advance this change.

Addressing a topic that has received much recent professional interest, Student-Directed Learning: Teaching Self-Determination Skills provides clear, step-by-step instruction on how to teach students with disabilities to manage and assume responsibility for their own learning. Up-to-date and comprehensive, this book is one of the first to address the programmatic shift in special education from dependence to independence. The authors go beyond definitions and provide a detailed and systematic means of teaching self-management and self-determination - skills that are essential when teaching people with disabilities to manage and chart their own behavior.

Children are born learning machines who want to learn and can organize and manage their own learning. Unfortunately, today children have little choice over what they do in school and how and when they do it. Children prepared in this "other-determined" manner will be poorly equipped to navigate an adult world requiring that they act autonomously and self-direct learning to acquire skills in rapidly changing environments. In Teaching Students to Become Self-Determined Learners, Michael Wehmeyer and Yong Zhao explore the how and why of self-determined learning—which emphasizes autonomy and choice, turning over ownership for learning to students by supporting them in engaging in activities that are of personal value to them, thus enabling them to act volitionally. You'll learn * How to promote self-determined learning in your classroom or school * The importance of autonomy supports, competence supports, and relatedness supports * Conditions that enable self-determined learning * Teaching strategies for self-determined learning * Assessment strategies in self-determined learning * The role of technology in self-determined living The practical strategies, case studies, advice, and resources here will help you help your students to motivate themselves and become self-determined learners

This text provides a comprehensive overview of three theoretical perspectives proposed during the past decade addressing the self-determination construct as it applies to the field of special education. The three models were selected primarily because they have focused on defining and categorizing self-determination for all students with disabilities, including students with mental retardation and other cognitive disabilities. These models are intended to provide students and practitioners a solid grounding in self-determination theory. All models have been evaluated among students with cognitive disabilities but are applicable to all students with or without disabilities. The authors research each model and have applied their own theoretical framework to special education, ensuring that interventions to promote skills like problem solving, goal setting, decision making, and self-advocacy are in place for all students. By reading this text, the reader will gain a solid, theoretically based foundation in understanding the self-determination construct which ultimately supports the development of instructional interventions that enable students with disabilities to become self-determined. It will be useful as a text in upper undergraduate and graduate courses in special education, psychology, social work/welfare, general education, vocational rehabilitation and disability studies.