Chapter 8
What Is the Best Way to Instruct?
After intervention methods are determined and specific accommodations, skills, and strategies are identified, instruction must be provided. When visual impairment adversely affects a student’s performance in a priority activity, you will collaborate with teachers who provide daily instruction to ensure that visual efficiency needs are addressed in that activity. In some cases, you will provide direct instruction in separate vision specific lessons. Sample lesson plans for both kinds of instruction are contained in the BVEP Design for Instruction. When you provide vision specific lessons separately, skills taught by you must be transitioned to regularly occurring activities where they can be supported by other team members when you are not present. For example, Tran (see Snapshot, page G-11) needs to learn to visually scan his favorite center so that he can find desired materials. This is important because the students who use this center are required to put away their materials at the end of center time. They put them back on the shelves appropriately, but never in quite the same place. Tran’s TVI has coached the teaching assistant (TA) to do a short warm-up scanning lesson with Tran when he goes to his center. The TA teaches Tran to go to a central spot on the carpet. She then uses a flashlight to guide Tran as he finds the top shelf, moves his eyes across it from left to right, finds the beginning of the next shelf, and repeats the pattern until he gets to the end of the last shelf. They practice this three times. The TA watches as Tran uses the same pattern to find the materials he wants to use that day.
Perhaps the most essential component of effective instruction is the student’s active participation (Gibson, 1988; Erin & Topor, 2010). Experiential learning strategies provide instruction including five stages (Oxendine, Robinson, & Willson, 2004):
- Intention to do something perceived as desirable
- Initiation of behavior related to that intent—independently
- Execution of the intended behavior—with or without help
- Evaluation of the result—with or without help
- Correction of behavior in a new attempt—independently
This information calls into question the use of vision stimulation to address visual efficiency needs. TVIs use this method most frequently with students at the very earliest stages of visual development. There are two problems associated with this practice.
- Vision stimulation is often provided in sessions during which TVIs present visual media to passive students. The student is not engaged in any of the ways listed above. When an object is presented, the student may exhibit a visual orienting response. This is a primarily subcortical reflexive response to something different in the visual environment (Nelson, Van Dijk, Oster, & McDonnell, 2010). Eliciting repeated orienting responses does not result in learning. Learning is cortical and requires intent on the part of the learner (Rudy, 2008). From birth, infants pair vision with hearing and touch to gather information about their environments with a clear intent to make sense of things.
- Vision is not used concurrently with touch. In the early stages of visual development, visual information is meaningful only when it is combined with tactual information acquired by infants first during oral exploration of objects and then later through manipulation with the hands. Looking alone does result in development of perceptual skills (Gibson, 1988). Fixation, shifting gaze, scanning, tracking, and localizing must be practiced in experiences that allow students to touch and hold the objects they see.
Using brightly colored and shiny objects to elicit visual orienting responses should never be an end in itself, but it can be very beneficial. When students are not alert, an orienting response can help bring them into alertness so that they can attend to what comes next more efficiently (Smith, 2005). The use of vision stimulation to elicit an orienting response, thereby creating the alertness necessary for the instruction that follows, is an effective strategy (Thompson & Guess, 1989). If you use this strategy, you will need to frequently change the media used to elicit responses. Eventually the learner habituates to media presented repeatedly (Nelson et al., 2010). When it is not novel any more, the orienting response goes away.
When your student is alert, with or without the use of vision stimulation for orienting, you must teach a skill. The BVEP Design for Instruction provides a very simple lesson-planning tool. For each of the tasks you targeted for instruction during your administration of the BVEE, you will design instruction with the following components:
- Intention: The student wants something. This may be simple curiosity about an object resulting in the desire to touch it and examine it more completely. Or, the motivation for interaction may be social. In this case, the student may want to hear your enthusiastic response when he finds an object in a hide-and-seek game. Or, the student may want to complete a work task so he can get a good grade or move on to the next activity.
- Initiation: The student begins. In order for the best learning to occur, the student must initiate on his own the first behavior related to his plan. When this happens, there is a surge of electrical activity in his brain (Mesulam, 2000). If he wants to do a puzzle, he needs to try to find the piece he is looking for before you help.
- Execution: The student carries out the planned behavior. A level of difficulty in which the student can be successful on his own with some perseverance and self-correction is desirable. If a mistake occurs or a barrier stops activity, help should be given. Help should be specific and brief and should be required infrequently (Oxendine et al., 2004).
- Evaluation: The student likes or dislikes the results he achieves. Satisfaction makes repetition of the behavior more likely, but perfection is not required. In fact, general satisfaction with awareness of small errors generates higher levels of cerebral activity and more intense concentration in repetitions carried out with the intent to refine (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995).
- Correction: The student tries again with adjustments in mind.
If you cannot design instruction for a targeted task with these components, the task is not appropriate for visual efficiency instruction. For example, if the student does not really want to achieve a certain outcome, the task is not one in which visual skills should be addressed. Similarly, if a non-visual strategy is being used successfully, and the student does not like the results he achieves using visual strategies, the task is not one in which visual skills should be addressed.
Sample task
Tran’s Journaling Activity
Task: Get journal and pencil
Visual skill: Examining/fixating/3Dobject/identifying (category/skill/media/function from Table 7.1)
Components: Tran uses a tactual strategy to find his journal and pencil case in the compartment on the side of his desk. His TVI does not target this for visual instruction because the strategy works well. Tran opens his pencil case and begins looking for his favorite Spider-Man® pencil (intention and initiation). He quickly picks up a pencil with blue and red colors and puts it back in the case when, after close inspection, he realizes it is not Spider-Man® (execution and evaluation). He leans over the case, looks more carefully, and picks up a pencil with similar colors and internal details revealing Spider-Man® (correction). Tran’s TVI has gradually added pencils to the case that more closely resemble the Spider-Man® pencil. She helped Tran use his magnifier to inspect the designs after each addition. He likes to use his magnifier when new pencils are added, but he no longer needs it to find his Spider-Man® pencil.