Certificate in Teaching Strategies for People with Disabilities

Course details

This accredited Level 7 course will help you develop and implement an individual training plan for a person with disability using the Systematic Instruction teaching strategy.

Course you will work in partnership with a service user to support them to develop a skill that relates to their own person centred plan.

Who Is This Course For?

Participants are likely to be experienced practitioners who:

• Provide learning services to people with disabilities
• Already have a social studies/care/community development qualification; and,
• Would like to obtain a formal qualification (level 7 minor award) that focuses explicitly on teaching strategies for people with disabilities

These include Care Workers, Healthcare Assistants, Family and Home Support Workers, Personal Assistants, job coaches and Community Care Workers.

Learning Objectives

After successfully completing the course you should be able to:

• Explain the key approaches to learning and discuss what Systematic Instruction and how it relates to other learning theories
• Apply Brown’s Top Down model for developing a learning programme to identify a meaningful task/skill for the focus person to acquire
• Behaviourally define the task to be learned
• Design a task analysis and a data collection/record sheet
• State the criterion or standard to which the task is to be learnt
• Complete a baseline recording for the target task
• Identify any relevant individual learner characteristics
• Implement appropriate learning strategies based on antecedent changes, consequential changes and modifications to the task and/or the environment
• Devise a skill maintenance and generalisation plan
• Evaluate your training experience for this assessment

Contents

The course blends online learning with face-to-face workshops.

Unit 1: Meaningful Training

• Training Issues
• Selecting a Target Skill
• Applying Brown’s Model in Practice

Unit 2: Task Analysis

• Developing an Effective Task Analysis
• Assessment Recording Methods

Unit 3: Systematic Instructional Strategies

• Instructional Strategies: Definitions
• Discrimination
• Five Discrimination Strategies
• Instructional Strategies
• Antecedent Changes – Delivering Prompts
• Consequential Changes – Reinforcement & Error Correction Procedures
• Modifying the Task or Environment

Unit 4: Maintenance & Generalisation

• Maintenance Strategies
• Generalisation

Unit 5: Implementing the Training

• Reviewing your Individual Training Plan
• Trouble Shooting
• Hints on Data Collection and Evaluation
• Recording your Training Session

Assessment

Successful completion of the course is dependent on undertaking a project. This will record your progress as you support a service user in developing a skill that relates to their person centred plan. This will involve:

• Summarising your understanding of how the principles of systematic instruction apply to the actual practice of supporting a person develop a skill
• Producing a training plan
• Critically analysing your experiences, performance and likely future development in the role

Qualification

The course is certified by the QQI/HETAC as a Level 7 Minor Award. Successful participants will be awarded a Certificate In Teaching Strategies for People with Disabilities. Successful graduates will hold 10 credits against the B.A. (Ord.) in Applied Social Studies (Disability).