Chapter 3: Intervention with Children and

Youth who are Exceptional

When professionals apply skills to maintain or improve an individual's functioning, the process
is known as intervention. The establishment of educational and support services for young
children and their families is referred to as early intervention. Intervention includes habilitation,
rehabilitation, and remediation. A variety of interventions are available for children with
exceptional conditions. Generally, the greater the intensity of the disabling condition, the greater
the number and variety of interventions required.

Medical Intervention
Medical intervention includes surgery, treatment that is lifesaving, the controlled use of
medication, and supportive therapy. Surgery includes a wide variety of procedures such as
reconstructive surgery for cleft palates and orthopedic surgery for skeletal-system problems.
Psychopharmacology, or drug therapy, is designed to manage problems of behavior, activity,
emotion, and epilepsy.

Therapy
The treatment of an illness or disabling condition is referred to as therapy. For children with
exceptionalities, the major types employed are speech therapy, occupational therapy, and
physical therapy.

Social Intervention
Child welfare covers a variety of services designed to stabilize noneducational aspects of
children's lives, such as the family environment and the court system. Professionals involved
include social workers, family counsellors, foster parents, child advocates, and many others.

Educational Intervention
Education for children and youth who are exceptional is provided through a variety of
arrangements and alternatives.

Service Delivery Models in Education of Exceptional Children

Educational settings for children with exceptionalities range from the regular classroom to the
residential school to homebound instruction. These diverse settings are represented by the
cascade or continuum of educational services. Although the inclusion of students with
disabilities into general classrooms is becoming more prominent, placement in any setting is
determined by the unique needs of a particular child at a certain point during their school years.
The major administrative arrangements and support personnel for children with special needs in
Canada today are listed below.
1. Homebound/hospital instruction designed for children unable to attend school, usually because
of illness.
2. Residential and special schools, which provide special education to specific groups of
children. These may be day or residential facilities.
3. Self-contained special classes, which are usually located within regular schools. Children with
similar problems are grouped together and instructed by specially trained personnel.
4. Resource rooms, which allow children with exceptionalities to spend time with their peers in
the general classroom while still obtaining special help in the resource room.
5. The general classroom, which provides the least restrictive environment in that it allows the
maximum integration of children with exceptionalities with their peers.
6. Itinerant teachers, who provide individual assistance to children who are exceptional for
specific periods during the normal school schedule.
7. Consulting personnel, who fill many roles but generally do not provide direct services to
children who are exceptional. Rather, they give assistance to regular classroom teachers and
others involved with the child.
8. Paraeducators, often referred to as teacher aides or educational assistants, are an integral part
of the instructional team in that they often share responsibility in the area of learning facilitation.
9. Speech/language, physical, and occupational therapists, who are also important providers of
special education services.

Administrative Arrangements
Consultation occurs when two equals work together to discuss or solve a problem. Collaboration
is a process that involves an interdependent relationship among two or more people to achieve a
common goal. Educational teams are a concrete manifestation of the collaborative process.
School-based teams are designed to bring together all those who assist the student with an
exceptionality in a collaborative and/or consultative relationship. One of the major duties of the
team is to decide on both placement and program for a child assigned to special education.

Individual Education Plans

The process of adapting or modifying the general curriculum and classroom environment often
begins with an Individual Education Plan (IEP). Although formats differ considerably between
jurisdictions, most plans contain certain key elements, including but not limited to:
1. Child data.
2. IEP data.
3. Placement.
4. Assessment data.
5. A summary of the student's present level of performance across a range of domains.
6. The long-term or annual goals (a goal is a stated outcome desired as the result of some action).
7. Short-term objectives for each annual goal.
8. The specific educational and support services needed to attain each educational objective.
9. The personnel who will hold primary responsibility for specific long-range goals and short-
term objectives.
10. The anticipated duration of the services.
11. Specific evaluation procedures for each objective.
12. Procedures for re-evaluating the total IEP document.
13. Parent input and consent.
14. An invitation for older students to attend meetings and set their own goals.
Instructional Practices
There exists no universal method or instructional approach that is successful for all students who
are exceptional. Critical points to consider include the following:
1. Teachers must set out with effective teaching skills.
2. For students with mild disabilities, the changes in teaching methods are often not that obvious
or different.
3. Multiple strategies are necessary to accommodate the differences in learning that exist
between students with disabilities and their normally developing peers.
4. Strategies that have proven to be effective in integrated classes include precision teaching,
cognitive strategy training, monitoring of children's on-task behavior, small-group instruction,
appropriate pacing of instruction with group instruction, and appropriate pacing of instruction
with multilevel instruction, in which a main lesson is prepared and taught with variations
included for individual student needs.
5. Three broad general approaches of great relevance to inclusive classrooms are direct
instruction, co-operative learning, and peer tutoring.
6. Many of the traditional techniques that often work with normally developing students do not
always work with those who are exceptional. However, the reverse is true: the same instructional
strategies that work with students with special needs are the ones that work with all students.
Teachers will use procedures and techniques that, for purposes of clarity, we refer to as
accommodations, adaptations, and modifications in the physical, instructional, and psychosocial
environments. We can say that:

1. Accommodation is a change that assists a child's functioning in the environment; a technique

that eliminates or minimizes the learning differences by offering alternate ways of handling a
task.
2. Adaptations are procedures, changes, or enhancements that enable a student who is
exceptional to undertake tasks that he or she would not otherwise be able to accomplish easily.
3. Modifications step away from the general curriculum and have learning outcomes that are
substantially different from the prescribed curriculum. They generally apply to children with
significant disabilities.