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Individuals with mental retardation benefit from the same teaching strategies used to teach individuals with learning disabilities, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and autism. It is helpful to break tasks down into small steps and introduce the task one step at a time to avoid overwhelming the individual. Once the student has mastered one step, the next is introduced.

Verbal directions and lectures are not the most effective teaching approaches for any audience, and are especially unreliable methods for teaching mentally retarded students. Mentally retarded individuals do better in environments where visual aides such as charts, pictures, and graphs are used as much as possible. Such visual components are useful for helping students to understand what is expected of them. Using charts to map students' progress is very effective, for instance. Charts can also be used as a means of providing positive reinforcement for appropriate, on-task behavior (e.g., in conjunction with a token economy, as described below).

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Individuals with mental retardation require immediate feedback in order to make a connection between their answers, behaviors, or questions and the teacher's responses. A delay in providing feedback may interrupt the connection between cause and effect in the student's mind, and the point will be lost. Most people are kinesthetic learners who learn by doing, by completing a hands-on tasks and appreciating the results. This is especially true for mentally retarded students who cannot comprehend abstract lectures very easily at all. For example, a teacher who wants to teach the concept of gravity has several options: She can tell students that things are pulled towards the earth by a force known as gravity; she can show students how gravity works by dropping something; or she can instruct the students to drop something while teaching the concept. Chances are that the students will retain more information from dropping an object during the demonstration or by experiencing the act of dropping something, than by simply being told how dropping (gravity) works.

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Classroom arrangement for wheelchair/teaching tips - Geary - Jun 11th 2009

I work with mental retarded individuals(I.Q.-2-13)(6 to a class) in wheelchairs. What is the best seating arrangements? Right now they are in stations, learning paper tearing, identifying objects, and learnin how to rub lotion. Also, do you have any teaching tips, time managment, etc to make learning better?