Instructional planning Essay

Introduction Proper planning is a core prerequisite to an effective instruction process. Teaching disabled persons poses great challenges to instructors and calls for the careful planning of a lesson so that it may meet the needs of the learners. Disabled persons have special needs occasioned by hearing impairment, vision impairment; nervous problems as well as physical movement problems, therefore any good lesson plan must make sure that children with special needs receive as much gains from the learning process as their regular students. The learning process is very important; there is a need to avail services and facilities such as walking chairs for the physically disabled, hearing devices for the hearing impairment and any other necessary facilities. Another necessary adoption teachers can make to lesson plans to make them more responsive to the needs of the disabled includes the use of technologically mediated communication through computers to aid the learning process. In all adjustments to suit lessons to the special needs of learners, cognitive needs, psychomotor needs and the affective needs of the learner must be borne in mind. From both lesson 1 and 3 it is very clear that the lesson plan is only effective for a regular class. Notably the action verbs used for the objectives such as ‘by the end of the lesson learners should learn the colors’ is biased because the students are supposed to learn by sight or observation. When the teacher uses pictures as a resource material in the lesson, it implies that only the students with visual ability can benefit. The lesson can be adjusted to cater for the disabled and especially the visually impaired by deemphasizing the color aspect of the pictures and concentrating on shapes and texture which can effectively guide a disabled student to meet the lesson objectives. Another objective in lesson 1 and 3 requires the student to participate in physical activity. This again favors the students who are physically normal but it portends a challenge to the physically disabled to which physical activity may be a barrier to the learning process. The lessons can be adapted to suit the disabled students by only choosing the physical activities that the disabled can participate in or availing the necessary equipment to aid the physical activities. The lesson plans involve a lot of drawing and writing activities something that may be a barrier and a challenge at the same time to the physically disabled. Some students are not able to draw or write while others may not be able to even hold a pencil or crayon. Further, the lesson activities involve the use of music that is again insensitive to the hearing impaired. To make the lesson fully useful to the disabled students, the lesson plans should incorporate only special types of music which is responsive to the needs of the hearing impaired. The other key instrument to the lesson involves use of Braille or special computers, use of special needs expert to assist in the lessons as well as the strict use of materials that are responsive to the needs of the disabled learners. The other adaptation of teachers or disabled children is to involve a lot of games in the lesson plans activities. The games can help children to discover their ability to serve in spite of their challenges (Basil, & Reys, 2003). As a principle, every lesson plan should be a fit-all type of lesson plan to cater for different disabilities of the disabled students. Conclusion For a lesson plan to be effective, it has to bear in mind the cognitive, affective and psychomotor needs of disabled students. There is a need for teachers to design lesson plans factoring in the special needs of the disabled students so as to give such an equal opportunity as their regular counterparts. Only making changes to the lesson plan to reflect the needs of disabled learners can help teachers achieve learning objectives. References Basil, C. & Reys, S. (2003). Acquisition of literacy skills by children with severe disability. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, vol. 19, no. 1.