Teaching Students With Mental Retardation

Teaching Students With Mental Retardation

The identification of mental retardation, or intellectual disability (which, rather than a blanket term, is becoming the preferred term for mental retardation), often occurs early in a child's life. For this reason, its identification must be made with great care, so as not to refrain from challenging the student throughout their development in an appropriate way. Essentially, mental retardation or intellectual disability is diagnosed through an observation of a lack of ability to meet developmental and educational goals, and often a simple lack of curiosity in learning in any manner that is natural to almost all children. Not many cases of mental retardation have known specific causes, which has made the term's applicability a matter of contention. Other mental and developmental disorders have known causes and mechanisms, and so are more easily classified, but a significantly lower intelligence quotient without other factors leads to an MR classification.

This classification still comes with a legal entitlement for children with mental retardation or intellectual disability to a free and appropriate education, of course, just as it does with children of all physical and mental developmental issues. The primary issue with the classification of the mental retardation label is that it is not really a specific developmental problem, but can serve as a catch-all for developmental issues of unknown origin. While there are specific methods for engaging with students with better-understood disorders such as autism, no such detailed examinations have been made of children with mental retardation. Continual efforts to engage and stimulate their learning must be made in order to ensure that they are progressing to the utmost of their abilities, and not ignored.

Because of the lack of clarity and certainty regarding mental retardation or intellectual disability, the effect of having students with this issue in a classroom can be somewhat more chaotic than with other developmental disorders, where specific modes of instruction have been developed. It can be difficult to predict what a student with mental retardation might be stimulated by, and there are certain areas where individual students might simply have no interest. This can make it incredibly hard to involve them in classroom activities even when special accommodations and attempts are made. Students with mental retardation are not especially disruptive, and do not tend to make learning difficult for others, but this actually runs a greater risk of their going ignored as the classroom's education develops and progresses. For this reason, specific and repeated attempts to engage students with mental retardation in every aspect of the classroom and its activities is seen as the best -- and often the only -- method of encouraging development.