Every child is special

teaching young children with special needs

Barbara Nellestijn

Isabel Peters

pp. 149-163

in: Bert van Oers (ed), Developmental education for young children, Berlin, Springer, 2012

Abstract

This chapter describes how teachers can fine-tune their interactions to the interests and abilities of young children with special needs, in order to get them successfully engaged in meaningful learning processes. The chapter discusses how teachers, starting out from Vygotskij's "compensation hypothesis", can deliberately promote the learning of these children with the help of a specific interaction model, while still maintaining the pedagogical aim of promoting broad and meaningful development in all children. To achieve this, teachers engage children in shared guided activities, encourage them to find solutions together, maintain high expectations for each child and give appropriate help for meeting these expectations, open new points of view for the children, and evaluate the outcomes and possible follow-up activities with the children. By so doing teachers succeed in making the differences among children developmentally productive.