Education for Persons with Psychiatric Disabilities

Up until the last few months I had the distinct privilege of teaching groups of adults with severe and persistent psychiatric disabilities. I do not possess any specialized training n teaching populations with special needs. I was obliged to teach classes as part of my responsibilities in my last employment. I am a teacher by profession and have taught children in the past. The challenge was to see if I could transfer some of these skills to a special population of learners.I found that many basic instructional methodologies were indeed transferable to clients with psychiatric challenges. Through trial and error I found that if the teacher were to use flexibility and creativity he or she could have success working with special populations of learners. A few years ago I was asked to prepare a training workshop on how to teach adults with psychiatric disabilities. Due to unfortunate circumstances I was unable to follow through with this project at that time. Now that I finally have some free time available I will attempt to write out what I have learned from my experience teaching exceptional individuals. In my next blogs I will start to outline what I learned from my experiences and observations.