Don't children have to learn to crawl before they can learn to walk?
It would be wonderful if all children were able to learn to sit, stand, and walk by going through the sequence of developmental skills typical of most infants; but obviously, it doesn't always work. Surveys conducted at the Blair Learning Center, birthplace of MOVE, showed that students with severe disabilities either did very well learning to move independently or they became vegetative. There were very few students who improved their motor skills once they were past the age of seven and all but one of the students regressed if they could not perform the skills independently.
Snell, 1987, suggests that some teachers, especially those who are new to the field of special education, fail to select meaningful instructional goals for students with severe disabilities because the teachers are following the tenets of most developmental assessment devices. These assessments suggest that the first skills to be taught are the ones the student has failed on the list of skills normally performed by infants and toddlers. The theory behind the developmental model is that children need all of the skills displayed by infants in order to master skills displayed by older children. Although these teachers are able to teach their students, the skills the students learn are not relevant to the needs of daily life and often emphasize the student's disability because the skills are meant for children much younger.
It often takes years to teach a student with severe motor delays to "marine crawl" (stomach on floor), an equal number of years to teach the student to assume a high creeping position, and even more years to teach the student to creep on hands and knees. For our students with the most severe disabilities, even the most diligent parent/therapist/teacher would, at best, end up with a 22-year-old student whose sole means of ambulation is crawling. One has to ask oneself, "How often do adults use crawling?" Most people give up long before then and therefore, the student graduates with no means of ambulation.
Methods for determining what should be taught has been the weakest link in special education for students with severe disabilities. According to Snell, 1987, the selection of skills to be taught is possibly the single most important factor in determining the quality of education the student will receive. Although special education teachers have proven repeatedly that virtually all students learn, albeit some more rapidly than others, not all students are learning skills that are pertinent to daily living and to expanded environments in adulthood. The most successful teachers are those who have taken the time and energy needed to sort out priorities for individual students by talking frequently with the care providers and by taking an "ecological inventory" of the student's current and future environments.
This is the model followed by the MOVE Program to insure that students graduate from the public school system with skills necessary to their adult lives. The students are taught to sit, stand, and walk first. If there is still educational time left after these skills are taught, other areas (such as creeping, rolling, climbing onto furniture, walking sideways, etc.) can be addressed if deemed important.
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