TIRANA, October 21/ATA/-Thanks to the support teachers and psycho-social services providing assistance to children with disabilities in schools, it is succeeded to be avoided the phenomenon of dropouts that follows the isolation of these children because of failure to get integrated into the school environment.
The role of the support teachers is decisive in regard to the performance of pupils with disabilities. The presence and work of the support teacher, in addition to the subject teacher, significantly facilitates the integration of children with disabilities into mainstream school settings and provides a much better quality education for these children.
Valmira Ramaj, a support teacher at the “Kosovo” school, said that her work focuses in the emotional development of children and improvement of their school achievements.
“This is a regular class where I assist children with disabilities. Of course, this class is developed by following a specific program for every child with a disability. This is a program where the objectives are set for each of them. My focus is on mathematical and linguistic development for these children but of course what is very important is their emotional development, so engaging them with friends in various sports and drawing activities. To improve the achievement of these children, we develop certain tasks, for example by creating sentences in languages or maths with different math games, to do very simple math actions and so on,” said she.
According to her, the classroom teacher is unable to manage 100% all the pupils, so children with difficulties are assisted.
“The support teacher has an important role because he helps the teacher in the classroom. The role of the support teacher is to help both the teacher in the classroom and the child in need to be included in the classroom activities.
Psychologist Etel Turtulli said that, “The children with disabilities are for the most part supervised by the support teachers.
Since 2014, the guideline “On criteria of support teacher for the pupils with disabilities in public institutions of pre-university education” has been issued, namely to assign the support teachers in schools based on the number of children with disabilities that a school has./a.g/p.s./
