Interview with Isolde Adling

What kind of special needs education does your school take care of?

The ‚Schule an der Malchower Aue’ is a primary and a secondary school with focus on

• sports,
• vocational and practical training,
• environmental issues,
• health,
• media competence,
• innovation

The focus in special needs education is on ‚learning’.

This implies that we take care of pupils that have extreme and long-term deficits in their learning habits to cope with the demands of the regular school system even though they were offered individual support and special training sessions.
Our school is a support centre for special needs education. That means that our teachers and pupils either teach pupils here at our school or try to integrate them into regular schools by teaching such pupils at other schools.

As such a support centre we also assist pupils at other schools in the educational field of ‘emotional and social development’.
Here we especially support pupils that have severe problems in their emotional and social development and cannot be adequately taken care of at regular schools.

We gained our first experiences in supporting super-gifted children at primary schools in 2005/2006.

What are your pedagogical aims?

When we founded our school in 1996 we had the vision of lessons and teachers behaviour that focus on pupil-centered learning instead of directive learning. We succeeded at least a bit in doing so.

Pupils at our school have enormously changed throughout these last 10 years and are a constant challenge for us. The reality of pupils coming to our school shows that more and more have to cope with crises based on emotional problems or highly difficult family situations so that they hardly can accept learning at schools.

The role of the teacher has increasingly become the role of a social worker. We constantly try to make conditions at school more positive. The pedagogical consensus is to develop a differentiated learning offer to increase the learning competence and the will to learn among pupils in order to reduce conflicts and improve the fun of going to school. Pedagogical consensus also means to offer best training and support to pupils who need and want it.

Our pedagocial aims are to:

1. enable our pupils for an individually and socially satisfactory way of life
2. provide work relevant basic competences that are fundamental for a future integration into working life
3. avoid further increasing discrimination of special needs pupils by providing them with key qualifications for the research, selection and use of information and thus enable them to learn in their own responsibitlity.

Read the rest of the interview in English (pdf).

Редактор на сайта: Sylvia Binger Публикувано: 03.09.2008 Последна промяна: 12.08.2009