Social Mainstreaming of Mildly Handicapped Students

Social integration of students can be defined in terms of their peer acceptance, friendships, and participation in group activities. Social integration of children with mild-to-moderate behavior and learning handicaps is often a major obstacle to successful mainstreaming in elementary schools. The regular classroom presents important opportunities for overcoming this obstacle. In this article we emphasize teaching social skills and addressing classroom relationships in order to make the most of such opportunities. To teach social skills, we recommend assessing skill and performance deficits as well as behavior excesses to reveal students' learning needs. Such needs may then be corrected by use of a simple but effective directive instruction method featuring teacher description and demonstration of needed skills, followed by student practice with feedback. Teacher control over practice is decreased as the student shows increasing mastery of the social skill. The teacher should also attend to relationships involving herself or himself, the mainstreamed student, and the regular class students. We note a variety of steps the teacher might take, before and after the mainstreamed student arrives, to increase the chances that such relationships are positive and support social mainstreaming.