Developing Accommodations Part 1: The Process

A step-by-step guide for creating accommodations tailor-made for your neurodiverse students.

The goal of my course, Understanding Neurodivergence, is to teach you how to make home or school more accessible for kids by creating a comfortable environment for them. In my experience, when the environment meets their needs, kids learn. So far, I’ve given you the background knowledge and have shown you how to observe your students. Now, it’s time to explain how to take everything you’ve learned to create effective accommodations and tailor your instruction to your students’ needs. Because of the length of this article, I have broken it up into two posts. The first part will be a step-by-step process for identifying your students’ neuro-sensory needs, determining whether their environment and the task meet their needs, along with data collection pages. I will give you a full written description. At the end of this article, I will provide a cheat sheet so you can refresh your memory at a glance. The second post will be an in-depth tutorial about how to figure out what accommodations are needed and how to implement them. Let’s get started.

Photo by GeoJango Maps on Unsplash

The Process

1.

First, observe your student(s). You will want to notice what sensory behaviors they are displaying. When you’re new to observing, it may help to circle things you observe on a checklist. You can use my short Observable Sensory Behaviors page if you want something simple to use. If you want a more thorough checklist, you can use my longer sensory checklist, Thorough List of Observable Sensory Behaviors. While you’re observing, don’t worry about interpreting what you’re noticing. Just collect the data.

Links to data collection pages:

Observable Sensory Behaviors

Thorough List of Observable Sensory Behaviors

2.

Take the sensory data you’ve collected and look for patterns. You can look at the checklist you used to see which category had the most items circled. You can also plot the behaviors you noticed on the brick wall on the back of the Observable Sensory Behaviors worksheet. (Link) Here is a link to a large brick wall worksheet with more room to write down your observations.

More complex skills like time management and organization depend on all the skills below them, such as proprioception and touch. Similarly, if a student struggles with hearing and vision, they’ll probably also struggle with skills higher up on the wall. Do you notice multiple visual or auditory behaviors? Maybe you notice a lot under touch or vestibular.

Typically, I only consider a sensory system to need support if I notice three or more behaviors for a given system. However, if a student is only displaying one auditory behavior, but they’re doing it A LOT, that’s also a sign that the system is struggling.

If you’re new to observing for sensory information, you may not notice a lot of the behaviors the student has. So if you’re new to this kind of data collection, your student is obviously struggling, AND you only see a handful of behaviors, take all of the behaviors you notice as representing their need and develop accommodations accordingly.