Developing Accommodations Part 2: Providing Help for Your Students

How to develop instruction and classroom accommodations tailored to your students' specific needs.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Gaining Clarity

I sat at a meeting early on in my career that didn’t sit right with me. A teacher, whom I’ll call Mrs. Nelson, needed support with a student who was below grade level and not responding to the help she was giving him. She was concerned because she knew he was struggling and that she didn’t have the know-how to help him.

Mrs. Nelson presented work samples and shared with us what she’d done, which included small group re-teaching of skills that were lagging. After she’d given us her summary, the committee that sat with her in my classroom got to work. Each member of the committee had a book that listed accommodations for struggling students, and after Mrs. Nelson had explained her student’s difficulties along with what she’d tried, the members looked through that book and offered suggestions. Each suggestion was a good, solid one that had the potential to help struggling students. They were things like, ‘provide small group instruction’, ‘provide pencil grips’, ‘look at the student while you’re speaking’, and ‘use noise-cancelling headphones’. All of those are good things to do. But as the committee listed things for her to try, Mrs. Nelson’s face contorted with anxiety.

“But, I don’t think that’s what he needs,” was her response.

“Have you tried doing these things?” a committee member asked.

“Well, no,” Mrs. Nelson admitted reluctantly.

“Then how do you know they wouldn’t work?”

“Uh...I just know. Something doesn’t feel right about this process. He needs help, not a book of suggestions.”

I agreed with her, and I said so. But the committee challenged my hunch that these accommodations weren’t what Mrs. Nelson’s student needed. She and I looked at each other, bewildered.

Mrs. Nelson’s student didn’t get the help he needed that day. None of the suggestions worked, as she and I had suspected. But neither of us was able to say why these useful accommodations weren’t helping him. I was especially frustrated because I regularly came up with things to help my students. Why was Mrs. Nelson’s student not helped?

Over a decade later, I finally understand why. The committee skipped a crucial step: understanding the student’s neuro-sensory needs. These suggestions were given because they appeared in a book, not because they observed a need for them in Mrs. Nelson’s student. I also understand why Mrs. Nelson and I couldn’t articulate why we knew they wouldn’t work: we lacked differentiation in the area of observing students’ needs and student accommodations. She and I could not tell the difference between creating accommodations based upon what we’d observed in students and putting accommodations in place because a book said they were good things to try. Because we could not tell the difference between these two methods, we had no more than vague, but strong, feelings of unease that we could not put words to. This is what a lack of differentiation feels like: vagueness, a sense of something you can’t quite put your finger on.

Photo by sehoon ye on Unsplash

In this article, I’m going to show you how to provide a comfortable classroom environment and how to create accommodations based on students’ neuro-sensory needs. When I say ‘create’, I don’t mean ‘make from scratch’. I’m not talking about getting crafty or reinventing the wheel. (Although feel free to craft if that’s your thing!) What I mean by ‘create’ is to figure out what this student needs and to put that in place.

To show you how to do this, I’ll provide a written description that includes a few examples. In my following articles, I will demonstrate how to create accommodations for students of different ages and different aspects of school life that I have experienced either as a student or as a teacher.

Environment

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The environment is critical. Kids have to be comfortable in their environments before learning and growth can take place. Before creating accommodations to assist with instruction, make the classroom a comfortable, inviting place for them.