Teachers have a thousand tasks to complete every day. Identifying and sharing accommodations is an important one that takes time. This blog post shows a resource that allows teachers to literally shop for accommodations like they shop for items on Amazon or Target.
Overview
Accomods is an online source of accommodations for special education and intervention. It is useful for both special education and general education students.
Here is a FB Reel and a YouTube video showing how this works. You can choose to browse for a specific accommodation by topic such as “attending to instruction” shown below. You can customize a plan by identifying strengths and weaknesses and Accomods will provide you a full plan. Or you can search for a specific accommodation.
The Plan
The resulting plan provides an explanation, examples, and links to implemented examples.
Some educators and parents of students with special needs are unclear about what is meant by the term inclusion. Some think it is having the student with a disability in the same location as “nondisabled peers.” Some think it involves doing the same exact tasks or academic work.
Sesame Street figured this question out years ago. The girl in the red shirt in the video below (video set to start with her) was experiencing inclusion, not because she was next to the other kids. She was not jumping rope but was most certainly included and appeared to love it! (Note: “inclusion” is not defined in IDEA, so formally this issue would be one of least restrictive environment.)
Below is a genius representation of inclusion (not my idea).
It appears that inclusion is sometimes viewed as a dichotomous choice. For example, I observed the student in a school who was the most severely impacted by a disability sitting in a grade level history class during a lesson communism. This was an effort to provide inclusion but was he was experiencing proximity.
Below is an example of inclusion for a student with autism in an algebra 1 class. Below left is a typical math problem. To the right is one I created for the student with autism. It was designed to help him understand the concept of matching inputs and outputs without using a lot of the math terminology. In his case, the focus in math was on concepts.
I used this site, Explorelearning, with a 7th grader with Aspergers who tested at a 1st grade math and reading level. We used the Photo Synthesis Lab (screen shot below) to gather experimental data on the hypothesis “what helps flowers grow?” He won at the school level and went on to district competition.
(As of April 2020 you can get free 60 day unlimited access.)
Effective instruction is effective because it addresses the key elements of how the brain processes information. I share an analogy to help adults (parents and educators) fully appreciate this.
Information Processing Model
Below is a model of information processing first introduced to me in a master’s course at UCONN.
Here is a summary of what is shown in the model.
Human senses are bombarded by external stimuli: smells, images, sounds, textures and flavors.
We have a filter that allows only some of these stimuli in. We focus on the ones that are most interesting or relevant to us.
Our working memory works to make sense of the stimuli and to package it for storage. It is like a computer, if there is too much going on, working memory will buffer.
The information will be stored in long term memory.
Either it will be dropped off in some random location and our brain will forget the location (like losing our keys)
Or it will be stored in a file cabinet in a drawer with other information just like it. This information is easier to find.
Analogy to Classroom Learning
Here is an analogy to what happens during school instruction. You are driving down the street, like the one shown below.
There is a lot of visual stimuli. The priority is for you to pay attention to the arrows for the lanes, the red light and the cars in front of you. You have to process your intended direction and choose the lane.
Other present stimuli may be filtered out because it is not pertinent to your task: a car parked off to the right, the herbie curbies (trash bins), the little white arrows at the bottom of the photo. There is extraneous info you may allow to pass through your filter because it catches your eye: the ladder on the right or the cloud formation in the middle.
Maybe you are anxious because you are running late or had a bad experience that you are mulling over. This is using up band width in your working memory. Maybe you are a relatively new driver and simple driving tasks eat up the bandwidth as well.
Impact on Students
For students with a disability that impacts processing or attention, the task demands described above are even more challenging. A student with ADHD has a filter that is less effective. One with autism (a rule follower type) may not understand social settings such as a driver that will run a red light that just turned red. Another with visual processing issues may struggle with picking out the turn arrows. Their brain may start to buffer, like a computer.
Are you a parent of a student with special needs who is struggling with a math topic? Are you a teacher figuring out how to differentiate for a particular student on a math topic? Pose your question and I will offer suggestions. Share your question via email or in a comment below. I will respond to as many as I can in future mailbag posts.
Here is a topic multiple educators and parents ask about:
I don’t want my child to be stuck in a room. He needs to be around other students.
Randy:
Often we view situations in a dichotomous perspective. Inclusion in special education is much more nuanced.
In math if a student cannot access the general curriculum or if learning in the general ed math classroom is overly challenging then the student likely will not experience full inclusion (below) but integration (proximity).
For example, I had an algebra 1 part 1 class that included a student with autism. He was capable of higher level algebra skills but he would sit in the classroom away from the other students with a para assisting him. Below is a math problem the students were tasked with completing. Below that is a revised version of the problem that I, as the math teacher created, extemporaneously for this student because the original types of math problems were not accessible to him (he would not attend to them).
I certainly believe in providing students access to “non-disabled peers” but for students who are more severely impacted I believe this must be implemented strategically and thoughtfully. Math class does not lend itself to social interaction as well as other classes. If the goal is to provide social interaction perhaps the student is provided math in a pull-out setting and provided push-in services in other classes, e.g. music or art.
Here are the details of example of a push-in model I witnessed that had mixed effectiveness. A 1st grader with autism needed opportunities for social interaction as her social skills were a major issue. She was brought into the general ed classroom during math time and sat with a peer model to play a math game with a para providing support. The game format, as is true with most games, involved turn-taking and social interaction. The idea is excellent but the para over prompted which took away the student initiative. After the game the general ed teacher reviewed the day’s math lesson with a 5-8 minute verbal discussion. The student with autism was clearly not engaged as she stared off at something else.
