Category: Special Needs

Keeping the Lines of Communication Open  – ELT and the Special Needs Learner

Looking at the title of this post, a reader may be tempted to wonder who is presumptuous enough to lump all the widely different kinds of “special needs learners” into one post. Surely there is a world of difference between the one learner in your class who can’t hear well, the one who can’t see well, the one who is dyslectic and the learner who can’t sit still for more than a few minutes.

Well, I am.

Because there is one thing that all these learners have in common. They need to have an open line of communication to you, the teacher, outside of the lesson. While adult learners may be able to tell the teacher, in front of the whole class, something like: “You spoke with your back to the class and I couldn’t hear you, please repeat that”, most children avoid drawing attention to themselves like they avoid the plague. Children, particularly those between the ages of 9-15 are much more concerned with what they believe their peers think of them than with ensuring they are getting the accommodations the need. They will nod emphatically to indicate that they have understood even when they haven’t, just to avoid any special attention from the teacher.

Therefore, the teacher and the learner need to find a way to communicate regularly in a manner which will not embarrass the child. The options are many, ranging from face-to-face (the student stops by during the teacher’s weekly yard duty) to weekly phone calls, emails or video chats. Not only will these short exchanges allow the teacher to ensure that the child understood technical information (such as which material must be reviewed for the exam) but will give the child and the teacher an opportunity to work out “secret signals”.

Consider these two examples:

When a teacher switches back and forth frequently between English and the mother tongue, a child with a hearing loss may have a difficult time following. It takes such a learner more time to register that there has been a switch and then an adjustment of lip-reading skills focused on needs to be made. Some teachers and learners agree on a tiny hand signal the teacher makes when switching languages.  No one but the student notices it.

Sometimes a teacher may not notice that her black marker (for the whiteboard) is beginning to fade away. Or perhaps the teacher may not pay attention that she/he has written on the board with letters that are smaller than the size needed.  The student with a visual impairment may pretend to suddenly have a cough, which alerts the teacher to the fact that the board must be examined.

In many cases, the children themselves are the best source of knowledge as to how to help them function in class. But they won’t say a word in class. The teacher needs the opportunity to listen to the student, outside of the classroom.

Be A Guide: Find The Way

There is no such thing as students with special needs or learning disorders. It is the society we live in that has created a special place for those who haven’t learned how to conform their uniqueness. We all were once special needs learners!

Before I share my story with you, let me share one really thoughtful and bold statement I heard recently from one psychologist. She said that it is the conformity, sterility and rigidity of society that doesn’t allow us to have time and patience to deal with special talents and the courage to see that this just reflects who we are as adults.

Teachers or parents, you can either address a special need as a disorder and use it as an excuse for your decisions or actions, or you can embrace it as an opportunity to look inside the pure nature of unspoiled learning that does not follow the norms yet!

As a teacher, a good one, you choose responsibility and the place where the sun shines on others. It is not about rewards, comfort or recognition. It is about being a guide — and the guide is never the main hero in a story.

Please never, never ever blame children for not making your life easier.

My story is about a little Italian boy I met during a summer school who stole my heart in the most sincere way possible. He came into my elementary class and all we shared at the very beginning were a very few, basic phrases in English. Very soon I found out about his dyslexia. I knew I wouldn’t be spending more than a couple of weeks with him, but I couldn’t give up on him.

The natural instinct to learn is very alive in kids and if they are not made to feel they are part of the class, they can act in ways we perceive as disruptive.

I am not trained to teach such kids so I had to rely on some basic elements of intuitive learning:

Be attentive

Be flexible

Be mindful (here and now)

I had to observe him, the things he did, the way he did them, and what he didn’t do, while paying attention to his smiles and the look in his eyes. I could go on with all the details but the thing is we eventually found out the way to teach each other, connect the whole class and break any form, order or disorder.

I noticed he was really talkative and for that reason he naturally used his mother tongue. He paid attention when I used pictures and when I was talking in small chunks of the target language. His eyes got that famous spark when I showed interest in his language.

Don’t put your comfort above the desire to learn!

As a result, we created our own little game. My homework was to remember the words in Italian he taught me and his work was to remember the same words in English. Every time we met we tested each other. I said an Italian word and he responded with the English translation. He said an English word and I had to remember the Italian equivalent. The whole class worked that way and we could build on that.

It may not be a very sophisticated technique or effective for everyone, but the point is that as a teacher you need to step back and bring out the best in your students by letting them work the way they prefer to work. I just spent some time to learn who he really is, not only who he appeared to be, and none of us gave up on each other.

Road Posts Along The Way 

Before I started working at my current high school, the man who interviewed me tried to impress upon me that the students were, “a bit of a challenge.”  They were futoko, which, he explained meant that they had missed over 30 days of a school year, not because they were truant, but because… and then he ticked off a laundry list of reasons. They had been bullied. They had anxiety disorders. They were diagnosed with light cases of Aspergers. They exhibited behaviors like mild self-mutilation. They had been victims of domestic violence. He looked at my resume, mentioned that he was happy I had social work experience in Chicago, shook my hand and offered me the job.  Funny thing, my social work experience hasn’t actually been all that helpful.  Not when I started and not now, five years into the job.

Now I know that futoko can be translated as school refusal syndrome. I’ve also taken in-services and learned that many futoko are labled in some way or another (ADHD, DD, LD), a garden of capital letters blooming throughout their school records. But being able to decipher a school record hasn’t taught me much about how to meet the needs of my students. Fortunately, my students are willing to tell me what they need themselves. All I have to do is pay attention to how they stand up for each other, and how they care for each other.

Here are six things that my students have taught me about how to create the kind of safe space that can foster learning in a classroom.  There is no particular order to this list.  On some days some things are more important than others.  Some of the ideas on the list might even seem contradictory.  That is because they are. Learners are people. There’s no manual for how to connect with people and there’s no map for how to go about learning. Still, a few road posts are better than wandering around lost.

1. Make every success a group success. My students all progress at different rates.  Some get stuck for weeks without any sign of improvement.  Some suddenly switch on and take in months’ worth of language in a few days. But when one of them passes a standardized test, wins a speech contest, or gets into university, they all celebrate. Because they are a language community, I do everything I can to foster this feeling. Learning to celebrate these successes—big and small—helps all the students feel as if they are moving forward. It is the tailwind that keeps them learning.

2. Honor and welcome who my student is today. Yesterday and maybe for the whole month before that, one of my students might have taken notes, been active in class, and flashed smiles here and there. But today a cloud hangs over his head. He can’t put together a full sentence. Maybe he doesn’t answer back when I say hello. Still, he is in school. He managed to pull himself through whatever darkness greeted him when he woke up in the morning and got himself to class. Thinking about what he could do yesterday is not going to help him do any better today. One of my students’ most common greeting to a friend in a funk is a simple, “I’m glad you’re here today.” It is a great greeting. I would even put it slightly ahead of “nice to see you,” on my list of useful phrases.

3. Focus on the language, not the person. My students have been bullied, pushed out and ignored. When they share something about themselves, it is a gift. When they correct each other in class (and they sometimes do), they have a way of saying a word and waiting for a few heartbeats for their classmate to respond. That one word and pause seems to change the gears of the conversation. It shifts it out of the personal. Now I try and do something similar to separate the content from the language and make the class feel safer. Jotting down student language on Post It Notes, correcting it, and laying it down on their desk is one way I’ve found to help depersonalize the language of a communicative act.

4. Focus on the person, not the language Often as I watch students have a conversation in my class, one of them makes a shocking grammatical error, and the other student does not comment on it at all. I think this probably has something to do with students’ ability to differentiate between an error, a mistake, and a slip. If you put the jargon aside, it is really about how sometimes people just can’t put together a decent sentence—in a second language, or even in a first. Depending on what else is going on with the person, sometimes those errors/mistakes/slips do not really matter very much. So on those kinds of days, let a student talk, and instead of checking for cracks in the surface of their words, dive a bit deeper down towards their intentions.

5. Have more patience for students than they have for themselves:  Missing 30 days, 100 days, 1 year, or 3 years of school can make anyone feel a little stressed about lost time. Compound that with a diagnosis that implies the future is less than well paved and it is no wonder my students get a little impatient with themselves. Fortunately, most of the students in class are in or have been through a similar situation. Perhaps that is why they never, ever, get impatient with each other. As the teacher, I’ve learned to take it a bit more slowly, extend my class wait time, and give hints as necessary until a student can answer any question I ask. Someday I hope to be as patient with students as they are with each other.

 6. Ignore general lists of things that should or shouldn’t be done for students. When talking with one another, my students have no such lists in mind. As far as I can tell, they also have no intention of making one, which seems to me to be a very good thing indeed. Watching them support, share, and relate with each other from moment to moment is the best way I’ve found to keep learning what it means to be the kind of teacher I need to be—for them and for myself.