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| title | Accommodating Students with LD/SEN |
This is one of the most important things for me. I am so serious about educational accessibility. Here are some ways to approach students with learning disabilities or other special educational needs. Because I'll be teaching science, my focus will be on accommodating students in science classes, and because physics is so math-intensive, math learning disabilities and math anxiety is a special interest of mine.
All students learning any math will benefit from manipulatives, or objects used to represent mathematical concepts. These can be as simple as beans reprensenting numbers, to 3D-printed projections of extradimensional shapes. They are essentially math's answer to models in science: think of the ball-and-stick models of chemical compounds.
Manipulatives have been shown to provide long-term gains in mathematical ability; however, using them effectively requires extra effort from teachers, and may even require special training or meeting with a specialist.
For instance, students with math LD tend to have difficulty subitizing, or breaking quantities down into groups. So, if a student presented with two groups of five beans, they would need to count each individual bean to say that there are ten there. It is not enough to present them with two groups of five beans, to give them manipulatives; how that lesson is run, and how the knowledge is assessed and reinforced, is the most important factor.
Fortunately, there are a great deal of resources to make manipulative use accessible and widespread. The companies that make the manipulatives have lesson plans to accompany them, and websites like Math for Love and National Council of Teachers of Mathematics have further resources on theory and implementation. There are manipulatives that look like money; there are manipulatives designed specifically to teach place value, fractions, addition, and subtraction; there are virtual manipulatives, such as NumberBeads, in which students can drag, drop, slice, and meld strings of beads to develop their ability to subitize.
Because of the wide variety of manipulatives, there is no one way to implement them, so it is important that teachers familiarize themselves with the specific manipulatives they plan to use and are conscientious as they plan their lessons with them. Whatever my students' specific needs are, I'd look into finding a manipulative that can help make these abstract concepts concrete for them.
Students with math LD can struggle not just academically, but also emotionally. They can develop math anxiety because general education math classes do not meet their needs, and so they consistently underperform. In his article on math LD in Child Neuropsychology: Concepts, Theory, and Practice, Brian Butterworth included interviews with 9-year-olds with math LD about their experiences in math class:
Child 5: It makes me feel left out, sometimes.
Child 2: Yeah.
Child 5: When I like---when I don’t know something, I wish that I was like a clever person and I blame it on myself---
Child 4: I could cry and wish I was at home with my mum and it would be---I won’t have to do any maths.
And while math anxiety very frequently co-occurs with math LD, there are many students with no learning disabilities who still struggle with math anxiety. Every student deserves equal access to a math education that works for them, and addressing the needs of people with learning disabilities or anxiety is already an issue of equity: neurotypical students are not the only people whose needs must be met. But that issue goes even deeper when one realizes that a student's math anxiety may be borne out of stereotype threat, which is the sense of anxiety one experiences when they're worried about playing into a stereotype.
It is clear that, from purely a mental health standpoint, interventions to alleviate these students’ anxiety are absolutely necessary. But there is a further, more pedagogical motivation here, too: anxiety strongly affects academic performance and working memory, so addressing it will both help students take care of themselves and learn more effectively.
Fortunately, many interventions for other anxiety disorders are shown to work well for students with math anxiety. Practices rooted in mindfulness, like focused breathing exercises have been shown to both allay students’ fears about math and improve their performance on math assignments.
There are lots of structured breathing exercises that have been shown to alleviate anxiety, such as guided visualizations (for instance, keeping an imaginary feather aloft with your breath) and four-corner or tactical breathing: breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, hold for four seconds.
I really like four-corner breathing because it's a quick and easy way to ground yourself, and it's especially easy to implement while you're in the middle of something stressful and time-sensitive, such as a math test. Meanwhile, guided visualizations or guided meditation can be good to do as a class before a test. In fact, any of these strategies can be something we learn and do as a class; you don't have to have an anxiety disorder to experience anxiety, and these tools can come in clutch for anyone in a stressful situation.
Some of my favorite resources on mindfulness and breathing exercises are Stop, Breathe & Think, which has kid-friendly meditations and many resources for educators, and Coping Skills for Kids, developed by a children's counselor.
Students with very strong math anxiety should absolutely speak with the school counselor and/or a therapist specializing in anxiety for treatment options and other coping tools. Good anxiety treatment is really all about building a toolbox with lots of strategies to deploy when things get hairy, and the strategies I've mentioned, while often effective, are definitely not one-size-fits-all. Good anxiety treatment is also all about understanding the roots of your anxiety and re-evaluating your thoughts around them, and that takes lots of therapy and practice. And, of course, good anxiety treatment may also be all about raising your serotonin levels, which is something entirely beyond my control, as I am not a doctor.
As a well-intentioned non-expert with personal experience with mindfulness practices, I can introduce some of these techniques into my classroom, and if that's all a student needs, that is amazing. But for many students, they may just be stop-gap measures to help them cope while they seek treatment for the underlying issues. So I'd refer any students showing signs of math anxiety to go talk to the school counselor to get the ball rolling on treatment.
Journaling is another great tool used in treating all kinds emotional disorders, including anxiety disorders. And expressive journaling has been shown to be very effective for math anxiety. I'd love to use expressive journaling in my classroom, and that paper is a really neat read.
The authors told student volunteers that they were about to take a math test, and asked students to “write as openly as possible about your thoughts and feelings regarding the math problems you are about to perform.... really let yourself go and explore your emotions and thoughts.... Please try to be as open as possible as you write.” They then allowed students to freewrite for seven minutes before they completed the test.
Of the students with math anxiety, those who were highly expressive about their anxiety had higher performance gains than those who used less specific language, and all of those who journaled did better than those who did not. This suggests that emotional honesty is key to this process; so if I implement this, I'll emphasize that to my students, and make sure they know that no one will read their journals, so they can feel free to be as honest as possible.
I'm thrilled by this journaling intervention for few reasons. First, it's a good intervention for math anxiety; second, it's a good way to work some writing into my class; and third, it's a really good way to get all my kids some practice being honest with themselves and their emotions, which is so healthy, and so hard for teenagers! It's an important life skill that builds resilience, and I want my students to be able to transition into college life and adulthood as smoothly as possible.
Hello. My name is Laura, and I'm a fidgeter. My sister is a fidgeter, too. We use fidget tools to relieve our anxiety and help with focus. They're not toys (even though some can be bought in the toy aisle) and they can be an incredible asset to students, making them a valuable accommodation.
Fidgeting serves many purposes. Maybe a student is overstimulated and needs to release some energy in order to focus; maybe a student needs something to ground them in the here and now; maybe a student is autistic and needs to stim. Maybe a student is 100% middle-of-the-bell-curve neurotypical, and they still might find themselves clicking their pen or drumming on the desk. There are lots of reasons to fidget, and lots of ways to fidget, but they all serve to keep a student present and engaged in class. That said, lots of pen-clicking and desk-drumming can be very distracting, so it's important to establish good protocols with your fidgeters to make sure they're not getting distracted, or distracting others.
Because there's so many ways to fidget, there are loads of fidget tools out there to meet a wide variety of needs. Manual tools include spinny rings, fidget pencils, and medicine balls; I personally like something kneadable, such as slime or silly putty. There are chewable necklaces and clickable chains, textured cloths and silicone pads, and of course the dreaded fidget spinner---which raises an important question: when is a fidget tool a tool and not a toy?
Ultimately, it comes down to distraction. Is it distracting others in the class such that it's becoming a real problem? And is it distracting the fidgeter? For instance, I don't bring slime to class because when bubbles get worked it, it clicks and pops and distracts others, and when I'm putting it back in its bottle, trapped air makes for a bit of a ... sonic issue.
But I'm a Real Adult who is sufficiently self-aware to say, "I'm not bringing that slime in today; I'll find some other way to self-soothe if I get panicky." I'm also able to ask myself, "Is this helping me, or is it distracting me?" Younger kids are still learning how to do that, so teachers working with wee fidgeters may ask the student, with their parents, to agree to a fidgeting contract which establishes when, where, and how using a fidget tool is okay. Teachers also need to talk to parents about what the rules about figet tools are at home so those rules can be consistently enforced at school.
My sister actually had this accommodation, and it was one of her favorites---in retrospect, not at the time. At the end of every class, she brought her agenda up to her teacher, who reviewed it to make sure she'd written down her homework and important upcoming deadlines, and signed off on it. These checks started in elementary school and went through middle school, at which point my sister was totally sick of them, but now she says they were invaluable. Not only did they keep her on track academically, but they also provided scaffolding for her to be able to independently keep an effective agenda in college. And my parents loved that they had clear confirmation that my sister was keeping on top of everything.
So it's probably no surprise then that I'm a big fan of agenda checks: a quick check-in and sign-off at the end of class is so much easier and more pleasant for everyone than having a ton of assignments pile up, and the fact that it teaches important organizational and executive function habits makes it even better! Honestly, I think this would be a great thing to do with all students---especially in middle school when it's time to start thinking about the transition into independent adulthood.