#72 Strategies to Accommodate Struggling Learners

In many classrooms, teachers have students who don't do well and haven't been identified as having a disability.  A student for whom English is a second language might also be struggling with the language barrier and/or might also have a disability issue compounding academic problems.  The challenges for both groups of students can sometimes look identical, and determining the exact nature of the issue may take quite a while.  In the meantime, parents who are homeschooling, K-12 teachers, or college professors will have students in a class who need immediate help.  Today we look at "Accommodating Learning Disabilities in the English Language Classroom," by Jimalee Sowell and Larry Sugisaki from The English Teaching Forum.  We talk about supporting those struggling students without an official learning disability diagnosis using 4 methods of instruction: The Inclusive Classroom, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Scaffolding, and Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS),

Accommodating Learning Disabilities in the English Language Classroom

Episode 54 The Importance of Universal Design for Learning

Episode 9 Is Learning Style a Thing?

#27 LD Evaluation: What You Should Know

#38 The Complexity of Dyslexia

mickieteaches@gmail.com

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Transcript

Mickie  0:00  

Good teaching is good teaching and whether you are a teacher or a parent, when you're helping your kids with their homework or with their schoolwork, using good techniques and good strategies make a big difference. But what if your child has a learning disability? Or what if your child is bilingual? Or what if you have a bilingual child with a learning disability? There are many levels of difficulties in all of these situations that a teacher or a parent will find within a standard classroom. So just what do you do to help those children and young adults in college learn that's what we're going to look at today, whether they struggle with a learning disability or bilingual or need support in both areas. So welcome to College, Disabilities, and Success. Episode 72 Strategies to Accommodate Struggling Learners with Mickie Hayes. The opinions in this podcast on my own, please reach out to your college physician or legal services for additional information. 

Sometimes teachers and professors find themselves in situations where they know that a child is struggling, they know that a student is having a hard time, but they don't quite know why it could be a learning disability, it could be an English language difficulty, and sometimes you just don't know why the struggle is there. And you may have a student who hasn't been identified with a learning disability, and they're just barely hanging on trying to figure out what's going on. So today we're going to look at some techniques and strategies that you as a parent, if you're homeschooling or you as a teacher, if you are in an inclusive classroom do you need to figure out when you run into students who just don't seem to get it, there's an article written in 2021 from the English teaching forum called accommodating learning disabilities in the English language classroom. And it's written by Jimmy Lee Sol and Larry Sasaki. And I wanted to share this article with you today because it is so representative of so many students who struggle when sometimes the instructor, teacher or parent just doesn't really know what the reason is for the problem. And without an extensive evaluation for a learning disability, there's really no way to tell if you're looking at a learning disability as such, or if you are looking at an English as a second language problem. So that's what we're going to talk about today how to teach those students regardless of the situation. Now, when a student has gone to Disability Services at a college, they are set up for the accommodations. And at that point, the professor can just follow the accommodation guidelines. And usually things are pretty straightforward. But many, many times two things could be happening. First of all, there are a lot of students who know they have a disability have been identified with a learning disability but don't want to go through Disability Services to get accommodations. They are often of the mindset that once they get to college, they'll be able to handle the work that's thrown at them. Sometimes students come into the classroom and they are coming from a bilingual situation in a bilingual home. And in many times students speak one language at school and a second language at home to the family. And some students are very adept at switching back and forth and others struggle with those changes back and forth. And if a student has a learning disability on top of it, that really becomes complicated for the student. So the question becomes what can we do in the absence of a diagnosis and a support team to help so first of all, in the article accommodating learning disabilities in the English language classroom, the instructor needs to understand if the material that they are teaching is culturally pedagogically and linguistically appropriate to meeting the needs of all students. There are no cultural or linguistic biases in the material that may not be helping the students. If most of the students in the class are struggling with the assignment or with the task that they were given, then chances are it's not the student’s issue. It has something to do with the way the material is being taught or explained. However, if most of the students seem to be understanding the directions and they're getting down to work and not showing any problem and then a few of the students are having problems that could be an indication that there's something else going on with that student. Determining whether the child is dealing with a learning disability or a language learning difficulty can be very challenging because there are similarities in both of those situations. And there are some shared behaviors that you're going to see such as difficulty following directions, poor auditory memory, difficulty concentrating.

Mickie  5:00  

Seeing challenges processing difficult language and a tendency to become quickly frustrated. But the reason for those problems is unknown. There may be a situation where the student with a learning disability has a problem with phonological awareness. But second language learner is having difficulty just distinguishing between the sounds that they're hearing in an unfamiliar language, there could be problems with recognizing sight words when the student has a learning disability. But there could be that same problem when there's a second language issue. So there's really no way to tell without an extensive evaluation, what you're looking at in many cases. And so the purpose of today's article is to give you ways to accommodate both groups within a standard classroom. And the first suggestion they make is to have an inclusive classroom. And an inclusive classroom is a classroom that is designed to meet the learning needs of all students, including students with disabilities or other learning challenges. An inclusive classroom is designed to remove barriers. And so they look at teaching strategies and techniques that do just that they talk about using guided note taking as a strategy in the inclusive classroom. So if you are doing guided notes with the young adults, then you want to give them specific points or specific questions that they need to answer as they're listening to the lecture or as they're taking notes from the text. But they're not just randomly taking notes, they're taking notes with a purpose guided by these points in questions. The second strategy that the article suggests is to make students aware of the daily schedule, and that is as simple as a chart or Flipboard, or something in the room that just has the daily schedule or a list of tasks that they have to do so that the students know exactly what's expected. In a college classroom, very often, the instructors will lay out the goals or the plans for that day's lesson, whether they're in the syllabus, or they do it aloud in the classroom, be on the lookout for student fatigue, even in college students get tired or bored or start to drift. And so changing up what you're saying and

Mickie  7:16  

how you're saying it will make a difference. And you can help combat the student fatigue at that point, follow a systematic approach when you're teaching. In other words, as I said a moment ago in college giving an overview of what's coming, break down the outline up front, let the students know what the plans are, where they can get the information in the book. But giving them some framework or outline really helps make a difference and give very explicit directions and explanations to the process that you are teaching. This can be a real challenge in a math class especially. And I've known math teachers who have the students read the book, look at the material and figure out what to do. And then if the students can't figure it out, they help them out later with it the next day or when the problems arise, but they don't give any upfront explicit explanations. And that really challenges a student with a disability or a student that is bilingual, because they just have to do twice or three times the work just to figure the things out on their own, that maybe they can't do, but they could really accomplish and understand if you just took the time to give them very explicit directions. And using activity based learning when it's possible. It's not always possible. But when it is possible, tying the lesson into some sort of activity, whether it's a writing task, or a spelling test, or a presentation or a video or anything that's going to be some sort of an activity away from the norm. The second approach or the second strategy is using your Universal Design for Learning UDL. Now, if you are not familiar with Universal Design for Learning, and you want a refresher on it, go to podcast number 54 The Importance of Universal Design for Learning, where I go into extensive detail about what Universal Design is and how it works and why it's so very important that basically with Universal Design for Learning, you provide multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representation, multiple means of action and expression and Multiple Means of Assessment. And so the first tenet of Universal Design for Learning is to provide multiple means of engagement. In other words, you have students work in pairs or group work or alone, you might have them do projects that have strict guidelines. You might have them do projects with loose guidelines, but you find multiple ways to engage the student. The second tenet of Universal Design for Learning is to provide multiple means of representation and that means you teach things using the visual auditory tactile, kinesthetic methods. You can check out podcasts Number nine, where I talk about visual, auditory and tactile, kinesthetic activities that you can do in the classroom. But using multiple means multiple modes of teaching really enhances the opportunity to reach everybody. The third tenet of Universal Design for Learning is to provide multiple means of action and expression. And that's how students output the material that they've learned. And so they could output through an oral explanation through an written explanation through tests, worksheets, reports, videos, projects, things like that. There's all kinds of ways. And then you find in the fourth tenant of Universal Design for Learning Multiple Means of Assessment. In other words, you're looking at various ways to assess everything does not have to be an essay test, everything does not have to be a multiple choice test, you can mix and match. You can have students do graded projects, you can have them do projects alone, or projects together, these are all under providing multiple means of assessment within Universal Design for Learning. So we talked about the inclusive classroom as the first strategy. And we talked about Universal Design for Learning as the second strategy. The third strategy is called scaffolding and scaffolding is an instructional technique where a teacher or an assistant or even a really capable peer assists the learners to complete a certain task in stages. So with a scaffolded instruction, the teacher uses a step by step process in order to take a student to the completion of a task. So they may start with something very basic and work into something more detailed, but somehow or another, they scaffold the learning from one level to another level. In the article, it talks about following a brainstorming session. And all of those stages in the writing process, students draft the paragraph, and then they receive some kind of feedback on their draft, I used to have students evaluate each other's first drafts to give feedback on how another person would react to their papers. So that's a scaffolded lesson. And then they go back and rewrite their rough draft and do a second draft and possibly a third draft depending on the situation before they actually have their final piece of writing. And all of those stages in that writing process are scaffolded lessons in any subject, whether it's in the K 12 system or at college can be done in a scaffolded lesson, especially the more complex concepts that need to be taught scaffolding is very effective for English language learners. And it's very effective for students with learning disabilities

Mickie  12:41  

because it gives them a chance to break up and assignment into manageable parts. The fourth strategy that will help students whether they have a learning disability, or whether or not their English language learners is Peer Assisted Learning Strategies, they call them pals, Pa L. S, Peer Assisted Learning strategies, and those involve things like partner reading, paragraph shrinking and making predictions. So sometimes reading with a partner taking turns analyzing the text together, shrinking a paragraph down into its main ideas and main points, predicting what's going to come next makes a big difference. And when I was a college professor, I used to do a lot of peer assignments where they would partner up, the students seemed to enjoy it and like it, and they actually I watched and they actually were having conversation about the topic they didn't stray, and it gives a student a chance to get another student's point of view, especially if one of those students is not quite clear on what's happening. Talking to another student about it will sometimes make a difference. So using pills Peer Assisted Learning strategies is very helpful. So today, we covered an inclusive classroom, Universal Design for Learning, scaffolding and Peer Assisted Learning Strategies. And all four of these are very good approaches that will make a huge difference. Whether you're teaching in a classroom or you are homeschooling your child at home, taking these techniques and strategies makes a world of difference. Because good teaching is good teaching and good teachers know that just telling the information and assuming everybody got it is not enough, especially for students who struggle regardless of the reason. It's very important to think through the material that you're teaching and the degree of difficulty and the degree of rigor that the student has to have in order to understand the material when you are really supporting students with disabilities or students that are English language learners. Regardless of the situation good teaching benefits, everybody, not just those students. If you have any questions or comments, please Feel free to send me an email, I am at Mickieteaches@gmail.com. That's M I C K I E teaches@gmail.com. And check out my website and many of these topics are covered on my website at Mickey teaches.com. If you would like more information about Universal Design for Learning, check out podcast 54 and Learning Strategies and Learning Styles in podcast number nine. And if you want to know more about diagnosing a student with a learning disability, check out episode 27 LD Evaluations, What You Should Know in Episode 38, The Complexity of Dyslexia, all of the links for everything that I've mentioned today will also be in today's show notes. So you'll get a copy of the article and links to all of the other podcasts that I mentioned recently. In the meantime, thank you for joining me today and have a great rest of the day. And we'll talk again soon by information contained throughout this podcast has been gleaned from my own personal experiences, but to ensure accuracy, please contact the Disability Services at the college of your choice to have first hand information and the most up to date policies and procedures followed for your particular institution of higher education. The content in any of these podcasts is not intended as a substitute for information from legal, educational or medical professionals. Always seek the advice of your attorney or qualified health care provider with any questions you may have with regards to legal educational or medical concerns.

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