Making Accommodations For Safe Communication

Early this week, I observed a self-contained classroom for students with low incidence disabilities. At least two students had Down Syndrome, several had some form of autism, and others had multiple disabilities. The range of accommodations and degree of differentiated instruction was really remarkable, but there were two accommodations that I thought were especially noteworthy, and both of them centered around creating and maintaining a safe environment for communication.

One student, R, had a lot of difficulties relating to others: she was uncomfortable with eye contact, her speech was echolaic, and she didn't seem to process the questions asked of her. R became pretty agitated by a series of questions asked by Ms. A, and began to rock back and forth; she then left her seat and began to pace back and forth in the back of the room. Ms. A called her back to her seat, offered her her hand, and said "Squeeze to safety." R took Ms. A's hand and squeezed repeatedly until her rocking subsided and she had calmed down. I thought this was a really touching moment, and an excellent accommodation for this student.

Another student, E, had some form of mental retardation. She was completing a math worksheet, and the teacher's aide, Ms. R, was offering to help E with it. Ms. R asked if E wanted help on the worksheet several times, but E was silent; eventually, Ms. R held out her hand and told E to "touch my hand if you want help". This both allowed the student to accept help without having to ask for it, and also allowed her to do so without having to vocalize, which may be difficult for her and may have drawn the attention of her classmates.

While neither of these specific accommodations are appropriate for most general education students, it seems to me that the idea behind them could be easily applied to most classrooms: give students ways to feel safe and to safely ask for help. If you have a struggling student who is embarrassed about asking for extra help in class you could arrange a shared signal that they could give you that indicates they need extra instruction. I imagine it's also important to devise non-stigmatizing ways to sort students into groups, especially if one of the groups is low-performing; you want to differentiate your instruction in this environment, but you also want to allow students to save face and be comfortable accepting differentiated instruction or extra help.

- O + B