Preferential Seating and You (Part Two)

Hey, it's a school! A school of sardines. I'm winking at you in an exaggerated fashion right now, via the internet.

Anyone reading this blog feel as though they've got a lot of extra space in their classroom? Anyone? Just, you know, raise your hand... lots of room to move around... empty desks...

(crickets chirping)

Ah.

I got to chat a little with one of our mainstream teachers today, taking a small bite out of his already short prep period. I still marvel at the many teachers I meet who give of this precious time so gracefully. When approached during those measured, quiet minutes of thinking and planning time, my reaction is similar to a cat who is approached by another cat while eating. A growl forms deep in my throat, giving warning to all those nearby that I'm feeling threatened; if the intrusion continues, I bat repeatedly at the interloper's head with both paws (!) until they go away and I can resume my photocopying.

To the point: this teacher is a prince of a human being: a gentleman who always greets me with a smile, even when it's early in the school year and he knows that I'm walking up his ramp to nibble away at his prep time. He knows I'm stopping by to add stress to his life. He would be well within his rights to greet me at the door with a can of pepper spray.

Stepping into his classroom, I look around. Desks. More than thirty desks. They have been pushed into neat rows, tight walkways winding their way up and down. There is, maybe, two feet of space between the frontmost desk and the whiteboard. There is, maybe, two feet of space between the rearmost desk and the back wall. Near the entrance, the teacher has carved out a small man-cave of space, replete with books and teaching implements: yardsticks, hole-punches, small brass devices for calculating the position of the stars while saving the world each day. A large table is covered from end to end with large stacks of photocopied something.  I ask if I can help with anything while we talk, tilting my head towards the stacks of something. He politely declines my offer of help, much as a drowning man might politely decline the offer of a thrown life-preserver from the side of a rescue vessel.

I am struck by how many kids -- how many brains and bottoms -- must occupy those seats during any given lesson.

During my most horrible, run-crying-to-the-union school years, I've never counted more than thirteen heads in my room during morning attendance.

This teacher says: "On your student's first day in my classroom, I don't think I actually made eye contact with him once during the entire time he was here. The other kids with special needs consumed almost all of my time, attention and energy during our lesson."

I forget, sometimes, how much - how much, how many, how? Just - how?

My entries on preferential seating will continue in a future "Part Three" with all those tantalizing details that I teased in my last writings. For tonight: just this simple thank you to all the mainstream teachers who take on so much for so little. I feel honored and humbled to work with you.

Preferential Seating and You (Part One)

Welcome back, everyone!

I hope your summer was both restful and fun. I have a vague, sepia-tone recollection of summer vacation being both of those things. As I age, and as my daughters take a more decisive command of our household during the summer months, I am finding more and more that "rest" and "fun" have become mutually exclusive experiences. I can enjoy either, but only at the expense of the other.

I thought I'd take a few moments to address a common IEP accommodation for deaf and hard of hearing kids: preferential seating. This accommodation is so universal that this blog is (surprise!) actually named after it. More often than not, "preferential seating" is interpreted as meaning a seat in the front, close to the whiteboard and teacher.

Intriguingly, teaching while rooted to the front of the classroom and surrounded by comatose students is no longer considered sound educational practice. Instead, teachers are expected to move nimbly about the room, taming lions and starting fires using only their bare hands and captured methane gas. They might project images onto a screen in the front of the room while speaking in the back of the room using a microphone that projects their voice from the side of the room while directing small, collaborative groups in the middle of the room. 

I have seen teachers teach from atop a lab table while hula-hooping. I remember my high school physics teacher continuing to lecture while in full pursuit of a flaming dry cleaning bag as it floated into a neighbor's tree. I am not making this up.

Where, I ask, would the preferred seating be for this particular circus act?

The default application of this accommodation continues to be, in most cases, a seat at the very front of the room, with a chair facing the student where the interpreter will be deployed. In many situations, this works out pretty well. The interpreter is in a predictable location, which reduces the likelihood of catastrophic (although potentially entertaining) collisions. Many teachers continue to teach dynamically from the front of the room, making a front-row seat an appropriate accomodation. Often, after a brief period of intense attention from the students, stationary educational interpreters find that they can fade into the background as the novelty wanes: a transparent tool giving the deaf child access to the classroom curriculum. 

As is often the case, I'm going to encourage y'all to go a little deeper.

Does the student wear hearing aids, or is he or she totally deaf? Does the student use a classroom FM system? Have you seen the kid's aided audiogram: a easy-to-understand graph that provides vital clues as to how much a student can hear in a variety of situations? Is one ear better than the other? Does the student wear glasses? Does the student have additional learning disabilities? (An estimated 20%-50% do: source) Can the classroom Radium system make it *more*  difficult for the student to understand what you are saying? Does the student have a cochlear implant or does he or she rely totally on conventional hearing aids?

Do you, as a teacher, move around the classroom the whole time, or do you teach primarily from one location in the room? With the advent of Common Core, are you doing a lot more group work? Computer work? Whole class discussion? Have you implemented rules for turn-taking in group discussion that makes it possible for the interpreter to clearly point out who is speaking and what they are saying? Can the student take in the teacher, the interpreter, and any visual aids you are using within a single field of vision, or must they shift their gaze between the three - not to mention notes or work on their desk - in order to follow instruction?

As you can see, there can be a lot more to this seemingly innocuous detail than first meets the eye.

It's my belief that with a small amount of work, a little courage and a few moments of reflection, this tiny IEP detail can become something meaningful: an accommodation that can truly bring a child's mainstreaming experience to life. 

I will be posting a second, more detailed installment on this topic in a few days. In the meantime: I am at your disposal if you are interested in taking a closer look at this accommodation. I think you'll be amazed at the huge difference that very small changes can make. :)

We Should Teach Yoga!

One advantage to my terrible iPhone camera and my terrible photography skills is that student confidentiality is always protected! Even the photos I take of the students themselves are completely unrecognizable. ;)

The picture above is actually a photo of my interpreter / student / classroom schedule for this year. I can say in all sincerity that...well, that this is nuts. One or two of the mainstream kids in particular are giving me fits. Seriously, I have the twitchy eyelid, the random cold sweats - the whole business. With DIS pullout (speech, vision, etc.) there honestly doesn't seem to be enough hours in the day.

This post may seem, at first blush, to be a thinly-veiled attempt to guilt you all into adhering to a rock-solid, 100% unyielding and inflexible schedule for my own convenience as I attempt to schedule my own instructional program against yours.

Well, okay. It's sort of that.

I know, of course, that teachers - more than any other of God's creations - must be resilient and flexible to survive. You must bend to the assembly, to the minimum day, to the state standard requiring that all students be able to recite the Declaration of Independence, in the dark, hanging upside down by a trapeze. You've worked out an agreement with your grade-level teaching team that Social Studies will be taught during second period on Wednesdays and Thursdays, except when it's on Tuesdays, and never under a waxing gibbous moon. Also, second period should include part of third period, at least on every other Friday.

Complicating matters further is this frequent IEP gem: "Student will be mainstreamed for all subjects EXCEPT Reading / ELA."

As we begin to implement Common Core, isolating ELA in this fashion seems heretical.

I am unabashedly grateful for the contributions of you, our mainstream teachers - for your hard work, for your tolerance of additional adults and children in your already overcrowded classrooms, for your willingness to go the extra mile for kids that really need your help. You never ask for thanks (and receive thanks far less often than you deserve). In all past school years, when teachers have needed to flex their schedules a bit, we've generally been able to accommodate the change, even with no advance notice.

This year- it feels overwhelming. In mapping out precisely what students I hope to have at what time of day, I've sliced each period very thinly in an effort to squeeze as much instruction as possible into tiny slivers of time. For example, I have third period and part of fourth to teach 5 different levels of Reading / ELA to kids who need intensive instruction in these areas. A simple shift or extension on the part of a mainstream teacher might simply mean that a given student gets no Reading/ELA that day. If several mainstream teachers all decide to modify their schedules at the same time, things are suddenly the special kind of hairy that no mousse can tame.

This goes two ways, of course. Changes in our schedule - even small misfires, like sending students at the wrong time, misunderstanding an announced schedule change, or - epic fail - having kids show up that you never knew were coming - can be very disruptive to your classrooms as well. Pull-out for speech, vision, mobility, etc. can derail otherwise promising group projects, or put you in a position where a lesson must be re-taught and extra materials/notes provided when the students returns.

There is no clear solution to this, other than - in the words of a famously forgetful blue fish - "Just keep swimming..." The day to day survival of any teacher depends, in part, on his or her ability to flex. And boy do we flex! We should teach yoga or something...

I do think that understanding our respective situations helps. Keeping the lines of communication open helps even more. It's much easier for me to plan around a 48-hour notice that Math and ELA will be swapped on an upcoming day than it is for me to react in the moment to a harried interpreter, letting me know that the student's schedule has changed at the last minute and that not only will the student not receive my carefully planned ELA instruction that day, but the interpreter won't be getting her well-deserved break after all. :(

I'm happy - almost overjoyed, in fact - to sit down with any mainstream teacher individually and discuss a given student schedule. It sometimes really helps to see the schedules spread out on a table in order to understand how things like A/B schedules, subject area times and DIS services (speech, etc.) impact the complex flow of our school days.

It ain't rocket science, but it's within spitting distance.

Thank you for your submission to my demands patient understanding and boundless grace. :)

J.

Grading Mainstreamed Students

Each year, I answer a number of questions related to the grading of our mainstream DHH kids.

Each year, I lament our inability to make this process EASIER for you all.

Two questions commonly asked:

Do I need to use differential standards in grading the deaf / hard of hearing kids in my classroom?

How do I record / track grades for the said children?

The answer to the first question is, generally, no. I don't like differential grading for my kids, because I think that it dilutes the basic message of standards competency for our kids. Our students will take the HSEE, just like each of your other students. Our kids are not exempt. They will receive either a diploma or a "Certificate of Completion", just like your other students. And just like you, we hope that most of our kids will manage to bring home a diploma, as anything less adds uncertainty to their post-graduation college and career future.

Our students may, however, have other modifications per their IEPs - additional time for test-taking, reduced homework load, etc. The SDC teacher following each mainstream student will typically review with you any modifications that are in place. It's also pretty common to add modifications later in the school year, after we've had a chance to see how things are going.

I am hoping that Mrs. Mackenzie will chime in here if her philosophy differs from my own! :)

Recording and reporting of grades (the second question) has been an ongoing concern and the source of many questions each school year. Presently, our deaf and hard of hearing students are not in the school Pathways system. This means that all mainstream grades have to be tracked and recorded separately, which is (in my opinion) a REALLY TERRIBLE THING ™. My perspective is that we ask enough of you guys without turning grading into a major chore as well.

I've had a couple of different answers re: adding our students to Pathways. The first response is that the addition of our students would exceed the cap / limit for our school license in terms of numbers, pushing the costs to Hart-Ransom up a notch. A second, more recent explanation is that adding our kids to Pathways generates serious headaches when it comes to state reporting requirements.

Our SCOE information systems lady has recently promised to speak with the Hart-Ransom office in the hopes of coming up with something. I continue to hold out hope that a solution will be discovered soon.

In the meantime - what's a buried-alive instructor to do? (Other than cry out feebly from under the avalanche of paperwork?)

Option A: Give everything to me.

That's right - just send all their work to me. I can even correct it if you'd like. The downside to this is that I don't know your weighting systems or grading policies, etc., so my kid might wind up being graded rather differently than the hearing student sitting across the aisle from him/her.

Option B: Record all scores for the DHH kids in a separate Excel spreadsheet.

This method seems to be the current method of choice. Mrs. Montgomery was using a nice little spreadsheet for mainstream math last year; I have the file if you are interested, or you MIGHT be able to convince her to share if you ask nicely. I've tried bribes in the past, but she is a woman of integrity and only niceness works. Just sayin'.

Option C: Run all student assignments through a shredder, or use as birdcage lining.

NOT RECOMMENDED. ;)

A final FYI: I attempt to send out progress reports / report cards at (or very close to) the same time that you send yours home. It's super helpful to me if I can have all the information in-hand by the time you are sending your own reports home.

Thank you so much for everything you do to support our kids!

Extra Prep Period for All!

The human ear. Gross.

I wanted to inform / remind mainstream teachers that I am available to provide 45-minute (approximate) lessons on hearing, hearing loss, the ear, etc. The lesson covers anatomy, a little tiny bit of sound science (physics), hearing loss, hearing damage due to noise, hearing aids/cochlear implants/etc. Time permitting, I can throw some sign language into the mix or give an "unfair spelling test" to simulate the experience of a hard of hearing kid.

Generally, this helps to defuse some of your students' natural curiosity, and seems to make my kids a little more approachable in the long run.

I can make most times work for me, given a little advance notice, so let me know if you'd like to have a guest teacher for a period sometime. :)

Eye Music

This girl does a fantastic job of translating music into American Sign Language. She isn't following a word order; she's making complete images that even hearing people can appreciate. Enjoy!

Defining Deafness

With your new mainstream student comes a label: Deaf. Hearing Impaired. DHH. Hard of hearing. I thought it might be helpful to spend a little time looking at -- and beyond -- the labels we use to describe our kids, and talk about what it might mean for you as a teacher.

Perhaps it would be best to talk about some of the labels that are presently frowned upon. Historically, the word "dumb" was used to refer to individuals who were unable to speak. The phrase "deaf and dumb" was commonly used in the past to refer to deaf individuals who, for whatever reason, had not developed comprehensible speech. As you might imagine, given the modern associations for the word "dumb", this tag has become pretty offensive.

You might be surprised to learn that the terms "hearing impaired" or anything containing the words "disabled" or "handicapped" (or any variant thereof) are also generally frowned upon. Deaf and hard of hearing people generally do not consider themselves impaired, or disabled, or handicapped, although many feel somewhat inconvenienced. :)

I would encourage you to refer to your students as either deaf or hard of hearing. Referring to them as DHH kids (identifying them with our program) is fine, but either deaf or hard of hearing is generally preferable.

Deaf persons are those individuals who must rely on some form of visual communication for full access to the world. They often may receive some limited benefit from hearing aids. Some deaf persons are able to speak, while others are not. Almost all deaf individuals who do speak have a noticeable "deaf accent" that takes a little getting used to. Not all deaf people use sign language, but the vast majority do.

Hard of hearing persons are those who prefer to communicate by listening and speaking (rather than sign language). They usually are able to hear speech to one degree or another when wearing their equipment. They too generally speak with a "deaf accent", although that accent is often milder than that of a deaf person. Some sign fluently, others not at all. In the classroom, educational interpreters are often used to ensure that a hard of hearing student has full access to the curriculum; without this accommodation, studies show that a lot of information in the mainstream environment may be missed or misunderstood.

The distinction between the two labels has grown somewhat blurry as cochlear implants have become more common: a number of deaf children have become functionally hard of hearing through the procedure. A cochlear implant can be a very powerful tool, but it is neither a cure for deafness, or the one-size-fits all panacea that it is often made out to be.

As kids get older, we tend to ask them how they view themselves (deaf or hard of hearing) and allow them to identify themselves.

There is a third, important distinction - the use of a capital 'D' in describing a Deaf person. Capital-D "Deafness" it a cultural rather than a medical label; it is used to identify oneself as a member of the Deaf community. As a cultural label, it refers to a group of people with a distinct language (American Sign Language, or ASL), a distinct history and a set of shared experiences that hearing people like myself cannot truly understand. Deafness with a capital 'D' is an affirmation - a powerful and positive statement of personal identity.

Interestingly, a person who is hard of hearing can be a part of the Deaf community, but wouldn't describe him or herself as being deaf. Follow?