I attended a meeting today for a student in one of my Honors classes. This student (named Student A for confidentiality purposes) is in the moderate range for hearing loss.
The meeting I attended included all of Student A’s teachers as well as an Audiologist, who explained the student’s hearing loss in detail.
Each teacher was given this yellow form, which explained how to change your classroom to accommodate for this student. It was really helpful! I have now decided to move this student to the middle and front. I have also decided to have all of my worksheets and assignments accessible online so that this student can easily follow along without getting lost or having to hear and remember all the instructions.
Each faculty member was also given a diagram of the student’s hearing loss to see a visual of where this student was on the spectrum of noise (see right).
Again, this was helpful to see how my classroom might need to be changed. (Ex: moving this student away from the door, having this student work in groups close to the wall to prevent other outside, and most importantly, not singling this student out!)
Though this will be a challenge, I’m ready for it! And I’m excited to help this student have a great experience in my class!
This is very interesting to me because you have thought of even just the little things to accommodate this student (i.e. moving the student away from the door). I am still in the student teaching phase and I am curious about how differentiation occurs in the classroom for diverse learners. Like you said, I would not want to single one student out of a classroom, but this is something that is not always seen in a student teaching placement. I am interested in learning more about this for my future teaching career! Can’t wait to read more!
Exactly my point! Yes, that was the exact struggle I was running into with planning for my classroom. It’s so hard, because you want to accommodate, but at the same time some students don’t want to be singled out. I ended up placing the student towards the middle of the classroom and somewhat towards the front, but away from the door and away from the glare of the window on the board. So far so good! And thank you for commenting! I love being able to reach out to other student teachers and teachers 🙂 I hope your placement is going well!