Flexibility: The Key to Accommodations and Modifications

Becoming a teacher means that you have to be flexible. If a lesson plan goes array, you need to be able to adjust quickly. Maybe you are suddenly sick and you take a sick day; put your lesson plans on hold and make changes to the schedule. Whoops, there is an unexpected assembly today! More changes. And that two-hour delay from last week means that your 1^st hour is now behind your 4^th hour. However, teachers don’t have to be flexible with just their schedule, but their students as well.

There will always be special needs students who have a disability requiring more attention from the teacher. Often times, special needs students have accommodations that the teacher is required to follow in hopes of helping the student be successful in the classroom without getting frustrated or overwhelmed. It doesn’t mean that the student doesn’t have to study different content, but there are extra steps to make things easier for the student. For example, maybe there is extended testing time or it is required that the students receive copies of all of the notes.

Often times, accommodations can be confused with modifications. Modifications are when the content itself is changed so that the student isn’t studying the original or required content. For instance, if students are writing a narrative where they are to focusing on imagery, dialogue, and plot, but one student’s assignment is changed because he is struggling. Instead of focusing on the three previous items, the teacher wants him to focus on just dialogue. By doing this, the teacher has changed the learning outcomes for the student, thus creating a modification. Once the student masters one element, he will not only have more confidence, but he can build off of this new knowledge to learn a new concept, such as imagery, and improve his narrative writing skills. He needs to be proficient at his current learning level before moving on.

When thinking of accommodations and modifications, I instantly think of two students that I taught face-to-face.

One student was not diagnosed with a disability, but as a freshman was reading at a fourth-grade level. Was it fair for me to ask him to read ninth grade level text on his own and comprehend it? Certainly not! If I did, I would be setting that student up for failure. He already had a habit of not doing his work out confusion and frustration. Why would I want to encourage that behavior?

I ended up working with this student after school a few days each week. During this time, I would modify his assignments. He might read a text that had the same elements as the one from class but was at his reading level. I also modified the history tests for him, so that they were not as complex as the other students’. By making modifications, I was working towards building the student’s confidence and filling in the holes of his learning. I needed to help him build up his knowledge so he could scaffold off of what he knew to understand these high school level concepts. In my eyes, this is just as important as accommodating a student’s needs.

The other student I think of was in my American History class. I had asked the students to write a paragraph using the typical structured paragraph format. This particular student struggled with writing, so the idea of writing an eleven sentence paragraph made him extremely anxious. I knew it would result in a lot of frustration for the student, so I accommodated him and asked him to write one claim, support, and explain, instead of three of each. This meant that he had to write only a five sentence paragraph.

Was he still practicing an introduction and conclusion? Yup. Did he still have to find evidence to support this claim? Yup. Did he still have to explain the evidence? You got it. The student was held to all of the same standards as the other students, just on a smaller level. I didn’t modify the assignment, rather I made accommodations to meet that student’s needs.

It seems that the accommodations that I have had to make for students in the past were usually the same and quite basic. Of the accommodations that I am familiar with, I can’t think of any that would be difficult in an online setting. I could see where if a student had a seeing impairment, it might be difficult to meet required accommodations, but other than that, I am drawing a blank. Oral directions can be given, notes and content are always available, courses are self-paced so students get extra time, teachers can create videos or audio, examples are provided, and the list goes on and on. I feel that online learning has so much to offer to students so many accommodations are already met.

I must admit, the flexibility of the online courses has made accommodations from my perspective much easier. Part of this could be because of my new freedom to be able to focus on students instead of lesson plans. I can now concentrate on being flexible with students and accommodating all of my students, not just those with disabilities- every teacher’s dream!