Are We Listening to Our Students?
When you choose a Special Education focus in school, you quickly realize the field is very broad. Classes are able to touch on disabilities, some providing more detail than others in order to provide a well-rounded base of knowledge. Understanding this, the true growth of an educator is on the job. We learn the most through our interactions with other educators, administrators, parents, specialists and other stakeholders.
My area of expertise and pride point is focused around behaviors. I gravitate toward the students who exhibit the most outward of behaviors. It’s critical to understand that many students, regardless of having a disability or not, are communicating through how they behave. Really think on that for a moment and think of examples where you’ve seen that in your life.
A few years ago, I was working with a family who was trying hard to advocate and support their daughter. She has been classified with a speech and language disability, but there were concerning academic areas as well. When I first met the family, the student had already been going to speech and language therapy for years as it was clear she had articulation concerns, however there was more to her story. She also struggled with reading, specifically spelling. It was a hardship for her to memorize her spelling words, understand the rules of the English language and generalize these skills on a daily basis.
In addition to the academic concerns, there were behavioral as well. Nearly every day when she was picked up by her mother, she would run to hear and immediately have a meltdown. What upset me the most was no one was understanding the message she was trying to convey to staff. Clearly the student was telling everyone something through her behaviors, but it was being dismissed by the school up to that point. I pushed on the team revisit the student’s file and try to understand what the behavior was telling us.
Through the time in working with the family, they began taking their daughter for outside assessments. It was discovered that she had dyslexia. Finally, as a 4th grader, she and her family could take solace in their being a reason for her struggles. Her parents enrolled her in external tutoring, where she embraced her situation and actually began advocating and educating others. The Committee on Special Education met and updated her IEP to reflect the needed modifications and accommodations.
Well, what happened......?
As the student’s programming changed to meet her needs and the team understood how to better assist, the end of day behaviors began to fade away. Her self-esteem and self-confidence soared! The morale, is to take a step back and assess what you are seeing, what is the root cause of the behaviors? This can’t happen in a vacuum so invite others to observe as well. We all speak through our behaviors, remember to stop and listen.
#standreadytosupport