9/15/2022
Topic:
Students With Disabilities
Jeanne Hayslip
|
Kelly Rayl wrote:
Abby is one of my high school dance students with Autism. She has a bubbly personality and a love for movement. She is eager to participate in class daily. I follow her IEP ,closely. Abby flourishes when the classroom routine is structured with consistence expectations. The dance class provides this for her and relieves stress. Although Abby enjoys listening to music, she has a sensitivity and trigger to certain sounds. This causes her discomfort. So, I created a safe, quiet space for Abby when she begins to feel overwhelmed and uncomfortable. |
9/15/2022
Topic:
Students With Disabilities
Jeanne Hayslip
|
My first experience, many years ago with a D/HH student taught me the necessity of never turning away from my student while speaking, gesturing, or presenting information. D/HH students require the accommodation of printed out notes of all class discussions and visual aids in order to learn, understand, and feel included. I was a new teacher, unaware and uniformed by guidance or administration, as this was prior to the days of IEPS and prior to IDEA legislation.
Before realizing that the student was deaf, I noticed a slight frown on her face. Initially, I wondered if she was unhappy with the class, which was senior English. Thank goodness her parents were proactive and called a conference with all of her teachers and guidance counselor. I learned that I had to write up all class notes and discussions and distribute it to her. In the classroom, I no longer walked around while speaking. I no longer talked while turning my back to write on the board or point to key items, photos, or words posted on the walls.
If a related arts teacher in music, art, PE, or dance class were to teach a D/HH student, it is imperative that they likewise always directly face the student, and as our school system now provides sign language interpreters, the student has the right to receive that accommodation.
If there is no language interpreter who can sign for the student, then the classroom teacher must spend the time looking face to face with the student or visually showing examples and written instructions. Dance movements must be shown close by the student, and repeated until the student understands the timing and pace. No counting aloud or music cues exist in the world of deaf students, yet they can most definitely dance if the teacher is precise and considerate. Creativity - whether from classmates or the instructor - is vital for students who are deaf or hard of hearing. |
9/15/2022
Topic:
Tools and Strategies
Jeanne Hayslip
|
Wilhemina DeNunzio wrote:
I used cooperative learning to address a student with physical disabilities. By using cooperative learning, the grouping of small heterogeneous groups allowed for peer tutoring as well as allowing students to interact in the areas they were physically able and others to use their areas of expertise. |
9/15/2022
Topic:
Tools and Strategies
Jeanne Hayslip
|
Wilhemina DeNunzio wrote:
I used cooperative learning to address a student with physical disabilities. By using cooperative learning, the grouping of small heterogeneous groups allowed for peer tutoring as well as allowing students to interact in the areas they were physically able and others to use their areas of expertise. |
9/15/2022
Topic:
Tools and Strategies
Jeanne Hayslip
|
Strategies through the use of technology and visuals for students with autism, D/HH impairments, E/BD disabilities, and muscular or neuromuscular/orthopedic impairments provide methods of teaching students with disabilities, as all educators now realize. However, one of the best and one very necessary tool educators need to use is to familiarize the students with historical and contemporary examples of great musicians, writers, dancers, artists, and actors with whom the students share similar handicaps. Beethoven's deafness, John Milton's loss of sight, Van Gogh's deep depression, geniuses such as Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Elon Musk's autism are just a few examples. Artists universally admired such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and great inventors such as Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell all displayed symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder, ASD. Actors such as comedian Jerry Seinfeld shares his struggles with E/BD behavioral disorders. Nikola Tesla, inventor and the great psychologist, Carl Jung, both suffered from E/BD anxiety. Stephen Hawkins and Christopher Reeve were paraplegics, and Franklin D. Roosevelt suffered orthopedic impairment during his presidency. Connections with these struggles of musicians, composers, actors, scientists, and artists can relieve anxiety and establish relationships of mutual respect and understanding in the classroom and throughout life that will inspire and offer comfort to students with special challenges. |
9/21/2022
Topic:
Tools and Strategies
Jeanne Hayslip
|
As a high school English teacher who encouraged creativity through cooperative learning teams drawing story maps, literary posters and book covers, illustrated haikus and sonnets, my students with disabilities in inclusion classes benefited from a variety of instructional strategies of tiered lessons designed to challenge them by adjusting the pace and complexity of lessons, individually differentiated assignments according to their ability and interest levels and mnemonic instruction to process ideas and concepts according to various visual memory triggers.
Graphic organizers such as Venn Diagrams and story maps, semantic maps to conceptualize vocabulary according to the word's qualities and attributes not only captured their interest, but allowed them to individualize their maps through color, texture, and medium. For example, gluing brightly colored tissue paper or found objects as well as drawing and even creating Venn Diagrams using wire, paper chains ,rubber bands, string, and clay.
One Shakespearean Big Ideas project involved conspicuous strategies for cooperative learning projects on Elizabethan era models selected by each student according to their interest and abilities. One team wanted to draw a detailed poster of the Globe Theater and were intimidated by the detailed examples found through googling images on the internet. When they found one architectural plan that had the best clarity and details, they used the classroom teacher computer to project the image onto a large poster board taped to the white board. That provided the scaffolding to trace the outlines of the theater building, The next day the class met, they felt confident to draft the details of the structure, and by the time the project was finished, folded the poster board to form a free standing tri-fold of the Globe Theater. Other students selected key quotes and illustrated them, for example with red paint "blood" for Macbeth's bloody dagger. |
9/21/2022
Topic:
Assessment Of Learning
Jeanne Hayslip
|
Jenn Stewart wrote:
In regards to quizes/tests in my dance class, I have a student with a visual impairment. I print out all of her assignments on different color paper so that it is easier for her to see/read. I also teach theatre where they were assessed on memorization of a monologue. My down-syndrome student had a condensed script to memorize so that it wasn't as overwhelming. It is definitely easy to adjust the length of this assignment based on student needs.
Your use of a variety of colored paper prompts as cues for your visually impaired theater student is a great idea. I've always found color coding helpful myself, use it to trigger memory, and have now learned from this course of Teaching Students with Disabilities in the Fine Arts that we both use a Mnemonic Instruction strategy.
Isn't it amazing that what comes naturally and teachers have always done instinctively has evolved into an instructional science? |
9/21/2022
Topic:
Students With Disabilities
Jeanne Hayslip
|
Teaching high school art, a student with the physical disability of color blindness was not able to create a color chart. Teaming up in a cooperative learning group, the student adapted to the challenge of the project by mixing the colors shades and hues for the team chart. He and his classmates both benefited from the project in that they were able to understand how he saw color through discussions with him. They attempted to describe colors such as green and red and found that likewise challenging other than describing the colors as "grass" green and "flowerlike" red, which they realized were not clear explanation.
The same student found his visual disability beneficial when it enabled him to effortlessly engage in a follow up assignment which was to paint a still life using just one color, allowing only the mixture of white and black to show shadows, shape, and texture. Whether he used blue or red made little difference, although the students who could detect the full range of color were initially challenged when limited to one. |