3 Accommodations That Remove Barriers And Can Benefit All Students

Intro

Let’s chat about common accommodations that can remove barriers and benefit all students, not just those with IEPs or 504s. Back in my second year teaching, I remember going into the cafeteria and having to sign for a ton, probably like 30 IEPs–it was a lot, people! Just an absolute ton of IEPs, and I had to go through them all, figure out all the different accommodations, and who gets what. Because of this, I built another resource which you can find in an upcoming blog post. Once that’s posted, I’ll link to it here about how to keep track of those guys.

Accommodations

So what did I do? I started looking at how I could make this more efficient. Are there accommodations that some students get but benefit all students? Is there something that I can provide that will potentially remove a barrier for students who perhaps need services and don’t get them? Or any student, for that matter? I wanted to find specific supports that I knew everyone could benefit from, so I started brainstorming what I could incorporate into my class to save some time and sanity as a new mom and teacher while also helping all students.

Access to Notes

So the first thing that I started doing was giving access to notes. So what this looked like at the time for me was that as I was doing direct instruction via Slides on a Promethean board, my Co-teacher would model good note-taking practices on a dry-erase board at the side of the room for our students to reference as they were taking notes in their notebooks. Her notes were color-coded, and they remained up there longer so that students could reference them if they needed to, like if they missed something, or if they were just working a little bit slower than the rest of us. 

The best part was that she would annotate her notes as well. So we developed a kind of a model for note-taking in math that I originally thought of like modified Cornell notes, but really what it most closely resembles is 2 column proofs or leaving comments in code. If you’ve ever coded anything, you write notes to yourself or to other people who are going to look at your code and say, hey, this is what is going on here and why and it ends up setting kids up well for proofs later in geometry.

Today, in my classes, I have a laptop that has tablet mode and I use OneNote and a stylus to fill out my guided note pages with the students. I have that screencast on a TV in my classroom, so they can see me model good note-taking. I also have a Screencastify subscription, so I record one period a day for all three of my classes. I don’t record with the webcam, since I’m using a tablet–You would get a view up my nose or of my 10 chins haha. Instead, I record the screen so that students can follow along both with the audio and have the visual of the notes so that they can fill them out as well. 

If Screencastify went away today or I didn’t have access to that anymore,  I would export my completed notes PDF (or if I was doing an interactive notebook with a document camera I’d take pictures of it) and share that on my LMS. So we use Canvas, but you can upload it to Schoology or to Google Classroom, whatever you guys are using to let the students reference them. 

Now of course these things all go up after the fact, right? So students have to put forth effort into taking good notes during class to be able to have access to those resources later on,  and another time we can talk about what to do if students refuse,  but for the most part, my students do not have difficulty with this setup. Having a recording or access to notes is great as well for absent students, students who need a refresher, and students who are working with a tutor or with their parents at home. I’ve had parents say before that they’re so glad that I do the recordings because they go back and watch them so they can help their students. Access to notes has been huge for my classroom. 

Access to a Calculator

The next accommodation is access to a calculator. This one I’m keeping pretty short and sweet, because I’m very passionate about it and could drone on forever, but just give them the dang calculator.  If my student not knowing their math facts is preventing them from engaging with grade-level material, that’s a barrier that I’m allowing to exist. I’m doing them a disservice if I say, well, too bad you’re just going to have to figure out how to do your multiplication facts now, and I’m only increasing their feelings of shame, I’m adding to the fixed mindset that they may have, and I’m increasing their math anxiety. More harm is done in that case than if I gave them a calculator. Gone are the days when teachers said you’re not going to have a calculator with you everywhere you go–it’s right there at their fingertips. Just give them the dang calculator. Once a student can use a calculator, they can engage with grade-level math, and that’s our main goal. 

Shortened Assessments Grouped or Chunked by Learning Target

The last accommodation I made widespread is shortened assessments and assessments grouped or chunked by learning targets. So I give weekly quizzes that have 1-2, maybe three learning targets on them, and the students know exactly what’s going to be on there. So if the learning target is that they have to graph quadratic from the standard form, they’re going to have to graph a quadratic from the standard form on the quiz, and I provide them a labeled coordinate plane, which is another accommodation (consider this a bonus #4 haha). So back in my day (you know, the Stone Ages) I would have to use graph paper or I would get a blank coordinate and I’d have to label/ number the axes myself and figure out the window it’s going to be in, but who’s got the time for that? Especially when there are always the students that are going to be using a ruler and getting those perfectly precise coordinate grids–but that’s taking time away from the goal.

My tests are over more material, but still, I don’t believe in double jeopardy or surprises. So if I’m saying I’m assessing 5 learning targets, that’s what I’m doing. I probably give 1 to 3 problems each depending on how many versions of that type of problem there are, and I put them in the same order that we saw in class. That helps my students who have trouble figuring out which method is used where. If they know this is the order in which we’re going to be doing things, then it’s easier for them to reach back and reference when we talked about it in class. 

Conclusion

So these are three ways that you can take something that’s normally considered an accommodation and make it available for all students. That way, all of your students have these potential barriers removed, so they can benefit from it as well. With access to notes, I’m still teaching them how to take good notes, but I’m also preventing that executive function skill from preventing them from being successful in math. By providing a calculator, I’m removing the barrier of poor math facts, so that they can engage with grade-level material, and they’re most likely going to pick up some of those math facts along the way. By giving them shorter assessments, I give faster feedback to them, and thus faster feedback to me, and they know exactly what to expect without double jeopardy or anything crazy.