Students on the autistic spectrum, students with ADHD and other pervasive developmental disorders including dyslexia and dyspraxia can often find it hard to access and progress through the normal mainstream curriculum. These are strategies that teachers can employ to make it easier for such students to access their education alongside their peers.
Some of these are classroom management strategies. Others are based on a close assessment of the child who is not accessing or making progress in the curriculum. The aim of the strategies is inclusion of the child with special educational needs within a class group, and for them to enjoy and make progress in their education.
Inclusive classroom management strategies for ADHD & autistic children
Students with ADHD and autistic children can easily become anxious in a classroom situation. It is therefore a good strategy to tell them at the start of the lesson exactly what the plan is. Writing or drawing this plan on the board, with approximate timings, will also help. This is complementary to the good practice in current teaching of communicating lesson objectives – “What we are Learning Today” and “What I am Looking For”.
Some students become fixated on a particular thing they want – and it’s not the lesson! In these cases, try to allocate some limited access to the desired thing as a reward once a certain, timed amount of work has been done, or a task completed. This can be built into the lesson plan.
Controlled choice can sometimes be helpful. For example – “You have to complete the ten sentences, and then you can choose to either read a book or draw a picture for five minutes.” Or “You can choose to write a diary entry or a description of the island.” Controlled choice can help to reduce anxiety by allowing some flexibility.
Most children on the autistic spectrum have enormous difficulty in attending to more than one voice at the same time, and will find "calling out" confusing and anxiety-provoking. The fairness of a “hands up” policy in the classroom can be understood by all and provides a useful visual signpost for the autistic child. This reassuring structure makes it possible for all students to follow the lesson clearly.
How to remove barriers to learning for children with special educational needs
These next strategies are based on individual assessment of the child who is not progressing in, perhaps not even accessing, the curriculum, despite inclusive classroom management strategies. They are individual strategies for the class teacher and are not designed to replace the normal channels of assessment such as a Statement of Special Educational Needs.
The class teacher makes an assessment of the child taking into account the nature of his or her difficulties, with a focus on identifying the child’s barriers to learning. She then takes a section of the curriculum and modifies it with the aim of removing the identified barriers for that particular child. At the end of the unit the child’s increased access or progress can be evaluated and the next step decided upon.
An example of this might be a boy who has ADHD and who is dyspraxic. His handwriting is extremely poor and he becomes agitated when asked to write in class. It has escalated until he says he “hates English” and is refusing to come to lessons. The barrier to his learning could be identified as his anxiety and agitation around his handwriting. To remove this barrier, a unit could be modified to allow him, and any of his peers if appropriate, to complete all work on a pc or laptop.
At the same time, or perhaps afterwards if successful, specific work on gross and fine motor control leading to handwriting, using a program such as Getting it Write, could be carried out with the student in a non-threatening situation.
Another example might be a girl who is severely dyslexic and still cannot read at secondary school. She deliberately clowns around and draws attention to herself instead of getting on with her work. Her barrier to learning is identified as fear of failure. The curriculum is then modified to provide her, and any of her peers if appropriate, with a unit of work where success is guaranteed through small specific steps and progress is explicitly seen, measured and praised.
A structured synthetic phonics teaching programme to tackle her literacy difficulties would also be recommended in this case, such as THRASS or Ruth Miskin’s readwriteinc.
Inclusive classroom strategies benefit all, not just special needs students
These inclusive teaching strategies do not just benefit children with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and other pervasive developmental disorders. As examples of good educational pedagogy they can benefit every student by improving the learning environment for all.
To read more on inclusive teaching, see how to reduce anxiety in the classroom, teaching reading comprehension, teaching phonic sounds, quick inclusive lesson plans and interactive phonics games for children with dyslexia and language impairments.
Children with language and communication impairments benefit from a curriculum that is culturally rich in language and meaning. See these great tips for teaching Shakespeare's Macbeth and Dante's Inferno in the inclusive classroom.
Communicating with autistic children may also be useful.
Cathy Anne Smith - Hello :) I wrote for Suite 101 until March 2011 and now publish my own fiction at Poems and Short Stories to Read Online .
