She explained that this title was for teachers as well as students!
First of all she talked about Special Education Needs (SEN), students that have different abilities and need extra help. She started off with a class of ELLs with different needs and she looked at ways of giving them equal opportunities to succeed and gain the confidence they needed. She realised that the odd ones out actually enrich the classrooms and other people can actually learn from them. She uses drama to engage the students.
She asked participants for examples of SEN students and the best answer I heard was from Nellie, 'Students who don't conform to normal expectations.' This includes physically and mentally challenged students as well as students who are gifted because often teachers don't know what to do with them!
She thinks that drama is a good way to engage these students because they use the 5 senses and this approach benefits them. ( This is also a good way to engage regular students too.) We also need to find other ways of using the other senses in the classroom, not just listening and reading.
Susan then went on to show us some activities using SPICE. First she asked everybody to stand and draw a large 'S' in the air while saying sss, sss, sss. Everybody was doing it together, this was to remind us that S stands for Social, students enjoy learning in a social atmosphere. She repeated this for 'P', which stands for Physical Development, I for intellectual (cognitive) development - every lesson must be a thinking lesson. C stands for Creative development - students need to be creative and they need to be up and thinking, not sitting and writing. E stands for Emotional development. Using this technique you can use all of the skills!
Then she went on to look at this expression which I have heard before, it means that we need to reassess the way we teach and implement new techniques as necessary. Susan believes that we need to increase the presence, participation and achievement of all learners. To do this successfully in multisensory education we need to look at three strategies, the first one is affordances - we must afford the students the chance to do something instead of giving them activities that they can't do. The next strategy is interventions - we intervene when we need to but we try to give the students as much independence as possible. The final strategy was differentiation - different students have different activities.
We then looked at a common problem, Dyslexia, in which people have problems with sound letter combination. It is not just a reading problem, it can affect many different parts of their lives. SPICE is a good way of helping dyslexic students, use a multisensory approach with touch as well as the other senses.
I really loved this picture which was used to introduce the idea of ADHD, if you introduce movement into the classroom, ADHD disappears according to Susan.
She then talked about students with SEBD - social, emotional and behavioural disorders, Susan says that we should allow them to bring their emotions into the classroom and let them talk about their emotions and act their emotions in the classroom so that they understand the difference between drama and reality. We need to teach them how to deal with their problems.
We then went on to look at Aspergers Syndrome and Autism and we had another beautiful slide.
Susan suggested using lots of realia and take learning out of the traditional system and allow them to learn in new ways. Let students use masks and they become a different person. She gave us a list of general hints for dealing with students with different needs.
She talked through the advice and clarified that 2 footed questions are questions which relate to the students' real life. Checking in chunks means that the students have regular assessment rather than end of course/term tests.
She finished off by looking at the difference between equality and equity, equity means everyone has the same opportunity rather than the same challenges.
This was an eyeopening session for me as I had never really come in to contact with students with learning and other disabilities in the past and I had absolutely no idea how to deal with them if I did get them. Now I do have a better idea. Thank you Susan for opening my eyes.
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