This week is the start of my winter quarter, which means that as part of launching my courses for the term, I am setting up meetings with students to discuss their academic accommodations. As with most aspects of academic professionalization, instructors are given almost no guidance for how to meet the accommodations students are entitled to, much less their needs. My approach? These students just have another set of learning goals and these meetings are a way to identify and plan out the skills they need to work on in my class.
The accommodations trainings I’ve been required to complete are simultaneously absurd and boring, boilerplate choose-your-own-adventure videos that mostly convey my legal obligation so that I don’t get sued. They focus on my responsibility to “reasonably accommodate” students with documented disabilities who have already received approval from the office of Disability Services on my campus. Each time I completed one of these trainings, I took away from them that I am an overworked machine that can only compute the parameters fed to me by the ADA. What I mean by that is that there is no practical advice about how to treat my students as humans, how to manage this aspect of my job in tandem with my other responsibilities, or how to realistically determine what accommodations are appropriate to my classes.
Most students I have taught who receive accommodations are either given extra time on exams, entitled to use a computer during exams, or entitled to use a speech-to-text software to help them take notes during class. While these accommodations are useful, they are often inappropriate to my class format and assignments. I typically give papers rather than tests or quizzes and class is discussion-based so notes are of minimal importance. But these students still have learning differences that can impact the way they experience these activities and assessments, and that can become obstacles to their learning.
My teaching is already focused on skill-building. I strive to help students learn to read different kinds of texts and visual/material sources critically, interpret them in a relevant context, and communicate information and interpretations of those sources in a variety of written modes. I also work on time management, verbal communication, and collaboration. I take these skills and break them down into techniques, questions, and methods that can be adapted to different individuals who enter my classroom with different interests and different levels of familiarity with the course content and these skills. Why should my students with documented disabilities be treated outside this framework?
My goal with students who receive accommodations is not to meet them to the letter of the law, but to the spirit of it. I want to help them find what works in my class and use that as a testing ground for all of their classes (and life). I already do this with students who are not entitled to accommodations: students whose primary language of instruction has not always been English as well as students who deal with anxiety or who are having difficulty adjusting to the work expectations of college for a variety of reasons. I invite these students to work with me from the start of term, coming to those office hours that no one ever attends otherwise, to develop strategies to build the skills they are lacking or learn how to meet their own needs. It is in this model that I am approaching my students with documented disabilities this term.
My meetings with these students go like this:
- They come into my office and sit in the comfy chair. I ask them if they would like tea (or cookies, when I have them).
- I ask them to tell me about the services they are entitled to. I’ve already received an email from Disability Services, but it’s useful to have the reminder and to hear it in the student’s own words.
- Then I ask whether they find that these services fully meet their needs or if they are still struggling. This is the point where my university’s legal team is telling me to shut up, but this isn’t about my legal obligation to ADA compliance. This is about my role as an instructor. Boilerplate accommodation policies have very few tools to address a variety of needs - for instance, many different issues can benefit from extra time during exams, from dyslexia to anxiety to ADD, and so extra time doesn’t always have the intended effect with different test formats. Because I as the instructor am in a position to alter my exam formats for everyone, it is useful to know whether my expectations can reasonably be met by most of my students. Often, everyone would benefit from a different approach, or, at the very least, no one else will be harmed by it.
- It is at this point that I ask an important but delicate follow-up – where is the student running into difficulty, and have they found any strategies on their own or on the part of the instructor that can help. I specifically do not ask what the student’s issue is. First, because I am not entitled to know. And second, because even if I did know, I am not a specialist in any learning difference or disability. What I understand as an instructor is what they do, what they have trouble doing, and what I can do to help. If they want to, or think it would be useful, they might tell me why they have difficulty. But I don’t need to know whether my student has an auditory processing disorder. What I do need to know is that they find it easier to focus when they have more opportunities to speak or to listen to a smaller group conversation. This question is, in part, directed at my learning. I collect strategies that I can convey to students, so that they can figure out what works for them. If they already know what they like, it’s useful for my catalog of tricks. If they don’t, I can pick out a few things for them to try on. As I said, I already do this in building skills as part of my curriculum – I used to offer one-on-one consultations in time management, and now it’s written into my intro course. It’s important for me to recognize when I am teaching a skill and when I am simply evaluating whether my students have already picked up that skill elsewhere. I don’t want to teach a course that only serves students who went to private schools – I want to teach a course that gives everyone something new.
- Based on what my student has told me at this point, I might offer a policy, an approach, or simply a word of encouragement. I clarify whether the student wants to go beyond their accommodation – if that is meeting their needs, it would be obtrusive of me to suggest something else. I also can’t presume to know what is appropriate for them. But if they have said to me that they are still struggling, this is an invitation to find a solution. I say “here are some things that could potentially help, try them out and let me know if they work”. “Here are the solutions that I am able to offer you within the structure of this course – Disability Services cannot direct me to do these things, but they already exist and may be useful to you.” I will also intervene at this point if they explain their solution in terms of self-deprecating language, such as “I just need to try harder and I’ll get better at it” or “I know I need to grow up and get past this”. Whether they have a documented disability or not, this way of thinking cannot help them overcome what is giving them difficulty, because they are making themselves the problem, with no actionable solution or measurable goal. This is where my encouragement as an instructor is important. I feel that I need to acknowledge what they are saying, legitimize how they have come to that impression, but also make a distinction for them between the work that is being asked of them and the strategies they can employ that are appropriate to their needs. The great thing about a college environment is that students have considerably more freedom to do things their way – their instructors should not judge them for leaving the classroom to deal with an emergency or argue with how they take notes. As long as the student isn’t hindering anyone else’s learning, we should be encouraging their efforts to figure out what works for them.
- Finally, as I do with most of my student meetings, I end by asking whether there is anything else I should know, anything else they want to say, or if they have any other questions. I have been directing this meeting and I need to make sure that the student has the opportunity to modify my approach. They might want to volunteer other information, raise something I forgot, or ask about something that isn’t directly related to their needs but is still important for the course. The point, ultimately, is the dialog.
I am still tweaking this approach, but I feel at the moment that it is achieving its intended purpose. Crucially, I don’t want to think of this process as outside of the planning of my course. It is a form of research that helps me understand how I can improve my teaching. I learned years ago that students find it useful when I write on the board while I am talking. They are able to read texts more thoughtfully when I give them discussion questions ahead of time. They need long pauses after a question and the verbal assurance that it’s ok to be wrong to feel comfortable answering. I did not make these changes in the context of “special needs”, but as part of my own growth as an instructor. Similarly, I learned that many students who feel they have poor time management actually have decision paralysis – they lack the skill to ask themselves the necessary questions that will move their thinking forward. There is no value in punishing these issues, the same way that there is no justice in blaming neurodivergence for a student falling short of my expectations. I should not assign work that cannot be adapted, and I should bake in self-evaluations that enable students to direct their own approaches.
I want to build my courses and my pedagogy in a way that offers students a variety of formats, builds the skills they find useful, and maximizes the value of my time. Spending all of my time giving every student individualized attention would certainly meet the first two criteria, but it would be exhausting for me and not a good use of my time. By asking my students about what works for them and where they are still encountering difficulty, I feel that I am learning more about inclusive pedagogy in ways that meet needs that haven’t necessarily been identified. I am prompting students to direct their own learning and hone their self-advocacy by identifying what help they need from someone else and what they need to do for themselves. This is an iterative process, and hopefully I never feel that I am beyond some version of it, though I anticipate that it will continue to change.