Adapt the Educational Environment

Teachers may need to make adjustments to the physical environment in order to enhance access in a classroom. For example, it is not uncommon for teachers to position students who use wheelchairs off to the side or at the back of a room because their chairs make it difficult for others to get around them. Creating wider aisles between student desks and classroom furnishings is a preferable solution to this problem because this allows the AAC user to stay with the group instead of being physically marginalized. Wider doors adapted with special open buttons or electric eyes allow easy entrance into the classroom and other areas of the building, such as the music room, gymnasium, and cafeteria. Teachers should position student working surfaces (ideally, adjustable desks and tables) at appropriate heights for comfort and efficiency. Cutout desktops may be necessary so that students have a suitable distance between their wheelchairs and their working surfaces. Chalkboards placed at lower-than-usual levels and extended slightly out from walls allow students in wheelchairs to position themselves appropriately for writing activities. Teachers can also lower other items such as doorknobs, pencil sharpeners, coat racks, and light switches to heights accessible to all. Finally, classroom assignments should be made after taking into consideration the mobility needs of students, because some classrooms are more accessible than others.

Managing the Academic Workload

Educational specialists can increase the academic workload of a student with disabilities unnecessarily without realizing it. For example, Jason, a middle school student who requires AAC, received some resource room assistance to increase his literacy skills. He was learning to use a Macintosh computer with a standard word processing program and Co:Writer (Don Johnston, Inc.), a writing program with rate enhancement features. Early in his augmented writing program, Jason’s resource room teacher gave him writing assignments without considering the many written assignments that his general education teachers required. It soon became apparent that Jason, who wrote very slowly anyway, was being asked to manage a workload that was far beyond his capabilities. Through collaborative efforts, the general and special education teachers began to coordinate their writing assignments so that Jason had sufficient writing practice and was still able to complete his general classroom assignments. For example, his English teacher agreed to accept the letters and stories that Jason wrote in the resource room as fulfilling his language arts requirements. In addition, the resource room teacher agreed to design assignments to relate to the subject matter covered in the general classes.

Assisting Students to Be Active Learners

Because the communication content in general classrooms changes so rapidly, it may be difficult to keep the vocabulary in the AAC system current. This leads to a tendency to provide AAC students with communication systems that are solely designed to address wants/needs and social interaction functions rather than the information-sharing functions that are integral to classroom participation. If this happens, AAC users are often forced to be passive learners: They cannot ask or answer questions in class, deliver topical reports, or otherwise participate in subject-oriented discussions because they do not have the vocabularies to do so. It is critical that the AAC support team aggressively attempt to translate the curriculum into communication units that will allow the AAC user to participate in these classroom interactions. This is particularly crucial during the early elementary years before students are able to spell well enough to compose their own messages. In this case, the demands on the AAC support team will be reduced if the AAC student has access to adequate rate enhancement techniques. Support staff, however, will still need to institute strategies that help students manage the time constraints of the general classroom.

Assisting Students to Manage Time Constraints

Students with severe communication and motor impairments often find it difficult to keep up with the pace of a general classroom because they have difficulty manipulating educational materials such as books and worksheets. Without accommodations to these difficulties, students may experience academic failure because they cannot complete their work, although they have mastered the content. Educators often use one of several approaches to accommodate the time constraints of students with disabilities:

• advance preparation
• use of peer instruction
• adapting academic testing
• reduced workloads
• selective retention