DISCLAIMER: I am not a trained SEN educator, psychologist or medical professional. What I am is a very experienced teacher and trainer, and a neuro-diverse person myself. What you will read below describes my personal experience with trainees. Any beliefs, opinions or advice you find below are entirely my own and do not constitute professional guidelines or best practices.
Continuing from the previous post, we are looking at increasingly complex teaching situations and the ensuing problems.
There are several times when one or more trainees ask you to stop and rephrase what you said or start from the beginning, claiming they cannot follow you at all, even if what you are saying seems simple and straightforward.
What happens:
Again, we are not talking about trainees who lack basic knowledge or the linguistic competence to follow a simple argument. And we are not talking about trainees who are simply indifferent or unmotivated and cannot bother to follow what you are saying. We are talking about trainees who are honestly trying very hard to follow you as you explain something, but they cannot remember what you said a minute ago. As a result, they get lost almost immediately, and therefore ask for help. There is nothing wrong with their comprehension skills, again, but their retention and concentration abilities are lacking.
How you see it:
You can see that the requests for repetition and help clearly require attention, but you cannot keep doing that throughout the whole session. A shift of perspective might help here: instead of worrying about how responding to such requests may upset your lesson plan, think of how much more effective your teaching can be if you can involve everyone, even those that need more support.
Ways to handle it:
Clearly, both patience and flexibility are highly required here, but I would like to make a couple of practical suggestions, connected to planning a session and managing a class.
Once you have spotted such trainees in your group, there should be a shift in your materials design: since you cannot do the best for everyone, settle for doing the best you can for most of them. This means you may have to forego ambitious class activities or highly technical sessions, full of terminology (assuming you wanted to do these things in the first place!). You may find yourself unable to go into concepts in much detail, having to confine yourself to the basics, presented in a succinct, accurate manner. You therefore need to plan for shorter, simpler input.
Apart from input quantity and degree of analysis, there should also be a shift in pace and use of alternative modes of instruction. You will need to examine cognitive loads carefully and avoid having dense, demanding activities one after the other. Instead, plan for deliberate pauses during your session, allowing trainees time to note down points or take a screenshot. Insert a recap slide every few slides, when a particular section has been completed. Plan for specific elicitation slots, with lots of clear visuals, following short simple steps and the tri-modal input model: say/ask + do + write. Finish each elicitation slot with a short checking task, e.g., T/F.
You can easily see that the techniques suggested above are time consuming and require a specific approach: instead of cramming as much as possible into your session, assuming more is better, you rather make a conscious choice to move at the pace of your “slower” learners and give everybody a chance to digest information and perhaps come up with some interesting questions.
Again, the suggestions above may not stop some trainees from getting lost at some points during the session, but there are certain benefits:
- They will reduce the amount of confusion and the need for repetition in neuro-diverse trainees.
- The whole process forces you, the trainer, to re-examine the scope and effectiveness of your materials, and rethink what works and for whom.
- All trainees benefit from such an approach, being involved in most stages of the session and avoiding frequent or long explanation slots by the tutor.
- The benefits mentioned in the previous point are all present here as well.
During input sessions, you notice specific trainees are always the first to speak when you ask a question, but their contributions are rarely relevant to the question asked. It seems like they just waited for you to stop talking, in order to make an irrelevant point or ask a totally unrelated question themselves.
What happens:
Such trainees always seem very eager to contribute but their contributions are often disruptive and almost never helpful. They are always faster than everyone else and there comes a point when no other trainee gets a chance to say anything, and you start dreading asking questions. They may honestly be trying their best to contribute to the session, and they cannot stop themselves from blurting out a statement, without always realising that it is irrelevant to the point being discussed. What’s more, their statements often lack cohesion or even coherence, and it may be really difficult to understand what they are trying to communicate, let alone answer their queries or decide how they are related to the session in question. In such cases, you may also notice problems with the trainees’ written work, in terms of coherence and cohesion, as well as excessive and often incoherent teacher talk during teaching practice sessions. It seems like the link translating thoughts into coherent speech is not working.
Ways to handle it:
This is very tricky indeed, since one of the most basic means of communication, speech, does not seem to work. Such trainees do not only have a problem comprehending input but are also extremely frustrated when they try to make themselves understood: what makes perfect sense to their ears is met with puzzlement, and gradually annoyance, by everybody else. As a result, they are often defensive, unreceptive to feedback (which they cannot comprehend most of the time), and deeply hurt when they realise that they are perceived as annoying and disruptive by their peers.
There is no simple way to handle this, really. A mix of techniques may prove useful, but only to a certain extent. Here are some that I have tried over the years:
- Having one-to-one tutorials with the trainees in question, trying to understand their queries, and explain to them that they should let other trainees speak as well.
- Prepare a careful list of T/F statements that reflects your concerns about the trainee’s development and ask them to complete it; then arrange an individual tutorial with them. Careful: your statements should be short and simple, e.g.,
- I believe that I work well in a team. T/F
- When my trainer asks a question, I always feel I know the answer. T/F
- I feel my contributions are clear and helpful. T/F
- If I have something to say on a point, I should say it immediately, not wait for someone else’s contributions. T/F
- If in an online teaching environment, ask all trainees to mute themselves and nominate specific learners to contribute. A bit authoritarian but works at a pinch.
- Be mindful who you’re pairing with the trainees in question during learner-oriented activities: avoid pairing them with weak, easily confused or short-tempered trainees and avoid pairing them with the same trainees all the time. Vary their partners and monitor closely.
Final notes
There are a couple of final points I’d like to make, more in the nature of what NOT to do in such delicate situations.
Well, for one, I would do my very best not to express annoyance at specific trainees, or single them out in any way. This might be extremely difficult to do under certain circumstances, e.g., intensive synchronous on-line courses, but it is crucial if any of the above coping techniques are to succeed.
For another, please do not forget that these trainees find it extremely difficult to cope with the course demands, especially if they do not have the option of going for a part-time course or doing a face-to-face course, which can simplify interaction a lot. On top of that, there may be an extra layer of challenge, if they are not familiar with an online teaching environment: the combination of neurodiversity and technophobia can be truly paralysing for some trainees! You are there to support them, not judge them.
Finally, I would like to highlight the fact that most of these trainees are either unaware of their diagnosis, or ashamed of it. In either case, they will almost invariably fail to mention it in their application forms, which leaves both schools and trainers between a rock and a hard place, since even the meagre affordances given to such trainees in most training schemes cannot be taken advantage of. It is a sad fact that such discriminations exist to the extent that people feel the need to hide anything that may be perceived as a disability, even to the detriment of their own development. But it is a fact. All we can do is cope the best we can and support them to the best of our ability.
Image attributions
- Cover picture: Image by freepik
- Brain: Image by storyset on freepik
- Head: Image by macrovector_official on freepik
- Diversity: Image by freepik
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