Sensory Rooms Need Adult Management

Sensory rooms.

A lot of schools are adding sensory rooms where students can calm down, maybe have some comfortable seating, some soft lighting, maybe some fidget toys, things like that.

If you have something like this in your school, let me know how it's going.

Leave a comment.

I wanted to share a couple of thoughts on how to manage something like this because I think a lot of people set these things up naively thinking that they'll just work right that we can create this space for students to calm down and anytime a student is feeling upset they can go there and calm down and they kind of forget that you can't just have students walk out of class whenever they feel like it so one of the first things I think we have to consider is how are the adults going to keep track of where the students are we can't have a situation where students are free to just hop up out of their seat and walk across campus and spend time kind of either unsupervised or kind of make their own decision about how long to spend in a room like that.

If we want to give students the level of freedom that they would normally not really have about their own movement until college, we really have to think about how we're going to manage that.

And what makes a lot of sense to me is having a sensory room that is managed by special ed aides where if a student has a one-on-one or has a student who works with them on an inclusion basis or in a self-contained classroom, they can take them there when they see that the student needs a break or when the student says, hey, I need a break, can you take me down there?

That seems to me like it would work because it is supervised, it is managed, and one of the things that we have to manage is not just where the student is and how long they spend in that room, but I think we also have to manage the level of challenge and frustration.

And that to me is one of the biggest risks of something like this, that it would just be used for work avoidance when the student doesn't really need it, right?

We have to be very careful as educators, and teachers will emphasize this, we need to be challenging our students.

We need to keep them, I wouldn't say like right at the limit of their frustration, but we need to be pushing students hard enough that it's not just their default approach to walk away from any work, right?

Like students will not learn if they are not challenged.

And if given the choice to completely relax in a sensory room versus actually be challenged, I think we know how that's gonna go.

So I think managing the frustration level, managing the challenge level is something that a good IA, a good classroom aid can really help with and just kind of monitoring the students, you know, level of elevation and help them make good choices about, you know, whether it's better to keep working or better to go and have a breather.

Like none of us want our students to get to the point where they're out of control, where they flip out.

We don't want that to happen.

But at the same time, we would be failing in our duty as educators if we didn't build some stamina, if we didn't help students face and overcome some frustration like personally i don't want my kids being able to just walk away anytime they don't want to do something i want them to have that option if they really need it but i think we have to be very careful about that let me know what you think