Will This Accommodation Actually Increase Your Learning?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder suggests that schools should ask a simple but powerful question before granting accommodations: will this actually improve learning?
Key Takeaways
- The question reframes the conversation - Asking whether an accommodation increases learning focuses on its educational purpose
- Many accommodations reduce learning - Avoidance-based accommodations that let students skip challenges may actually decrease learning
- Students can answer honestly - When asked directly, students often know whether an accommodation helps them learn or just makes things easier
Transcript
For students with disabilities, often high expectations make a bigger difference than accommodations.
And I think we have to be very careful about accommodations and make sure that they're actually going to be a net benefit to the student and not something that merely allows them to get out of doing their work, that deprives them of the benefit of doing hard work and being held to high expectations.
And I think one big opportunity here is to actually ask students what accommodation would be helpful to you in meeting high expectations.
Often, we don't ask kids that.
They're supposed to be involved in the IEP process, but often that's not where the accommodations come from.
You know where the accommodations come from in a lot of cases?
is software.
They're built in as defaults, and I think there's a built-in incentive to just check all the boxes and to say, yes, this student can have extra time, this student can be exempted from this, exempted from that, you know, special circumstances for this, that, and the other thing that may not actually be helpful to that particular student.
And a lot of people have been commenting on my video about anxiety from a few days ago and said, you know, one thing that was never helpful to me was extra time.
I did not need extra time, but I was consistently given extra time as just kind of a default accommodation.
And I think most of the accommodations that kids are getting now are defaults.
They're in the software.
It's easy to check the box.
It's better safe than sorry.
Parents will not criticize you if you allow an accommodation most of the time.
Now, parents will often say, hey, my kid does not need this accommodation.
Don't give it to them.
And I think we've always got to have that conversation of what is actually going to result in the most learning for the student.
Let me know what you think.