First Year History Teacher

Your question assumes that students with learning differences will have trouble comprehending the material. More often, though, students with learning differences have trouble interacting with the material - for lack of a better word.

Students with reading issues will not be able to read the textbook often. Students with writing issues often can’t generate written answers to test questions. Again students with reading issues need extra time on a test as do students with attentional issues.

Comprehension is perhaps your last worry but that you’re worried about your students with learning differences is great. Maybe get hold of a book called Educational Care which will offer you some strategies to help your students with learning differences. Also consider getting hold of their files - make sure you know which of your students have learning differences and make sure for those who have IEPS that you’re familiar with their IEPS.

Other suggestions - assign only reasonable amounts of homework and none on weekends or holidays. It gives your students who are behind a chance to catch up. Go light on projects - they’re time consuming and overused in modern education. Don’t give essay tests - that’s unfair to students with learning differences in writing. Give a choice of assessments if you want to be fair and recognize your students’ different learning styles. Don’t prop your class or your teaching up with memorization. Students with reading issues struggle to memorize written information.

The teaching profession is fortunate to have a new teacher who clearly cares about students - all of them. Any school would be lucky to have you.
Good luck.

It’s great that you’re thinking about this before you even begin teaching! Here are some ideas that should be relatively easy to implement within your class …

Don’t rely solely on the textbook to teach the subject. Students who have difficulty reading and comprehending it will be lost. Supplement with visuals ~ videos are great: use them as a teaching tool, pause in the middle and discuss, and not just as a filler when you have a sub or need to get caught up on paperwork. Also, try to relate your subject to their lives as often as possible. Ask students to bring in newspaper/magazine articles that relate to the area/country you are studying, and share them with the class.

Post vocabulary around the room, and review it for 2-3 minutes at the start of every class. This will help not only the students who have learning difficulties, but everyone will benefit. Give points: 3, 2, or 1 depending on how much information a student is able to add to the definition.

I can see how essay tests are probably expected in the higher grades, but always offer one that is multiple choice, true/false, cloze, vocab., etc. Have 2-3 essay questions at the end. Accept varying levels of answers: one student may be able to write a 5 paragraph essay as an answer, but another may be able to come up with 3-4 good sentences. Evaluate the answer based on each student: not on what the answer key says. Also, take time to teach students how to answer essay questions. Make up sample questions based on what you are studying and spend time in class going over how to answer them. While you are not teaching writing, being able to answer questions correctly can be a difficult skill for some students.

Also, allow students to show that they understand the material in differing ways. For some units, offer the option of a test, project, or report.

When giving reports and projects, always include a rubric that clearly spells out what is due when, what is expected (amount, type, etc), how it will be graded, and any other information that the students need to be successful. For the first assignment you might break it down to 3-5 separate due dates to help those students who have trouble with time management.

If you do have special ed. students in your class, find time to speak with the special education teacher(s) as soon as you are comfortable with what you are doing. Get as much information from them on the individual students as you can: what works, what doesn’t, their personalities and histories, etc.

Before a test, always give a study guide that spells out exactly what will be on the test and what the student should study. Do periodic notebook checks to be sure that the organizationally challenged student has the appropriate papers in his/her notebook, and not in the bottom of his/her locker! You could even spend a day before the test letting the class organize their materials, quiz each other, etc.

Hope these help! Good luck with your first teaching position!

Jenn

If the child has an IEP then it will spell out certain things you have to do to accomodate their needs so they can better access the material.

The hard and fast advice above “Don’t give essay tests” with the implication of not using essay tests ever — or even sentences, only single words or multiple choice — is called by another name: watering down the curriculum.

One of the central goals in teaching history is teaching students to reason and to explain their reasoning. After a few years out of school a lot of the finer factual detail slips out of the memory, but the larger structure of how to read and process information and put it on paper stays with you. Also working with the facts to make up an essay will actually make you remember them much longer than just memorizing a list to check off.

If you simply work on recognizing and checking off facts on multiple-choice tests and filling in single words on fill in the blank tests, you have omitted the major part of what you supposedly are teaching.

I have an excellent book at home, “The Shopping Mall High School” which discusses the issue of whether you are getting a top-rank department store education or a dollar-store education — the same building may offer both, often carefully disguised by wordy descriptions.

In this book the author makes what I think is a very important point: Many modern schools are **academically challenging but not intellectually challenging.** They are academically challenging because there is a ton of work to do, there are huge lists of facts to memorize for the tests, and there are tests every day so you can’t ever slack off and take a breather.

But they are *not* intellectually challenging, because everything is predigested and summarized into neat little study guides of all the facts you have to recognize and check off. You never actually have to *think*, just pack those memory banks until time to dump them on the test.

If you are a real teacher, you are in the business of stretching your students brains to take in things that are not always easy or simple. You are trying to get them working on those *higher-order thinking skills* — things that are more than just recognition, more than just definitions of words, more than just memorizing, more than just imitating previously provided models.

Sure, this stuff is hard. That is the point. That is why people go to high school instead of just doing their own thing as teenagers. That is why you get paid to teach it instead of just letting them hang out and do their own thing. That is why when you graduate from high school and college you get honoured at a ceremony, because you are supposed to have done something difficult.
That is why (theoretically at least, whether or not it is implemented) you have a developmental curriculum that leads students gradually to the point where they are ready to benefit from a history class — you don’t have a serious history class in primary school in Grades 1 to 4 because the students are learning the fundamentals, but in middle and high school you are supposed to have progressively richer and more challenging courses to offer, including among other things *learning* to do your own reading and thinking and composing. You don’t do everything all at once in your first course, but you’re supposed to be led gradually to more and more difficult activities.

If you never write essays or paragraphs or even sentences in your middle and high school classes, when are you ever going to learn? I think of all the people complaining about how college requirements are too hard and they never had to do this kind of thing and they’re flunking out, and well …

OK, for LD students, you find ways to cope with the difficulties. I am personally a strong proponent of remediation — first improve the skills and then work on the content area. if you can’t do that, try to find ways to accomodate that don’t take away from the goals of higher-order thinking.
Examples: you will have to read your textbooks anyway before you teach. How about reading aloud into a tape recorder and giving copies of the tapes to anyone who is a slow reader?
And/or read the text aloud in class, a section at a time (takes only five to ten minutes usually) and then discuss it in detail — this helps teach critical reading and makes darned sure the thing really gets read, a rare thing for many students.
And/or have students in the class read it aloud taking paragraphs in turn; hop around the class so it is not obvious you’re avoiding a couple of LD readers. Have the Ld students explain the illustration or make a verbal summary, something that works for them.
If students have a real writing problem, let them do tests in another room dictating their answers into a tape recorder.
Or if they can write but slowly, arrange a place and time where they can take an extra hour to finish the test without pressure (hand it in with the others after class, then come back and finish later as appropriate — no embarrassment and minimal cheating).
*Instead of* giving ghastly non-thinking busywork like copying notes from text and then grading notebooks, give some challenging thinking questions (level of challenge appropriate to grade) to be answered in sentence form; non-writers can dictate to a tape recorder or a scribe.