Blog Post by Ruth Coleman
There have been many changes to education for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in the last few years. The 2014 ‘The Children and Families Act’ brought a clear expectation that most pupils with SEND would be taught in a mainstream school, and that every teacher is a teacher of SEND. As you will all know, in a class of 32, there are numerous different personalities, different special educational needs, different issues that have arisen that day and different emotional needs, making it very difficult to plan amazing lessons. But how can we ensure we are successfully supporting each and every SEND student that sits in front of us every single day?
The SEND principles are designed to ensure we do exactly this. They are designed for teachers and classroom learning assistants to work together to ensure each and every SEND student succeeds. Research shows SEND students need just as much teacher time as non-SEND students; with extra input from CLAs. As we know, if we are Challenging, Explaining, Modelling, Questioning, giving Feedback, ensuring students are Practicing and making time for the students to Retrieve the information learnt, then all students will achieve. And this is no different for SEND students. The way in which we plan these may be slightly different, but the principles of learning are not. For instance, when modelling with SEND students who you know struggle with retrieval, we may use the I,I,I,We,We,We,We,We,You, approach, whereas with a class you know don’t struggle so much to retrieve information, it may be a simple I,I,We.We,You approach to result in successful retrieval, or even in a perfect classroom an I,We,You approach, but we all know they don’t exist! For SEND students though, it is vitally important that after this guided practice phase, students are given time to do some independent practice so we can ensure SEND students are gradually (but certainly) being released into independent practice without errors or misconceptions.
Another of the principles that is vitally important to the achievement of SEND is Challenge. Gone are the days when SEND students were in another room with the SENCO, they are now in front of you all every day. Gone are the days of questions such as ‘How can I dumb it down?’ floating around teachers’ heads as they planned for SEND students. Now we ask ‘What do I need to plan in order for each and every student to reach that objective?’ Chunking is something I have seen used in so many different, yet so many successful ways across school. Whether it be teachers using the CLAs to work with a certain group in the class for the lesson, or CLAs physically cutting up worksheets so students aren’t daunted by the task, or teachers modelling a small part of a ‘Boy In the Striped Pyjamas’ analysis paragraph, ensuring understanding on that, before modeling the rest – I know as a school we are challenging all SEND students all of the time, so thank you very much!
Download Meden’s SEND Learning Principles by CLICKING HERE
