 Hi everyone. We're here today to talk about accommodations and modifications. Please let me know in the chat box if you cannot hear me. Give a message in case you can't hear me. Okay. Accommodations and modifications today. And our goals are we're going to define a definition for accommodations and give some examples of accommodations today. We're also going to talk about modifications, what they are, and give examples of modifications. And then we'll also talk through some examples of when you might consider both accommodations and or modifications. Okay, but first let's start with this story. Welcome to Planet Equal. And this is an example of maybe more of a home situation. And you know a lot of us in education are parents. So welcome to where everyone gets equally. So here's what you expect at Planet Equal. You know you'll go to bed at the same time as your little sister, even if your favorite team goes into overtime on a Friday night. You'll take ballet, karate, and piano in addition to playing baseball because your siblings all do this. Want a dog? Too bad. Your older sister has a cat and now you're going to get one too. That's how we do things on Planet Equal. But on the other side of the solar system we've got Planet Fair. And here's what you can expect on Planet Fair. Older kids get to stay up later than younger ones since young kids need more sleep. Your sister gets new skis because the ski club gets a new camera because you've joined the school. Do you think you'd rather? So in the old days I think we always had a lot of questions about what is fair. A lot of times kids will say, oh that's not fair, or teachers will feel like if they're doing things differently for kids that it's not always fair. And so there is a big important difference between equal and fair and we want to make sure in schools that we are really thinking about what's fair. Is it possible for parents or teachers to treat their child absolutely fair? Absolutely. And it wouldn't be right if we did that. We must treat kids as equal because each are different individuals and they have individual needs. And we have to remember the same thing. There is everybody that they need in order to be successful. And I think that sometimes helps teachers and educators to think about fair doesn't have to be equal because it wouldn't be right to give everybody the same thing. And here's another example. You wouldn't go back to a doctor if they treated everything in the same way for everybody who comes in. So for example, my doctor gives me the same treatment for a headache or think about my headaches. So the cost for one headache might be allergies, the other could be a tumor or something much more serious. In the same way we want to think about how identical treatment for two students who don't do homework for different reasons. For example, one who has to help at the family business after school and one who watches television is no easy doctor with a single headache. So again, equal and always what's fair in school. And it's also good to think about that fair isn't easy. We think about being truly fair for students. It really is harder because we have to really think about what is fair for each individual. It's going to take us more work in the short run. So up front it's going to take us more work to figure that out rather than just treating everybody exactly the same. But in the long run, it's going to take time and be more effective. And when it comes to treating everyone the same, every child deserves a lot better than that. It's not right to treat everyone the same. So we're going to start talking about accommodations. And as we go through this discussion, I did also want to say that Sheila Crop is here today as well to help with this discussion. So if any question that Sheila could answer or if Sheila has any points to or any point out, she's going to go ahead and jump in. So what is an accommodation? Accommodations are a variety of techniques and supports that are intended to provide a student with disabilities full access to the general curriculum. These are things that would include changes in the instructional activities or testing procedures or materials that will minimize or eliminate something for the child that is disability-related barrier. But it doesn't create favor for students with disabilities. And I think that's an important point to think about as well when you're thinking about accommodations. We're not trying to create favor for students with disabilities, but we're really just trying to level the playing field. Usually, they're professional or test-adaptations, and they allow this student to illustrate what they know about what they're being taught about changing the target skill. And we're going to talk more about target skills in a minute. We're going to change the target skill that's being taught in the classroom, assured in test-adaptations. Accommodations do not reduce the learning or the performance expectations that we hold for students. But it does change the manner or the setting in which the information is presented or in the manner in which the students are expected to respond. But again, we're not changing the target skill or the testing construct. So if we think about target skills versus assess skills, this can usually kind of help to clear up if it's an accommodation or a modification. So oftentimes, accommodations and modifications can be confused because you're not sure what's the target skill and what's the access skill. And so what we want to do first is we want to think about what's the target skill that they need to know and then identify the skills the student needs to access it or respond to that target skill. So target skills are the academic skills that the teacher is actively trying to assess or teach. These things are the non-negotiable. The teacher has to know that the skills are not compromised in the instruction or the assessment of any general student. For example, let's say that there's a fourth grade teacher and the target skill for the class is development of computational fluency and basic multiplication facts. So the students to be proficient with their multiplication facts. And so to work toward the goal, the teacher has the class complete a worksheet of 20 computation problems under a certain time limit. The teacher would not allow a typical student who struggles with computation to do fewer than the assigned 20 problems, as this change would undermine the target skill of computational fluency that is the purpose of the assignment. So on the other side, we have access skills. And so access skills are those needed for the student to take part in a class or assignment or instructional activity but are not themselves the target of the instruction. Access skills can be the focus of accommodations because altering these might remove the barrier of participation but will not compromise what's been in the classroom and the academic rigor of the activities. For example, if we have a seventh grade teacher who assigns a five paragraph essay in class writing assignment, and as she's watching the student, she sees that one of the student finds that handwriting part is difficult or aversive. And so instead of having the student write it out by hand, the student has the accommodation of writing his essay on a classroom computer. So the access skill, which is the method of text production, is altered. So it doesn't matter if the student uses their handwriting or uses the computer because the teacher is still preserving the integrity of the elements of the assignment that directly address the target skill which is producing the five paragraph essay. And as we go along today, I want to make sure that if you have questions, just go ahead and type them into the chat box and we'll try to answer those as we go along. As we think about accommodations, we can generally break them into five categories. So the first category would be timing. For example, giving a student extended time to complete a task or test item. The second category would be flexible scheduling. So giving a student two days instead of one day to complete a project. We can also have the third category of a accommodated presentation of the material. So the material might be presented to the student in a different manner. That's maybe not so traditional. Sometimes pulling in some technology to help with that. We could also have setting accommodations which include things like small group students. We could also have response accommodations which means having the student perhaps respond or lead a test questions or instead of having to write their answers, respond through a scribe or as this example, like using a computer for their response. So students who are eligible must be provided accommodations to assure that they have equal access to the education that is comparable to education available without disabilities or without needs for accommodations. They may be instructional, behavioral, environmental, or medical. And accommodations must be documented in an individual student plan and a 504 accommodation plan or some other type of plan, a health plan. And so when would we consider accommodations or why might we implement accommodations? So here's just some examples of times when accommodations might be considered in the return to learn process. Someone who's returning from a concussion or maybe another medical event. If it's part of an individual student plan that would be documented by the student assistance team. If a student has been evaluated and does not qualify for special education or no longer qualifies for special education. So if it's a student who had previously qualified for special education, they're evaluated and the team determines that the student no longer qualifies for special education. That's written into rule 51, which are the special education guidelines, that if a student is evaluated and doesn't qualify, that student should return to the student assistance team process. And there it might be appropriate to write up some sort of individual student plan where you document some accommodations that would be effective for the student. You also might have accommodations as part of an IEP, an individual education plan through special education services. And again, these really need to be considered on a case by case basis. We want those based on the data that is presented at the IEP meeting like based on the present level of performance or other data that is gathered. And we don't want to rely on a generic menu of academic accommodations that are based on the student's disability category. So they need to really be individualized. I have some examples of accommodations here. There are all kinds of examples available. If you search accommodations on the web, there's all kinds of accommodations. So this is not an inclusive list that includes every single accommodation available. These are just some ideas. And I have just a couple different pages here of ideas. So I'm not going to read through these exactly, but you can see some things on there like visual cues, use timers to show how much time the student has left to complete an assignment or a test, repeating major points, taping a page that doesn't move around for the students, pausing during speaking, making sure that you have their attention are all types of accommodations. So as we talked about before, as I mentioned before, we want to make sure that the student actually needs the accommodation. So as much as possible, we need to really focus on database decision making when we're thinking about implementing accommodations for students because we want to reduce the likelihood that the student's access to the general curriculum is not, in fact, more limited because sometimes we just get a little overzealous thinking about all the accommodations that we could provide, rather than thinking about what is truly needed for the student. And there is research out there saying that students with disabilities are often over accommodated. And we really need to think about that as we're making accommodations as part of any plan. If it's an individual education plan or any type of plan, we really want to think about and be diligent about answering questions about whether or not the student really needs the accommodations that are being proposed. So does the student benefit from the accommodation is a question that all teams should really be asking? Any useful tool to help us kind of decide that is called the differential boost test. So when we do that, the teacher would examine a student's performance both with and without the accommodation and ask these two questions. Number one, does the student perform significantly better with the accommodation than without? And two, does the accommodation boost that particular student's performance substantially beyond what could be expected if it were given to all students in the class? And if the answer to both of those questions is yes, then there is clear evidence that this student receives a differential boost from the accommodation and that this benefit can be explained as a unique response for this particular student. We also want to think about with that evidence in hand, the teacher should feel confident that the accommodation is appropriate match for the student. But if you see that most students would benefit from that particular accommodation idea, then maybe the assignment could be revised or the assessment activity revised to incorporate the accommodation for everyone. Not that you're making it easier for everyone but that you're getting a better sense of their knowledge of the content rather than them being kind of held back because of not having the accommodation. Okay, so here's an example of that. So a teacher may routinely allocate 20 minutes for her class to complete an in-class writing assignment and finds that all but one of the students are able to complete the assignment within the time limit. Therefore, to figure out would the student do better if I gave more time to see if that's an accommodation that the student needs, the teacher allows the student an additional 10 minutes work time and finds that the work is much better with that accommodation. So the evidence shows that in contrast to peers, the student gains a clear differential boost from the accommodation of extended time because, number one, the writing product is substantially improved when using the extended time and number two, the other students didn't really appear to need it. So it seems that it's a unique accommodation for that student rather than an accommodation that maybe could be given to everyone in the classroom. Questions to ask as a team or as an individual when you're thinking about accommodations. What types of accommodations are allowed in state and district policies? And we want to consider provisions for both instructional and testing accommodations. A lot of times on IEPs, where we think about some of those accommodations is oh, what about those state and district tests? But we really want to consider accommodations that are all the time. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that too. Does the student display disability-related behaviors that interfere with learning and his or her ability to demonstrate his or her knowledge and skill? How can the student's strengths be utilized in planning for accommodations? So if we know that a student does something particularly well, is there a way that we can include that strength in an accommodation? And then do we have data available to support the use of that accommodation for the students? So how we really looked at does that accommodation remove the barrier for the student or is that boost, is there data to support that there is that boost for the student? So remember, accommodations are to be individual and the ones that are written into the plan are those that are being used consistently and all of the time. It is not like a menu to choose from each day. And that's something that Sheila had pointed out that came up through special education file review process. Using the menu that is on the IEPs and choosing 18 or so accommodations isn't really best practice. We'd rather limit to maybe four or five that are used consistently and all the time, because that's what's intended by the IEP. And by any plan that you're writing up for students where accommodations are being written down, what you're saying as a team is that those are accommodations that are going to be used consistently all the time. It's not a menu. Like, oh, for this class it's this accommodation for this particular activity. We want to look at the ones that we're using consistently and have those written into a plan. The only ones that should be part of a plan are the ones that the student needs consistently and that are expected to be implemented by all teachers. So again, not thinking of it as a menu, but as these are the ones that we are regularly putting in place for a student. And another thing is that accommodations are acceptable in most situations, but modifications are not. So we're going to start talking about modifications now. And modifications are quite different from accommodations, because modifications do change that target skill that we talked about earlier. So the critical learning that is non-negotiable with a modification that is being changed. They often reduce learning expectations or affect the content in such a way that what is being taught or tested is fundamentally changed from what is being taught or tested to the peers. So we're really making a big change when we're using a modification. They are instructional or test adaptations that allow the student to demonstrate what he or she knows or can do, which is like an accommodation, but they also reduce the target skill in some way. So if a child is provided with a modification, it's going to lower the performance expectation usually. And a modification may do that by reducing the number of items required or the complexity of the items or the task that we are teaching or that we're requiring. So in essence, the student doesn't demonstrate what he or she knows or can do in that target skill or that content because the modification changes it to such a degree that the student's product no longer represents what we think it does. So we have to be really careful with modifications and be real clear with modifications with parents because modifications do change the target skill. So modifications are anything that changes the curriculum or the target skill. So if we're lessening the depth or the breadth of the information or material covered, so if we're having the student learn fewer objections excuse me, fewer objectives or we're shortening the units or the lessons or we're giving them fewer pages or problems, those are things that are considered modifications. Materials that are written at a lower readability level and sometimes those are really important things to do for students with special needs, but we give them high interest low ability books, but we just have to realize that it is a modification. In any time that we're teaching out of grade level is definitely a modification. So if we have a we're implementing third grade math standards for a seventh grade student, that is definitely a modification. There's also assignment modifications. So we could have students completing fewer or different homework problems than peers. We're having them write shorter papers, we're having them answer fewer or different test questions or we're creating total alternate projects or assignments for students. Those are all assignment modifications. We can also have curriculum modifications where the student is learning different material. Like a student who hasn't yet mastered multiplication we have that student continue working on multiplication and don't continue them with what the rest of the class is learning so maybe the rest of the class is moving under fractions or division, but that student we're going to change their curriculum and they're going to keep working on multiplication only. Maybe another curriculum modification would be that the student gets graded or assessed using a different standard than the one for their peers. Excusing students from particular projects would be another example of a curriculum modification. So when modifications are made kids with disabilities are not expected to master the same academic content as others in the classroom. And that's very different than an accommodation. So in modification we're really lowering the standards. With accommodations we shouldn't be lowering the standards but we're just accommodating the access skill, not the target skill. When are some times that we would consider modifications? Again, possibly in that return to learn time following a concussion that would be based on an individual student plan or a health plan where the student is returning following like I said concussion or some other major health problem, health issue and modifications are typically written into individual education plans through the special education process. Okay, so we went through a lot of information today and fairly quickly are there any questions out there? Sheila do you have anything to add? It's just what came out from file reviews was basically to keep accommodations to like four or five that you are using on a consistent basis. So anything you have listed as an accommodation you should have some type of proof that it is being used by all the teachers every single day all year long for that student. Okay, thanks Sheila for that clarification. Are there any other questions? Okay I'll wait maybe another minute before I end the presentation. If there is a question go ahead and type in into the chat box otherwise I'm just going to offer these references here and ask that if you have questions you can always email myself you can email Sheila Crop, you can also email Ruth Miller or your school psychologist to help answer some of your questions. So I hope you have a great day and a great rest of your week. Thank you.