5 Ways to Facilitate Learning and Incorporate Sensory Language In Your Lesson Plans
Why is a strengths based approach to learning important?
Traditional teaching strategies start many times from a deficit model. It is important to know where students are starting from and what they still need to learn. But the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Knowing where a student is starting from, what their life experiences have been, and what the passions and interests of learners are will help you to better partner with students in their learning process, will help students embrace this process with passion, and will help to facilitate student ownership and agency so that students openly embrace becoming life-long learners.
How can I help students overcome fear of failure?
You can help students overcome their fears of failure by helping them to see failure as a worthy part of the learning process and progress as worth celebrating. Strategies that can help with this involve elements like embracing the role of the classroom as community, encouraging learner agency and ownership, and highlighting the practical ways failures have led to successes throughout history.
How does dialectical journaling help students build sensory language skills?
Practice unlocks ability. Dialectical journaling helps students explore sensory language and the mechanics associated with its vocabulary in a setting where they’re not experiencing sensory overwhelm. This can facilitate student agency so that when they’re in a setting where they’re more likely to experience sensory overwhelm, they’ll be more likely to be able to use this language.
Sensory language is defined as language that focuses on the senses, specifically senses like sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound. Through this kind of language, learners are able to experience stimuli both real and imagined. For those with Sensory Processing Sensitivity, there is a familiarity with the weight of experience. However, there may be a block in the ability to communicate this with you as the educator or with others in the learning environment. As an educator, you can help facilitate agency by incorporating sensory language into your lesson plans and classroom instruction. In ways that elevate learning for all of your students. Here’s how.
Use Clear and Direct Language to Communicate Instructions to Learners.
Ambiguity in instructions can add to sensory overwhelm and make it more difficult for sensory-sensitive learners to engage in class. Using language that is clear and direct helps to lower the barrier to entry so that every learner has an opportunity for success.
As an educator, your goal is to be clear in your instructions. But it can be difficult to achieve this goal with the appearance of barriers like the fast pace of the school year, the rapid and systemic changes that can happen in the course of that year, and societal changes that affect the emotional regulation of students. Life happens. This is why having support both personally and professionally is important. Personal support can help reduce or overcome burnout. Click here to open a new tab and unlock 12 Mindset Shifts to Help You Overcome the Symptoms of Burnout. Professional support can help you to achieve your professional goals, provide you with accountability in achieving them, and help you to face the rapid pace of change head-on.
Encourage Confidence in Learners by Building from Strengths.
Learning is an objective. This means that it requires a clear strategy to accomplish effectively. Deficit models don’t account for this. Instead, they focus primarily on what’s missing from the equation. For sensory-sensitive learners already experiencing anxiety or even fear, deficit models feed into the potential for sensory overwhelm. For all students, this sets the groundwork for insecurity and negative peer pressure. Adapting your class instruction style so you focus on the strengths of your students and develop an ecosystem of partnership and accountability and that embraces the philosophy that any student, given the right helps, resources, and opportunities, can learn is vital for achieving the objective of student learning. Instead of focusing on learning from the starting point of deficit, building from the strengths of learners mean that you as the educator open the door for getting to know your students better by finding out what their passions are and where they are already as learners as compared to where they should be and using that solid foundation of what they know, enjoy, and have experienced and become familiar with to help guide the path forward for what the learning process could look like for each learner. The National Education Association provides an example of what this looks like for English Language Learners. Click here to open a new tab and read that article. While this article is about language learning. It provides insights that can be adapted for your educational context.
Celebrate Learner Progress. Learn from Failure.
Failure is the pathway to success. Unfortunately, things like peer pressure, fear of embarrassment, and even what one might think about themselves if they fail, make trying new things a fear for learners. Educators can help students overcome this fear and anxiety by celebrating learner progress and learning from failure. Here are 3 things you can do to work toward these goals:
- Set up a regular time during your instructional time where students can bring their failures, talk about their anxieties and fears about failing, and talk through 1 thing they learned as a result of failure. Toward the end of the session, students can write down this 1 thing they’ve learned, and during a session at the end of the month, students can work together to create and implement a project that brings these lessons together in a real and tangible way. For sensory-sensitive learners, there can be a heightened sensitivity to failure. This approach targets that potentially triggering stimulus and presents it in a way that sensory-sensitive learners can become more accustomed to, so that if failure hits in another scenario, they’re better prepared.
- Each week, you can create a section to include at the bottom of assignments that highlights positive inventions that happened as a result of failure. To help students understand the what and why of the section, you can introduce it in class with a conversation about the importance of learning from failure and celebrating learner progress.
- Report cards and progress reports have their place. But this place is often more for parents than it is for the students. Something you can introduce to help students experience agency in the learning process is by providing students with progress reports designed for them. It would show their progress and strength areas as well as those areas where improvement is needed. Opportunities for additional learning could be provided so that students can deepen their own study and engage in learning in ways that make more sense for them. It could be additionally helpful if these learning opportunities are somehow aligned with the interests of learners.
Use Dialectical Journaling.
Literature naturally lends itself to the inclusion of sensory language. It has to because readers are working from language to imagine scenes, settings, and scenarios from the minds of authors they may share very little with. This works with texts for reading and literature classes. Literature can also create context for and share the story of concepts found in geography, math, and science. For someone who experiences difficulty with self-expression when experiencing sensory overwhelm, seeing the various ways sensory language can increase sensory language familiarity in the absence of triggering stimuli, so that when the time comes that it’s needed, accessing the language and vocabulary comes with greater ease.
For all learners, this can breathe new life into subject matter, increase exposure to key academic principles in ways that facilitate learning, and help them to further build empathy through exposure to new information and new ways of thinking. Here are 3 things to keep in mind when incorporating dialectical journaling into lesson planning.
Modeling Dialectical Journaling
Students may not be familiar with the concept of dialectical journaling, why it’s important, or how to do it. Working through the process yourself and then providing examples of what the process looks like will help provide students with these things.
Guiding Learners Through Dialectical Journaling in English and Related Subjects
The primary thing students will need to do during this exercise is to become observers. As observers, they’ll be responsible for reading the text. They should specifically take note of:
- Metaphors, similes, hyperboles, and other figures of speech they notice as they read. It’s not important that they mark down every example. It is important that learners show an ability to identify each figure of speech, select examples from assigned readings, and understand their meaning according to the context. Help with understanding this meaning should be communicated about as a natural part of the process to help decrease anxiety about it.
- Rising action, the narrative climax, and falling action.
- Primary characters.
- The universality, individuality, and suggestion present in the text.
- How students can build on what they’ve learned from the dialectical journaling about the reading.
Students should also be able to provide page numbers for each reference.
Guiding Learners Through Dialectical Journaling in Math and Related Subjects
It’s not uncommon for learners to question the importance of math and its relevance to their lives. Dialectical journaling can help you to meet your students where they are and encourage them with answers to these questions. Because the connection between dialectical journaling and mathematics might appear to be tangential at first glance, it might be helpful to start by selecting a time period when a test run can be run with this to see how it will work with your class. Select narrative readings that facilitate students being able to identify the following:
- The history of the concept being reviewed.
- Universality, individuality, suggestion.
- The relationship between societal change and the history of the concept.
- What the underlying logic is behind the concept.
- How all of this comes together in a way that personalizes the concept for the learner.
- How a student might be able to build on the concept.
Create a Plan for Learners That Accounts for Overwhelm.
Failure to plan presents the perfect conditions for failure. However, sensory-sensitive students might not be prepared for all of the sensory triggers that could be present in the classroom. Working with students to create a plan that accounts for overwhelm encourages them to take more agency in the learning process. It introduces the possibility of failure in a safe way that communicates that you’re there to walk with them through the learning process and what that means for them as a learner. This level of support is beneficial for all students because when you start from a position of care and a positive relationship, this encourages students to pursue learning and take ownership in the process.
Share in the Comments:
What are some of the strategies you’re looking to adopt to build a classroom environment that takes into account the sensory needs of your students?