This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License punishments than usual (for example, isolating a student for extended times). In case you are tempted in this direction, remember that every IEP also guarantees the student and the student’s parents due process before an IEP can be changed. In practice this means consulting with everyone involved in the case—especially parents, other specialists, and the student himself—and reaching an agreement before adopting new strategies that differ significantly from the past. Instead of “increasing the volume” of punishments, a better approach is to keep careful records of the student’s behavior and of your own responses to it, documenting the reasonableness of your rules or responses to any major disruptions. By having the records, collaboration with parents and other professionals can be more productive and fair-minded, and increase others’ confidence in your judgments about what the student needs in order to fit in more comfortably with the class. In the long term, more effective collaboration leads both to better support and to more learning for the student (as well as to better support for you as teacher!).
Physical disabilities and sensory impairments A few students have serious physical, medical, or sensory challenges that interfere with their learning. Usually, the physical and medical challenges are medical conditions or diseases that require ongoing medical care. The sensory challenges are usually a loss either in hearing or in vision, or more rarely in both. Whatever the specific problem, it is serious enough to interfere with activities in regular classroom programs and to qualify the student for special educational services or programs. Physical challenges that are this serious are relatively infrequent compared to some of the other special needs discussed in this chapter, though they are of course important in the lives of the students and their families, as well as important for teachers to accommodate. Only about one per cent of US students have a hearing loss serious enough to be served by special programs for such students (United States Department of Education, 2005). Only about half that number have visual impairments that lead them to be served by special programs. For two reasons, though, these figures are a bit misleading. One reason is that many more students have vision or hearing problems that are too mild (such as wearing eyeglasses for “ordinary” nearsightedness). Another is that some students with serious sensory impairments may also have other disabilities and therefore not be counted in statistics about sensory impairments.
Hearing loss A child can acquire a hearing loss for a variety of reasons, ranging from disease early in childhood, to difficulties during childbirth, to reactions to toxic drugs. In the classroom, however, the cause of the loss is virtually irrelevant because it makes little difference in how to accommodate a student’s educational needs. More important than the cause of the loss is its extent. Students with only mild or moderate loss of hearing are sometimes called hearing impaired or hard of hearing; only those with nearly complete loss are called deaf. As with other sorts of disabilities, the milder the hearing loss, the more likely you are to encounter the student in a regular classroom, at least for part of the day.
Signs of hearing loss Although determining whether a student has a hearing loss may seem straightforward (“Just give a hearing test!”), the assessment is often not clear cut if it takes the student’s daily experiences into account. A serious or profound hearing loss tends to be noticed relatively quickly and therefore often receive special help (or at least Educational Psychology http://www.saylor.org/courses/psych303/
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