13: Unilateral Part 2: Compensatory Strategies
We discuss compensatory strategies for unilateral listeners. These are strategies we teach the students so that they can learn to advocate for themselves.
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episode 13: UNILATERAL PART 2: COMPENSATORY STRATEGIES
Transcript
Intro: Welcome to the TOD Podcast, or as we like to say, the “TOD POD.” We chat about all things Deaf Education while you drive around. I’m Kimmy from The Hard of Hearing Teacher and I’m Deanna from Listening Fun, and let’s get started!
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D: We are back for Unilateral Part 2! This is going to be a quick episode right to the point with some actual strategies for you to use. We're going to focus on the compensatory strategies that you can teach your students to use. If you go back and listen to Part One which is Episode 2 of the TOD POD, we talked about how teachers can support unilateral listeners through accommodations and learning more about the impact of unilateral hearing loss. So I do want to preface this episode with the caveat that it is the teacher's responsibility to accommodate the student. And it shouldn't be completely on the student to compensate. However, it is helpful to teach these students these skills so they have some control in their own learning and can self advocate in situations where someone is not accommodating them. Whether it be a substitute, a new teacher, someone in the community, whatever it is. So the four main strategies we're going to go over in this episode are: looking at the speaker, standing with the good ear towards the speaker, asking for repetition and clarification, and asking for accommodations. I have a resource in my store it's part of the Self-Advocacy series called Strategies for Unilateral Listeners. It's a social story that reviews these but we're going to go into more detail about but all of them in this episode.
K: Alright, so let's dive into each of these. First we're going to talk about looking at the speaker. And this might seem like an obvious strategy but you'd be surprised how many students are in the habit of not doing this. I like to bring this to the student's attention and maybe give them some kind of cue like pointing to my eyes and that's something we can practice and introduce during our individual sessions. So then when I'm pushing in I can give them the signal to remind them to look at the teacher while they're speaking. This is most helpful for the students who tend to fidget or zone out or kind of get lost on what's going on. And it's a good reminder to help them since they tend to miss less directions when they're looking at the speaker.
D: The next one is practicing putting their better ear towards the speaker. An activity I like to do is drawing out their classroom on a piece of paper and then pretending to move their feet around the room or draw a little stick figure around the room and discuss if it's a good seat or not, and where they could move instead.
K: I've also done this with students where we go into a temporarily empty classroom and practice. Obviously if you don't have access to that the drawing is great as well. I like to, if you can, go into an actual space that is set up similarly to their classroom because then you can actually move around the classroom and say, "If I'm standing here, where should you be? And why?” or “If your teacher is facing this way, what can you do?”, “If your friend is talking from this seat," and I would physically move myself to that seat, "what would you do?" And this gives them a chance to literally hear the difference between if their head is turned one way or another.
D: I love that you ask them to explain it and why, because I feel like giving them the language to explain why something is easier is also like so helpful for them to give like practice explaining it.
K: Yeah, and also because they only have two sides of their heads. It's a fifty fifty chance so I want to make sure they're not guessing.
Both: [laugh]
D: So true. Alright, the next one is asking for repetition and clarification. First I teach what the difference is. Repetition is asking to say it again and clarification is asking a specific question. So if I said, "Kimmy can you give me the [mumble]?"
K: What did you say?
D: That's repetition versus, "Kimmy, can you give me the [mumble]?"
K: Can I give you the what?
D: That's clarification. Clarification is often better because it tells the speaker exactly what part you missed and it shows that you were paying attention but you just missed that one part. So I'll play games where I'll purposely mumble just so my students have a lot of practice of asking for clarification. I tell them that this is the point of the activity like I'm mumbling on purpose. And it just gets them comfortable with asking that type of clarification question.
K: For students that are in the habit of always saying "What?" a helpful LSLS strategy is to ask them, "What did you hear?" It helps teach the student to rely on their listening skills and take a moment and think about what they heard. And it helps with more effective communication repair. For example, “Yesterday, I went to the mall with Amy.”
D: What?
K: Well what did you hear?
D: Something about the mall.
K: Yes, yesterday I went to the mall with Amy.
D: I like that one because usually they do hear something. They just like don't know exactly what you said and they're in that habit and I feel like asking them what did you hear just helps them learn to trust their own listening a little bit. They realize that they heard more than they actually think they did. And then another thing too is I like to make sure the students know that not all communication breakdowns are on them. They can ask the speaker to adjust sometimes it's not them mishearing, the speaker was unclear. So we can role play situations in which the speaker is mumbling, speaking too quickly, facing away, whatever it is. So we have a couple examples.
D: “Did you hear about Brian?”
K: Can you speak a little slower so I can hear you better?
D: “Did you hear about Brian” (I turned away from the microphone if you couldn't tell.)
Both: [laugh]
K: Can you face me when you talk? It's hard for me to hear you that way.
D: “Did you hear about Brian?”
K: Sorry and hear the last part, who?
D: So like these are all just examples of like how they can ask the speaker to adjust.
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K: I like playing games like you said and incorporating these strategies in as well. I also do it with sabotage or telling the student that we're practicing, for example, "We're practicing... You're either going to ask me to repeat or you're going to ask me to fix what I did." Like giving them two options to pick from. And if the student can read I have a conversation advocacy poster that's a freebie in my TPT store that actually addresses all of the examples that we just practiced and it's just a good little visual aid to have when you're practicing during individual sessions.
K: The last strategy I teach is having the student advocate for their own accommodations. Even young children who don't know what accommodations are can start to do this.
D: This may look like closing the classroom door when the hallway is noisy, telling the teacher it's too loud, asking to work at the back table or the hallway for group work, reminding the teacher to mute or unmute the mic. I would say the one the students tend to pick up first is telling the teacher it's too loud and they can't hear clearly. I like to think about how powerful that is for the student like they're having trouble hearing during a noisy class period and instead of just suffering in silence, they learn that it's okay, encouraged even, to voice their concerns to the teacher and then remedy that problem, either by the class quieting down or moving locations. I think about this sometimes how students have so little control over their day like they have to be in that class at that time they can't just get up and leave if they're experiencing listening fatigue or overwhelm at listening in background noise. And it's so important we teach them at a young age that they can advocate for themselves. They can tell the teacher it's too loud, that they're having a hard time, and they can change the situation. Building their confidence in this way will help them in the future learn to do what's best for them in any specific situation even if you as the TOD can't be there to advocate for them.
K: So I love all these tips. I think this was a short but valuable episode. So thank you for listening and if you haven't listened to Unilateral Part One, we'll link that episode in the show notes so that you can listen to that one as well. We'd love to connect with you on Instagram. Deanna is @ListeningFun and I'm @TheHardOfHearingTeacher. As always a full transcript and show notes can be found at listentotodpod.com and we hope you have a great week.
Both: Bye!