Being Deliberate About Deaf Awareness

It’s the first day of the term and you have arrived to work well-prepared to welcome and deliver the curriculum to all your students. You are determined to implement the EDI playbook in every single lesson! You receive an email from the Teacher of the Deaf sharing with you one-page profiles of deaf students that you will be teaching. There are mentions of the students’ diagnosis at birth, ‘severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss’, pictures of the audiogram, cochlear implants, transmitters in lessons and diagnoses of multiple other needs…

You might be thinking “I have never taught a deaf student before; I never learnt about this on my teacher training programme! Will there be specialist support in my class? What is this soundfield system? I don’t know how to use a Roger Pen?!” All these questions will no doubt leave you in panic mode!

It was essential that we trained our staff on how to get the best of the EDI Playbook to ensure that it meets the needs of our 11 deaf students.

The Planning

The impact of hearing loss affects a students’ ability to listen and learn, their attention and concentration, language development, social skills, auditory memory and working memory - which ultimately impacts progress. This all meant that timely and effective action was needed as ‘every second counts!’.

At Petchey, effective education of all deaf students is a whole school responsibility.

When I looked at the EDI playbook, I strategised and formed an adjoining plan outlining how staff could make reasonable adjustments to the framework, promote good strategies and incorporate them into their intellectual preparation. In order to effectively share this with all staff, both new and longstanding, we decided that this pressing CPD need could be addressed through a specialised Teaching and Learning coffee morning.

I wanted to design a session in which they tell the teachers what they need and how they can be supported in different phases of the EDI playbook. I met with a sample of our deaf to get the ball rolling and we unpicked the routines for each phase. They decided on the strategies that would help them and I soon realised that it would be best if key messages came from the students themselves.

The Session

It was the best attended coffee morning yet! We covered:

• the impact of hearing loss on student outcomes and progress

• the complex technology many of our students use in the classroom

• how we can use the EDI playbook to remove barriers to learning for deaf students.

Three brave students then led our teachers through the deliberate practice for Phase 1 and coached us on: checking they were wearing correct equipment at the threshold, checking devices were ‘connected’ ensuring students were seated at the front to facilitate lip reading.

The Intended Impact

It was a successful session where our students felt empowered in showing their teachers how to help them and staff too felt a great sense of achievement and confidence.

One teacher said “I felt hugely inspired; what a start to the day!” Our teachers came away with a better understanding of how to manage and minimise the impact of a student’s deafness on their learning by ensuring that all students have full access to the curriculum, develop their learning skills and, ultimately, attain the best possible levels of academic achievement.

Embedding this training in every lesson will ensure consistently high quality, and genuinely inclusive, experience for our deaf students which will make a positive impact on their educational, social and emotional outcomes.