Benefits for Other Adults Visiting and Supporting in Classrooms

Benefits and Considerations for Other Adults Visiting and Supporting in Classrooms

Are Visual Supports Helpful to Other Adults Entering/Working Within the Classroom?

Yes! Supporting Neurodiverse Learners by Using Visual Supports as a Tier 1 Intervention revealed many benefits to neurodiverse and diverse learners in primary classrooms.  Co-Teachers, Administrators, Consultants or Coaches,  Division Based Professionals, Support Staff, Advocates, Volunteers, Student Teachers, Guest Teachers and Others benefit from the visual supports that classroom teachers implement in their classrooms.

Staff working directly and regularly within classrooms (e.g. Educational Assistants) as well as those observing or entering classrooms less regularly (administrators, division based professionals) reported that having visual supports available allowed them to:

• Ensure adults interacting with students use common terms and vocabulary (because key terms are visible on visual supports) when interacting with students in the classroom 

• Helps adults ensure they are teaching, prompting or answering questions from learners using the same procedures as the teacher (helpful especially for adults who may not be experts in a subject area they are in the classroom during or who may have learned something using different words or procedures than the teacher is presently using to teach the class.

• Helps adults who are transitioning from one space in the school to another to quickly understand the content, vocabulary and expectations of a lesson so that they can easily support after arriving to a classroom

• Helps adults to prime the students, who may need transition support or more wait time than peers, for what might be happening next or later

• See the focuses of student learning upon entering a classroom

• Feel more confident prompting or redirecting a student to a task/next step/assisting with problem solving because procedures students were following are explicit and obvious to adults because of the visual supports available.

• Could give adults a sense of a good time to take the student from a classroom for any pull out support and an idea of when it might be easiest for them to return (i.e. visual schedule, seeing what a student was expected to do after the present assignment in a list. . . )

• Can help adults to judge when whole class or natural breaks in teaching will occur to help a student complete an activity before taking a break (if appropriate)

Video: Benefits for Other Adults Working in and Visiting Classrooms