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What Are Accommodations and Why Do Students with Hearing Differences Need Them?

Speech perception and listening accuracy cannot be assumed by looking at the audiogram. Teacher’s voices, room acoustics, and classroom management vary so identifying listening challenges and specific accommodations needs to be done for students who are deaf and hard of hearing each school year. Accommodations are things that others do to support equity and inclusion. Students with hearing loss do not have access to auditory information both in the classroom and outside of the classroom. Classroom accommodations are used to change how a student accesses information and provide students with access to the maximum amount of information.

1. Changes can be made to the environment to increase student access to information.
   • Noise reduction measures: carpet on the floors, acoustic ceiling tiles, lower sound air vents
   • Limit interruptions and background noise that can make hearing hard: close the door, close the windows, shut off the fan while instructing
   • Use Closed Captions on Movies and Videos

2. Changes can be made to the way teachers present information to provide access to auditory information.

• Identification of those peers who are responding in class: When calling on a student, the teacher says the name of the student so that the other students know who is speaking.
• Peer-contributed information repeated by the teacher to ensure comprehension: When a student makes a comment or asks a question in class, repeat the the comment or question to ensure comprehension.
• Write important Information: When saying page numbers, homework, or instructions, write the key information on the board so that the student with hearing loss can fill in the gaps.

3. Students can make accommodations for themselves to increase access to information.

• Hearing Assistive Technology: Some students with a hearing loss benefit from hearing aids, cochlear implants, bone anchored hearing aids, microphone systems, or sound field systems.
• Interpreter or Captioner: Some students with a hearing loss benefit from using an ASL interpreter or a Captioner to access instruction in the classroom.
• Visual Cues: Some students look around them to see what to do based on what peers are doing.
• Listening Buddy: Some students have a friend that they feel comfortable asking when they miss something or don’t know what to do.
• Speechreading: Many students rely on the ability to see the speakers face and mouth to understand what is said. This is also sometimes called lipreading.

Parent Resources

Hands and Voices has some fun upcoming events. Check them out in the activities section below and register if interested. Also check out the Hands and voices parent newsletter at https://www.mnhandsandvoices.org/news-events/focus-newsletter

Upcoming Activities