How to Transform Your Library Into A Safe Haven for Students with Special Needs
- STUDENTS OF IDEA LIBRARY
- Sep 28, 2017
- 9 min read
Photograph taken by the author, Lauren Stevens.
“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” –Jimmy Dean
Author's Note: All names have been changed in the interest of protecting the privacy of teachers and their students.
Being in the 21st century, our society is endlessly racing towards the highest level of achievement. Simultaneously, there are individuals who are still fighting simply for understanding from their parents, siblings, teachers, peers, and one day, they will fight for understanding from their employers. Expectations are high, and accommodations still seem to be low. These individuals who were born and exist in the same world are receiving a vastly different life experience. We, as school media specialists, need to ensure that our students with special needs receive our understanding by designing a media center with accommodating intention.
Students with special needs should feel they have two safe havens in the school building. They should feel that the instructors in the special education room and the instructors in the school media center are both deeply involved with understanding their needs. These instructors have many things in common, but one of the most important things is the belief that no matter who you are, or how you get to where you are going, achievement can be reached by all. However, the school media center is not always known for providing resources and expertise specifically to students with special needs.
In a study on the attitudes of faculty in LIS and education toward teacher-librarian collaboration conducted by the journal School Library Research, it was reported that "school libraries were not even necessarily seen as resource centers, but rather as extra space where student detentions or faculty meetings could be held. Faculty in both disciplines characterized collaboration as nonexistent or difficult to achieve." Being one of the richest banks of information and resources in the school, the school media center should be regarded as the space where students know that they can receive the type of help they need. Additionally, librarians are trained to work with and accommodate resources for students who have special needs (McDaniel 2015). So the question is: Why aren't we collaborating with special education teachers more? What needs to change? By examining the perception of the school media center, we will be discussing the common issues and how this can change.
I interviewed the special education teacher and the school media specialist at ZHS. ZHS has 1,357 students with 157 students who have an IEP, making that about 11% of the students. The special education room is a simple, well-organized classroom with white boards and chalkboards containing calendars of due dates, dates of quizzes, and dates of exams. There seems to be guided reminders and items of classroom content everywhere in the room. The library is located right down the adjoining hallway connecting the high school and the middle school, serving grades 6-12 on a regular basis. The library is large, open and accommodating. All of the stacks and the computers are widely accessible.
I interviewed Mrs. Y, the school media specialist at ZHS who has a Master’s Degree in Library Sciences from Albany University. She has been a school media specialist for 17 years, previously working at BHS for 12 years before working at ZHS the last five years. She receives additional training for special education periodically during Superintendents conference days and working one-on-one with the special education teacher, Ms. X. Mrs. Y's personal vision throughout her career has been to successfully instruct the students despite any limitations.
I also interviewed Ms. X, the special education teacher at ZHS who has a Bachelor's in Special Education K-12, and has received her elementary certification for K-6. She has her Master's degree in both Special Education and in Reading. This will be Ms. X's 30th year teaching Special Education at ZHS. She expands her knowledge base using a variety of resources including conferences, parent advocacy groups, and anything else she hears about such as going to see a speaker at the local college. She also goes to the Professional Development professional at the school to find out about or share new ways to update special education knowledge base for herself and for the school faculty as a whole. She is highly regarded for her professional work ethic. Her personal vision is that the students' voices are heard. She believes that "they direct the traffic," meaning that they have a say in the decisions that are made for their learning. She values teaching them how to make decisions as an adult so that they continue doing so when they leave the school.
The perception of the role of the school media specialist according to School Media Specialist, Mrs. Y, at ZHS:
Staff rarely collaborates with the library unless it is absolutely vital. If the teachers are doing a project and the students don't know how to create a works cited page, or if the students are required to use print resources for research papers, they will bring them to the library. Collaboration ends there.
When asked what would improve collaboration, Mrs. Y's response was a swift, "A lack of computers might improve collaboration. They each have Chromebooks in their classroom now. Since the classrooms got Chromebooks, collaboration has decreased down to zero to four times per teacher, per year.”
When asked if she collaborates with Special Education, Mrs. Y replied, “To be honest, we don’t do much with Special Education here.”
- Mrs. Y believes that if she were given the opportunity to publicize the products and the skills she has to offer, then perhaps collaboration may increase.
The perception of the role of the school media specialist according to Special Education teacher, Ms. X, at ZHS:
- Ms. X directly collaborates with other faculty all the time. For her, collaboration is a constant. That being said, if the general education teachers don't require the students to do work that needs to take place in the media center, there is no need to collaborate in that location.
- Ms. X uses the school media center mostly to have Mrs. Y teach them how to create a works cited page for a research paper.
- The variable that would need to occur to increase collaboration with Mrs. Y would be an increase of necessity. The students would need to be assigned more research papers. They would need to be required to cite more authoritative sources. They would need to be required to use databases more often.
- When taking on any kind of collaboration project, Ms. X mostly considers the content of the course and how to deliver that to each student. In other words, in order to ensure her students are held accountable for their content, she thinks about what modifications and accommodations she can provide. To put this into context of collaborating with the library, she might consider what exactly the students need to know in the library, and then she can be available to collaborate, lend modifications, or make accommodations so that the students may best reach the level of literacy that is expected of them.
The general attitude of Mrs. Y was extremely agreeable to the study that took place in the journal School Library Research. She parallels the notion that libraries are thought of as an "extra space," with not nearly the level of collaboration she prefers. She considers ways in which collaboration can improve, and truly believes it would have a large impact on the students if they understood the resources and the expertise she could provide.
Ironically, Ms. X also unintentionally echoes the study conducted by School Library Research. While her experience has always been positive collaborating with the library, her general attitude was that if she had more reasons to collaborate, she would. As of right now, it is not a necessity. We can change that, and here is my proposal.
Findings indicate that there is still a very traditionalist view of the school media center among school faculty, including with special education professionals. It seems that initiative on our behalf as school media specialists is essential to increase collaboration efforts. I believe it is taking a passive approach to reminisce the days when classrooms did not have Chromebooks, or to hold out hope that we will get the opportunity to publicize our services. There must be another answer.
First, what are our students' needs in our special education programs? When I asked Ms. X what the most common diagnosis was for her students, she replied, "Hands down: High anxiety." She says, "Students today have high stress because they have high expectations. They had to grow up a lot quicker. They weren't always allowed to just be kids." I spoke with my mother about this, who is a teacher of 20 years, and she said that her students are highly anxious as well. One student with anxiety will ask to go to a back room in the media center where she paces around, or cries her feelings out. When she comes back, she is back to her old self. I thought about this, and I looked something up that I heard about from one of my fellow graduate students. Libraries across the globe are facilitating a space for sensory stress relief. According to Senior Editor of Edutopia Betty Ray, these sensory rooms are "a therapeutic space with a variety of equipment that provides students with special needs personalized sensory input—helping them calm and focus themselves so they can be better prepared for learning and interacting with others." What would this look like at ZHS?
I imagine the students at ZHS and how their high anxiety influences their performance in school. I imagine I, or the special education teacher, having the ability to ask them if they would like to step away from their work for ten minutes to go take a brain break. “A brain break is a short period of time when we change up the dull routine of incoming information that arrives via predictable, tedious, well-worn roadways," says Dr. Lori Desautels from Edutopia. Brain breaks are beneficial because they can re-energize or relax students. They can help blood and oxygen flow to the brain. Perhaps most importantly, they can give students processing time to absorb information (Watson Institute).
I believe there would be endless possibilities when repurposing an unused room or doubling a Makerspace with peaceful intention. There might be televisions displaying scientific wonders. There might be large bean bags chairs to sprawl out in. There might be slow color-changing lights and a Sensory LED Bubble Tube. I might provide Zen-like art supplies like soft clay to mold, a watercolor setup, or journals. I would pile a number of yoga mats in the room for students to stretch out and move in ways that help the blood and oxygen flow to their brain. I would provide DVDs that queue meditation, breathing exercises, and yoga poses.
I envision this safe space, which I might call "The Brain-Break Room,” and I predict the perception of the media center would change immensely for the better. Perhaps we ask if the special education teacher would like to collaborate when deciding what to put in our room. Perhaps we invite her to bring her students down to the media center to do their general classroom work so that they may end her class with a much-needed brain break. I believe the accommodation of 'The Brain-Break Room' would help students with special needs internalize the notion that they are understood. They are taken into account. Their needs are held in high regard. The special education teacher would inevitably see just how much you are considering the needs of their students, and that suddenly, it is a necessity to come down to the library after all, research project or not.
Interview questions to my interviewees:
What is your educational background?
Do you receive additional training periodically? What is that like?
What has been your personal mission or vision over the years?
You are highly respected at Clinton. What types of achievements would you say really led you to where you are today?
About how often would you say you have the opportunity to collaborate with other faculty?
Do you ever collaborate with the media center?
Why or why not? How has your experience been with that over the years?
What are some variables you have needed to take into consideration when taking on a collaboration project?
Which variable would need to happen to increase your likelihood of collaborating with the media center and/or general educators?
What are your goals if any to increase collaboration?
What would you say is the special need that you see most in ZHS students? What causes this?
Resources
Champagne, T., M.Ed., OTR/L , & Sayer, E., Psy.D. (n.d.). THE EFFECTS OF THE SENSORY ROOM [PDF]. Northampton, MA : OT Innovations.
Desautels, D. L. (2015, January 14). Energy and Calm: Brain Breaks and Focused-Attention Practices. Retrieved September 28, 2017, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/brain-breaks-focused-attention- practices-lori-desautels.
Latham, Don; Gross, Melissa; and Witte, Shelbie. 2013. “Preparing Teachers and Librarians to Collaborate to Teach 21st Century Skills: Views of LIS and Education Faculty.” American Association of School Librarians
Library lights up with special sensory area. (2017, March 03). Retrieved September 28, 2017, from http://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/gloucestershire-county-council-news/news-march- 2017/library-lights-up-with-special-sensory-area/
McDaniel, K. A. (2015, August). SCHOOL LIBRARIANS AND SPECIAL EDUCATORS WORKING TOGETHER TO IMPROVE STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT [PDF]. Warrensburg, Missouri: Department of Educational Leadership and Human Development University of Central Missouri.
Purl, Rachael; Ewing, Michael. (2017, August 30). New program at Lane Tech helps students with autism. Retrieved September 28, 2017, from http://wgntv.com/2017/08/30/new-program-at-lane-tech- helps-students-with-autism/
Ray, B. (2017, June 28). Sensory Room 101. Retrieved September 28, 2017, from https://www.edutopia.org/article/sensory-room-101-betty-ray
The Watson Institute (2016, June 17). "Brain Breaks." Retrieved September 28, 2017, from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB3EjwegEPs&ab_channel=TheWatsonInstitutePittsburgh