Week 3 Post

1.) When planning for assessment of a student with hearing loss, what considerations should you keep in mind? Should you use only tests designed for this population? Why or why not?

When planning for assessment with one of your students who has a hearing loss it’s important to keep in mind why you are assessing this particular student, how you will complete the assessment, will there be any modifications made to the assessment including a description of the environment that the assessment was done in and how that affected the child, background noise in the room, how test questions were presented, and the students behavior and response to the assessment. These are all important factors to take into consideration when administering an assessment with a student who is d/Deaf or hard of hearing. In class we discussed that it is important to have a variety of assessments available to give a particular student in your classroom as future Deaf Educators. You want to have informal and formal assessments as well as assessments specified to children with a hearing loss and assessments that are meant for typically developing students. Having a variety of assessments will give you the best results on where a particular d/Deaf or hard of hearing student in your classroom is functioning in relation to his hearing classroom peers. There could be a scenario when the child you are assessing is having a bad day and doesn’t perform well on the assessment so re-assessing and giving a variety of assessments over a period of time would be helpful to get the most accurate results.

2.) Communicating with teachers and staff is a vital part of Deaf Education. Do you think face-to-face is better or email? Why and how do you plan to communicate with staff?

As we have discussed in several of our previous classes, we have learned that as future Deaf Educators we will be working as a team with many other professionals in the field to ensure the best success for our d/Deaf and hard of hearing students. Therefore being able to communicate effectively with regular classroom teachers, other staff members, interpreters, and other professionals in the field is very important. In class we discussed that an equal variety of face-to-face communication and email will probably be the most successful. I think it will depend on the discussion that you need to have with this particular person and how much time you have to discuss things with them. That will help you decide if face-to-face or email is more appropriate.  We also discussed in class how it’s important to sit down with your team at the beginning of the year and exchange contact information and discuss the best way to reach each other and the expectations you have for one another as professionals before the year begins. I plan to use this process with my co-workers in my future career as a Deaf Educator and hope it proves to be effective. As we have heard many times before, “ communication is key.”