We are equipped with a multidisciplinary team where the school management, mainstream teachers, special educator, counsellors, occupational therapist, speech/language therapists, parents and the students themselves are the stakeholders. This multidisciplinary approach provides the best services for our differently abled students. The school provides an appropriate environment for education and caters to the diverse needs of all the students together and does not segregate students with defined disabilities. A student with special needs may spend extra time in a resource room for individualized instructions, or he may receive therapeutic sessions away from the other students, but his home base is the regular classroom and the goal is to provide as much instruction in the classroom as possible. Sometimes SEN educator and other members of our multidisciplinary team come into the classroom to provide this instruction.
Standing operating procedure for intervention involves receiving of the referrals followed by assessments. Both formal and informal assessment tools are available. Informal assessment tools include observations, checklists, Handwriting assessment, GLAD etc. Formal assessment is carried out only in extreme cases. After receiving the assessment report, an IEP (Individualized Education Programme) is started based on a written statement about the educational programme for the child with disability. It serves as a management tool used to ensure that the child would receive the needed special education and related services.
Intervention strategies
Varity of need based educational intervention strategies have been used for the interventions like:
- Individual or Small group sessions: The neurodivergent student spends most of the week in a regular classroom and is pulled out for individualized or small-group instruction three to five hours a week. Educators have experimented with different systems of grouping them by grade level or by degree of disability when they meet in a small-group settings in the resource room.
- Remedial/Reinforcement classes: Subjective support in a small group setting is provided to the students in need on regular basis.
- Peer tutoring: We follow a buddy system, wherein we choose some students to be a model. These models/buddies support and teach the student in need and help them to get settled within the school environment.
- Therapeutic Intervention: To provide an eclectic, multidisciplinary approach, our school has partnered with a renowned institution - SOCH. SOCH therapists provide occupational and speech/language therapy to the CWSNs for their holistic development.
- Use of Technology: Technology makes the classroom environment more invigorating with the use of audio-visual aids like smart board, modern software and applications. They help our students to overcome challenges in a streamlined pattern. To provide additional academic support, the school offers various kinds of accommodations as per the CBSE guidelines. We provide the following variations of adaptations, comprising of both accommodations and modifications, to support our students:
- Exemptions and Accommodations –We have been providing exemptions from language and other main subjects like Mathematics and Science to the children who have been diagnosed with SLD (Specific Learning Disability) as per norms governed by CBSE. The students are also provided the option of choosing subjects like Painting and Music.
- Assessment Modifications Based on the needs of the children as per the CBSE guidelines, we have been following various kinds of modifications related to the assessments like
Content modification- Invigilation support
- Spelling exemptions
- Extra time
- Reader and writer support/ scriber support /provision of scribe
