4 Teaching Strategies for SEN Pupils
Your strategy for teaching students with SEN shouldn’t vary too much from your existing plans. However, understanding what difficulties these pupils face in the classroom on a daily basis, can help you to adapt your teaching in order for them to get the most out of it. In this guide, our aim is to provide you with our top four ways to support pupils with SEN by providing strategies that can be adapted to any classroom setting.
Table of Contents:
- What Are The Different Categories of SEN Pupils?
- 4 Ways to Support SEN Pupils in the Classroom
- Communicate With Both Pupil and Parents
- Continuously Evaluate Your Own Teaching Style
- Understand Each Child's Needs Are Different
- Create a Supportive And Creative Environment
What Are The Different Categories of SEN?
Special educational needs (SEN) can be categorised into four broad groups, which we will expand upon below. If you have not taught in a SEN role before, refer to our guide to understand what to expect.
- Communication and interaction - Autism, Speech impediment etc
- Cognition and Learning - Dyslexia, Dyspraxia etc
- Social, Emotional and Mental Health difficulties - Anxiety etc
- Physical and/or Sensory Needs - Hearing or visual impairment etc
These four broad groups, identified within the SEND code of practice, are what every school and educational provider should be identifying and focusing on for their teaching strategies. After all, education is a privilege and ensuring everyone has access to learning the national curriculum is important. With an estimated 1.6 million pupils in England with special needs, it is vital your teaching strategy accounts for these students.
4 Ways to Support Pupils with SEN in the Classroom
By ensuring your lesson plans account for your SEN teaching strategies, you should be able to inspire every child that comes into your classroom. And that’s the goal for any teacher. If this is your first year creating a teaching strategy for pupils with SEN, our following four tips should help you get started.
Communicate With Both Pupil and Parents
No one will understand the needs of a SEN pupil better than their parents, or even themselves. Which is why having effective communication is an important element of your overall SEN teaching strategy. By doing this, it can also reduce your workload as a teacher, as you can prioritise and focus on what works best in your classroom.
It’s the child’s parents who can indicate:
- What might trigger certain responses
- How best the child communicates
- Any historic medical knowledge that may be important
While communicating directly to the child can:
- Help to understand how they are feeling
- Can discuss what might not be working for them
Having both these lines of communication could help pupils with SEN to feel supported and listened to, which may make implementing your teaching strategy easier.
Continuously Evaluate Your Own Teaching Style
Being open minded in your teaching strategies for pupils with SEN will only help to make your planning more effective. As what works for one child, may not work for another. Which is why using the ‘Assess, Plan, Do, Review’ method may be of great help. Continuously reviewing what is working well vs what could be improved, not only strengthens your teaching skills, but is ultimately benefiting the learning of your students.
Adapting to new methods or resources could also be beneficial in milestone moments, such as the transition from year groups or schools. Transition time activities can make this process easier for all, so be prepared in advance with our guide.
Understand Each Child's Needs Are Different
Whether a pupil with SEN or not, each child's needs are different. And accounting for these variations can feel overwhelming, especially if you are still in the early stages of your career. However, the sooner you can learn what is needed for each child, the sooner you can ace your teaching strategy and lesson planning.
Useful resources for understanding the needs of your pupils can be from your teaching assistants or SENCo assessments. Your teaching assistants are most likely the ones who will spend the most time supporting SEN pupils, which is why communicating with them can provide helpful insights.
Another way to ensure you meet the needs of each SEN pupil with your teaching strategy, is using our new PangoGPT program. Designed to make lesson planning easier, you can find all our helpful resources in one place, while personalising your requests to suit the needs of your class. Discover how to use PangoGPT with our handy guide.
Create a Supportive And Creative Environment
If you are to take one tip away from this guide, to help develop your teaching strategies for SEN pupils, let it be to create a supportive and creative environment. This could range from physically how the classroom looks and feels to work in, to teaching wellbeing and mindfulness practices as part of your strategy.
Having a supportive and creative environment, can work not only for pupils with SEN, but your whole class and even you as the teacher. It can create a positive environment that people want to enter and learn in, as opposed to something that feels uninspiring. Research classroom elements you can implement, to help the development of your pupils this year.
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