Welcome back to part 3 of Malik’s story. If you want to go back, you can catch his introduction in [part 1] and learn about how his executive functioning skills were affecting his home life in [part 2].
Today we’ll talk about one of the primary reasons his mom reached out to me.
Malik’s School Challenges
Below are the main challenges Malik was facing at school.
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Difficulty with sustained attention; requires multiple teacher check-ins to ensure he completes his work
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Difficulty processing whole-group instructions; currently, the teacher checks in 1:1 right after delivering group instructions and he says, “Oh, I forgot.”
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Struggles with organizing his desk and backpack, as well as opening and closing things, which frustrates him and creates challenges around transitions
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He’s in an open-plan classroom, and he sometimes has 4 classes in the space together (around 120 kids)
Open Plan Classrooms: A Terrible Idea
I’m not kidding when I say I thought I made a typo when I went through my notes and read that Malik’s classroom had 120 students. Surely I meant to type 12, right? WRONG.
After polling my Instagram and browsing articles, it turns out this “open-plan classroom” setting is very common in places like New Zealand and Australia. There are also open-plan classrooms in North America, but more as a “leftover” from the 70s, not the current norm.
These open-plan rooms have anywhere from 2 to 4 different classes going on at the same time—with different teachers working on different lessons at once.
Apparently, the considered “benefit” to these classrooms was “to have flexible classroom spaces that can cater for large groups of students, while also allowing students to break into smaller groups, directing their own learning while receiving support from a team of teachers working collaboratively.” I’m not buying it.
You don’t need to be a neuroscientist, OT, or child development specialist to call out the most glaringly obvious downfall of such a setting:
THE NOISE.
THE SENSORY OVERWHELM.
THE PURE OVERSTIMULATION.
Research has confirmed that noisy classrooms can be detrimental to a student’s learning. For starters, researchers notice an increase in sympathetic nervous system activation (measured through skin conductance and electromyographic activity) when more effort is required to listen, especially when paired with a task with a high cognitive demand. In other words, the nervous system becomes physiologically stressed when a student has to exert extra effort to listen to instructions or an academic lesson. This is all magnified in students who are Autistic, have auditory processing challenges, are hard of hearing, or have sensory sensitivities.
No wonder he’s struggling.
Malik’s executive functioning skills—like sustained attention, task follow-through, task initiation, and working memory—were already known areas of need.
His mom reports that he could sustain attention on a Lego tower or video game for hours at home. That makes sense. Those tasks (preferred, playful, highly rewarding) require less cognitive energy to participate in. And he isn’t required to follow auditory instructions from a teacher while trying to drown out the sounds from over 100 other classmates.
Let’s take a common classroom instruction:
“Class, please think about your favorite vacation ever. Write a paragraph with five full sentences and draw a picture on the back. When you’re done, make sure your name’s on the top, then turn it into the blue bin and do silent reading.”
Here’s what Malik’s brain would need to do:
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Hear the instruction (while tuning out the constant background chatter of 100+ other students and another teacher teaching a completely different lesson)
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Process and discriminate what the instruction means (which requires working memory and other auditory, language, and communication skills to determine the core message)
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Create a mental plan to execute the instruction (which requires ideation to think about what he wants to write, mental visualization, and planning)
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Initiate the execution of the task (which requires working memory, praxis, and sustained attention)
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Follow through with the full task (which requires working memory, impulse control, and sustained attention)
Folks, that’s not even including the visual-motor skills required to write and draw (which happen to also be areas of need for Malik).
Do you know what all those skills have in common? They’re executive functioning skills.
And guess what? When the nervous system is in a sympathetic activation state (like, ahem, in the middle of a loud-ass classroom), your brain doesn’t really care to help you access those executive functioning skills.
To add insult to injury, Malik’s space and school supplies weren’t organized optimally, which further slowed down his execution of the assignments.
Doesn’t this just make you want to reach out and give Malik a big hug?
Next week: How to help Malik
Here’s a preview of some of the accommodations that might help Malik, which we’ll get deeper into next week:
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Visual supports to compensate for auditory processing challenges
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Preferred seating
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Auditory-processing supportive technology
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Scaffolding in class assignments
After we take a closer look at those accommodations, we’ll also explore how this all plays a role in Malik’s self-esteem.
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Disclaimer: These case studies are inspired by real-life clients I have worked with, with permission from their parents to share. Some aspects of the case are authentic, and other details are added to include more variability for our discussions. None of the strategies and advice here substitutes medical advice, diagnosis or intervention with an Occupational Therapist.
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