Classroom Coping Strategies for Hard of Hearing Teachers
by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.
A new teacher with a profound hearing loss wrote:
I am a hearing impaired student teacher. I have a profound hearing loss with a speech recognition of 12 percent. I was wondering if you could assist me with some strategies for teaching normal hearing students in a Middle School environment. I would need procedural and instructional strategies that work. Can you assist me with this, as I do not know of any hearing impaired educators locally.
Since your discrimination is so poor, my first suggestion is to consider getting cochlear implants.
As for coping strategies there are many. In truth, many of the coping strategies you used as a student are the same ones you need to use as a teacher. After all, hearing loss is hearing loss.
For example, continue to use your speechreading skills that I’m sure you have used all your life. If you want to improve your speechreading skills, may I suggest the Seeing and Hearing Speech CD program. You can get it at http://www.hearinglosshelp.com/products/seeinghearingspeech.htm.
I assume that you know many of the tricks to help you hear better such as get close, have the light on the speaker’s face, cut out background noise, etc. My short book, “Talking with Hard of Hearing People, Here’s How to Do It Right!” gives a lot of help in this respect..
Do you use any assistive devices? I think you’ll find the super-directional microphone plugged into a PockeTalker, will help you hear your student’s better. In actual fact, this microphone was originally designed for a hard of hearing teacher. I find it most useful. To use the PockeTalker with your hearing aids, plug in a neckloop instead of ear buds.
To learn more, read the article I wrote called “Hearing in the Classroom: An Assistive Device for Hard of Hearing Teachers“, and another article along the same line called “Hearing in the Classroom or in Other Noisy Places“.
If you have trouble hearing your student’s replies, then I’d tend more to written answers, rather than verbal ones.
If you can’t hear a student there are a number of strategies you can employ, such as:
1. Arrange your classroom so the soft-spoken students all sit near the front of the room so they are closer to you. That way you can hear them better.
2. Walk down the aisle so you are closer to the student you are trying to hear. That way you can hear him/her better and speechread better too. Combined with the Super-directional mic/PockeTalker combination, this can really work well.
3. Have a student who you can hear well sit at the front of the room and “interpret” what someone said that you just can’tget. At times I do this when speaking to groups. I ask someone that I know I can hear/understand to repeat what someone just said. Don’t do this too much as you are imposing on the goodwill of the person doing the “interpreting”. It is better to learn to cope on your own, rather than “using” other people as much as possible.
4. Pass a wireless FM microphone around and anyone who wants to speak, talks into the microphone. You wear the FM receiver and pipe their voices directly into your ears via a neckloop and the t-coils in your hearing aids.
5. Have a student you can’t hear/understand come up and write key words on the blackboard.
6. Teach your students how to fingerspell so they can fingerspell any key words you miss.
7. Give out a sheet at the beginning of each year that explains your hearing loss and what you need the students to do. One hard of hearing teacher did just that. You can read this sheet in my article, “Coping Strategies for Hard of Hearing Teachers“.
So there are 7 things you can do to help yourself successfully live with your hearing loss in the classroom. They may “prime the pump” and now you’ll think of other things you can also do in addition to using all the assistive devices mentioned above.
May 6th, 2010 at 8:57 pm
I am an itinerant teacher for deaf/hard of heaing students and I have a moderte to severe bilateral hearing loss. With more students with mild losses being identified and receiving services, I find myself unable to trouble-shoot hearing devices. I would love advice for this and for other communication problems that occur from time to time.
May 7th, 2010 at 8:15 pm
1) I am a tenured hearing impaired middle school Social Studies teacher who wears hearing aids. This year I was assigned lunch duty. Another teacher was willing to take the duty because he knew of my problem. I was willing to teach his extra class. The principal was quite mean about it and would not change my schedule and now I have terrible ringing in my ears. Do I have any legal rights?
2) Because of budget cuts and schedule changes, I recently was told that I would be moved from the middle school to the elementary school. I do not feel that I can teach that level/age because of my hearing loss. The older students are much more understanding, mature and can deal with my impairment. Do I have a right to demand an accommodation of staying at the school?
October 21st, 2011 at 1:52 am
Thank you thank you thank you for helpers like you!! Finally something for the Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing Teachers not just on how to Teach the Hard-of Hearing students…
Thank you for info
I will share more at later time
LM
January 13th, 2012 at 6:01 am
I wear two hearing aids and generally cope well but continued changes in my teaching environment have exhausted me and I face a difficult time trying to battle to keep my job. Has anyone else faced this? It is asthough each time I cope the head changes things to try to push me to fail.
June 16th, 2012 at 3:33 pm
I am hard of hearing and have a speech problem due to this. i really find it difficult getting a job due to my problem. i have studies so many courses to get a career and a job in my life but nothing goes my way. i studied accountancy and got a job as a financial manager but i had problem in hearing the phone ring and dealing with people on the phone and i think this may have annoyed my boss. she found some fault in my work and asked me to resign instead of getting fired. then i studied for my honours degree in bioscience but unfortunately am unable to get a job. i ahve always liked teaching but felt that i couldnt become a teacher because of my hearing and speech problem. i decided to do a teaching assistant course but am not sure if am wasting my time in doing this. can anyone tell me is it possible for a hard of hearing and speech impediment person to become a teacher or am i wasting my time ven thinking os leading a career as a teacher
February 3rd, 2013 at 8:33 am
Thank you for your advice. I have been teaching now for five years and I have had ups and downs with my hearing loss. I wear hearing aids in the classroom at all times. In the past I was reluctant and ashamed of my disability and refused to speak about it to staff or students. I would cover my ears with my hair. This was problematic because students were soon frustrated at having to constantly repeat their answers or me misinterpreting answers. As my confidence as a teacher was established I tell students from the very beginning of my hearing loss. I think there are many teachers who suffer, like me, in silence on this issue. I think several teachers struggle with hearing loss and do not speak about it. I find it ironic that the one profession that requires good hearing is the one I chose and challenges me each day. I feel there were many occasions when management could have been more supportive of my needs and I wish that I asked for help instead of suffering in silence. Certain classrooms, class sizes etc do impact on how well I can hear. I think most students are understanding about my hearing but there are times when their frustration is visible. There is nothing more disappointing when I see a student say never mind, and refuse to answer a question. I couldnt survive without my hearing aids but they really only go so far.
February 7th, 2013 at 12:02 pm
My dream is to become a teacher for the deaf. Since Im hearing imparied and I am planning to do a degree for primary teaching. Does it effect your teaching if you can’t hear your students properly or not being able to pronouce the words you want to say.
February 24th, 2013 at 8:27 am
Hi Lisa:
I commend you on your dream to become a teacher.
If you are teaching deaf kids, I mean Deaf as in using ASL and not your voice, then it doesn’t matter whether you can speak clearly or not, or whether you can hear clearly or not. You won’t be using your voice or your ears. You’ll be talking with your hands and hearing with your eyes.
However, if you are going to be teaching hard of hearing children, that is a totally different story.
You can use various assistive devices and coping strategies in order to hear your students. So that should not be an insurmountable problem.
However, in my opinion, it is critical that you can speak clearly. Let me explain. I have a severe hearing loss. Because of that, I have GREAT difficulty understanding people that speak with a “deaf” accent like you obviously have, or any accent for that matter. In fact, even when the speech is amplified so it is loud enough, I still can’t understand a lot of what they are saying.
You see, between their distorted speech and my distorted hearing, I’m not understanding enough to do much learning. In order for me to hear and understand the teacher, I NEED a teacher that has clear, unaccented speech. And it sure helps if they know how to project their voice, and are easy to speechread.
I have sat through enough classes and seminars over the years where the speaker didn’t have clear, unaccented speech and I essentially got NOTHING out of the class. Thus, it would be wrong to subject hard of hearing students to these kinds of situations and expect them to learn anything, let alone do well in class.
If your students are old enough to read fluently, then your could use real-time captioning. As long as the captioner can understand what you say, she can project it up on a large screen and everyone in your class can read the words. This works for understanding what you might say. However, it does nothing to teach your students how to speak properly since students learn to speak properly by mimicking their teachers and others around them. Thus you need to be a good role model in your speech.
Regards
Neil