MEETING INDIVIDUAL NEEDS

Bette Naughton

Providing scaffolding for students gives them the support they need to be successful when they create. For students with disabilities, it’s important to stress process over product. Outcomes and solutions to the task at hand may vary. Parents appreciate when you adapt lessons and engage their children in art; they don’t expect a perfect artwork to come home, and they are thrilled when their children make it themselves.

Adapting your art lessons so that students of all abilities can be meaningfully engaged in the creative process builds their self-esteem.

Removing barriers that prohibit a student from successfully creating art is of great importance to me. Scaffolding is one way to give students the support they need to achieve. It may mean breaking a lesson into chunks or easy-to-achieve steps. It may also involve adapting a brush or medium so a student can achieve greater success when painting.

A teacher might consider reducing the amount of work given and creating a structure to support the learner. For students with fine motor deficits, you could instruct a paraprofessional to do half of the cutting or to hold the paper when an art lesson requires cutting out shapes for collage. It also helps to have the paraprofessional trace the shape to be cut with a thick outline.

Teachers can adapt lessons, tools, materials, and media. Adaptations will differ from one student to the next depending on their needs. It’s so important to work through each student’s ability. Get to know to know what your students with disabilities are capable of by doing a few simple evaluations when you first meet them and discover what their strengths are and where adaptations may be necessary.

Pre-drawn lines support a student in creating a leaf. 

Always look for what your students can do as opposed to what they cannot! This often means starting with the least amount of adaptation and working backward to find their present level of skills. For example, can they draw a tiger’s head independently? If not, do they just need a circle tracer to get started, or do they require a step-by-step guide? If the student still can’t work independently, do you need to give tracers or a series of parts to create the tiger? If none of the above works, do you need to instruct the paraprofessional to hand-over-hand draw the shape of the tiger?

Think about the objectives of the lesson and how you can provide scaffolding to achieve it. If the objective is to learn about the exotic art of Henri Rousseau and to draw and paint a tiger in the jungle with collaged leaves, how can you simplify that? If students with disabilities can’t paint successfully, can they create a tiger using orange paper and a cut-out tracer to color the stripes with a crayon?

I always assess and think, okay, Sammy can’t paint in a confined space—could he draw with a tracer and cut it out? Can he paint within a stenciled area? If he can’t do this, can he do that? This is where adapting your own thinking is key for students to be successful in creating art. Not every adaptation will work every time, but students grow in skill and confidence daily. Students have off days and changes in medicines and behavior. They might take two steps forward and one step back, and what worked in the past may not work the next time.

Adapting your art lessons so that students of all abilities can be meaningfully engaged in the creative process builds their self-esteem. Scaffolding to meet students at their developmental level gives them a leg up instead of having them shutting down. Adapting lessons, tools, media, and our teaching creates specially designed instruction (SDI), which meets the goals of the student’s IEPs or 504s. Seeing students’ faces light up when they create and feel successful in their art-making makes it all worthwhile.

Bette Naughton is an art educator, an adaptive art consultant and artist, and the author of Adaptive Art: Deconstructing Disability in the Art Class, available from Davis Publications. bettenaughton@msn.com