asking students who have flexible deadlines accommodations to work ahead?

[financeguy]

Want to know why people do not take this seriously? Their own experience is likely based on someone with a "therapy dog," something specifically designed to screw over others who wish to live in a dog-free environment by invoking a fake diagnosis with no standard other than paying $20 online. As long as things like this are taken seriously, people will assume anyone with an accommodation is just a scammer.

[Mobius]

Flexible deadlines are now the second most common accommodations I see, affecting 10-15% of my students each semester. In my experience, about 50% use them as intended (they have one or maybe 2 flares over the course of the semester, contact me as soon as practical, catch up on the work, and do fine.) The other 50% spend the entire semester 3 or so days behind, frequently waiting multiple days to inform me they need a new version of the weekly assignment and want the three day extension to start after that, etc. With large classes it becomes a nightmare of keeping track of who turned what in when and writing additional versions of assignments because it's not fair to withhold keys from the rest of the class while their colleagues catch up.

I'm additionally frustrated because I have built a lot of universal design elements into my classes where students get to drop a fraction of assignments and have built in alternative ways to earn back points, but our disability folks insist that accommodations need to be over and above what is available to everyone in the class. Frequently students would be much better off taking advantage of a free drop and focusing on the work the class is actually doing instead of being continuously half a week behind.

I am at a very large university, and have been pushing for someone to do some data analysis to see how often these accommodations actually support student success vs pushing the inevitable off, but no takers thus far.

This is just such terrible interoperation and implementation of accommodations. It doesn't provide for "flexible deadlines." It just mandates different inflexible deadlines and it won't help the students at all. I'm quite flexible about extensions, but there are times when they don't work with the pedagogical purpose of the assignment. There's no point allowing extensions on reading quizzes, and the like, because the whole point is to have students do the work that gets them ready for class. I do the same thing you do, just drop a few of them.

The whole thing just seems like a really bizarre attempt to have a set of codified rules for something that doesn't work that way. Flexible deadlines are something that needs to be worked out between the instructor and the student in the context of the course, it isn't like 50 percent extra time on exams.

My issue with accommodations is they are rarely tailored to student needs. You think someone in the accommodations office really has the knowledge and/or time to tailor to student needs?

[Kron3007]

But they dont have an extra week relative to the other students....

I assume the accommodation is there to recognize they may need more time than others to complete the job.  As such, since the "extra time" is given to all students you are not providing any extra time to them at all. 

It also seems you are taking out your frustrations with administration on students who had nothing to do with it, which hardly seems kind. 

[the_geneticist]

My big issue is when the accommodations are not reasonable due to the type of assignment.  The pre-lab assignments are to draw a flowchart of the protocol to get ready to go to lab and do the protocol.  Doing it afterwards is not beneficial.  Or online discussion boards where students need to write a reflection due by [day 1] and then comment on N other reflections by [day 4].  Then the class moves on! 
I'm a fan of the firm deadlines with minor penalties for late work.  And having most assignments due by the end of class.  I really, really hope our accommodations folks don't jump on the "flexible deadlines" trend.

[mamselle]

My issue with accommodations is they are rarely tailored to student needs. You think someone in the accommodations office really has the knowledge and/or time to tailor to student needs?

Yes, trained people do.

I've adjuncted in four different schools and assisted profs as an EA at three others.

The three I had direct interactions with were competent, had contracts tailored to specific student needs, with boilerplate insertions based on either MD recommendations, tested skills issues (the delayed-hearing French student's response times were to the half-minute and the recommendations for time spacing between dictation elements was based on that) and very well-explained strategies for clearly well-understood learning issues I was less familiar with.

Extensive learning assistance also exists in the elementary and middle-school sectors. When I was subbing for the local public system, I was impressed with how instructors understood, implemented (and held the line on) accommodations for students at those levels. A few assistants in that setting seemed less well-versed in some of the elements they were testing on or administering timed response trials with, but their lead teachers were very skilled and saw to it that the tangles got untangled and the students were well-served.

One of my private students is high school now, he's struggling to do all the work because of other (family) issues at the moment, but he is also getting support and keeps at it.

As Hegemony said, they all wish whole-heartedly that they were different, or maybe 'less different from others' but the latter student is particularly forthright about his limitations, what he needs to overcome them, and his will to do his work well once things are set up so he can.

It takes students like that a lot of courage to confront this thing that is never quite going to go away in their lives, day after day, and I am personally in awe at how some of them manage.

M.

[Puget]

My big issue is when the accommodations are not reasonable due to the type of assignment.  The pre-lab assignments are to draw a flowchart of the protocol to get ready to go to lab and do the protocol.  Doing it afterwards is not beneficial.  Or online discussion boards where students need to write a reflection due by [day 1] and then comment on N other reflections by [day 4].  Then the class moves on! 
I'm a fan of the firm deadlines with minor penalties for late work.  And having most assignments due by the end of class.  I really, really hope our accommodations folks don't jump on the "flexible deadlines" trend.

Our accommodations folks understand this, and the "limited extensions" accommodation always comes with wording that you don't need to give them extensions when the assignment needs to be completed at a certain time for pedagogical reasons. Likewise, the "provide materials ahead of time" accommodation always states that you don't need to do this if there are pedagogical reasons that they should only do things a at a certain time. Overall, I've found them to be very receptive to faculty feedback when something isn't a reasonable accommodation for a particular class. I know I'm lucky in that regard as not everyplace is like that.

[kaysixteen]

Random points:

1) 'Flexible deadlines' does not mean, and cannot mean, that student loses his completed assignment, finds it weeks later, and it is acceptable.  The actual world does not work that way, and, of course, in hs, parents should take the responsibility to see that the student does the work, does not lose it, etc.  I worked at a special boarding school 20 years ago, and all students were made to have a school-provided plan book, take it to each class, and write down their assignments, materials needed, etc., and then dorm faculty or study hall faculty checked this daily during work time.   This hard line would be more important in college than in hs, of course, but too much 'accommodation' does not do most students any real service.

2) Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up.

3) That said, reasonable accommodations must be honored by faculty, who of course also should get with the Disabilities office to argue against unreasonable ones, such as 'spelling does not count' in Latin class.

3)

[Hegemony]

But also instructors have to do their bit. One of the reasons my son's high school career was chaos was that his teachers took forever to grade his work. And that was the only way I could tell if something had been turned in. He'd go off to school with it, and ten weeks later a "Missing Assignment" note would appear in the online gradebook. How am I, or for that matter how was he, supposed to figure out that it had not been turned in, when there was no feedback for ten weeks? (If you say "He should remember whether he'd turned it in," then I can tell you have no experience with ADD. Not a chance in hell he could or would remember.) It requires all parts of the system to be working.

[kaysixteen]

1) HS teachers have many more students than most college professors, do not get TAs, and teach many more hours.  And not all 'assignments' are graded-- my Latin homeworks are expected to be works in progress, and are just checked for being done/ attempted in good faith.  Contacting every parent every day is unrealistic, and no college professor would ever have to do anything like that... and

2) The kid may lose the assignment because of his ADD.  Mom cannot let him do that.   See above, my point about having a plan book and having the responsible adult check it every day, and see to it that the work is done, and is in kid's backpack on the way to school.

[jerseyjay]

I have to say that I am bit taken aback by the reaction against accommodations. Various schools I have taught have had more or less robust disabilities offices. One place I taught (as an adjunct) for more than a decade never contacted me. My current job (where I have taught for about 15 years in one capacity or another) seems much more active, and I have usually one or two students per class per semester with accommodations. They never say what the issue is, but the most common accommodation requested is extended testing time and a distraction-free environment. I assume this is often about ADHD.

When I still gave blue-book exams, I always granted these requests. I suppose for two reasons: first, it was just easier to do so than to come up with an argument against them. Second, if somebody with more training than I had said they were appropriate, why would I argue? I could arguing see if it were impossible to meet the accommodation, but if I could meet the accommodation, why not? It also seems like the nice thing to do for the students. I realize that "in real life" students may not get accommodations, but "real life" is rarely like college, and I cannot remember the last time I had to take a blue book examine "in real life".

I say this being aware that diagnosis, while a science, is not always accurate. My ex-spouse was variously diagnosed with either bipolar disease or ADHD and various, less specific things. (I have no idea what, if anything, she "really" has been diagnosed with now.) My stepson, who was a middling but okay student in high school, was diagnosed with a learning disability after he failed his high school graduation exams, which allowed him to pass with a lower score. When I took him to a specialist, after he graduated, she said this was nonsense. So diagnosis is not perfect--although I, as a historian, am much less qualified than a trained specialist.

[Caracal]

Random points:

1) 'Flexible deadlines' does not mean, and cannot mean, that student loses his completed assignment, finds it weeks later, and it is acceptable.  The actual world does not work that way, and, of course, in hs, parents should take the responsibility to see that the student does the work, does not lose it, etc....  This hard line would be more important in college than in hs, of course, but too much 'accommodation' does not do most students any real service.

Education tends to be artificially difficult for many people, rather than the other way around. What's weird is needing to do everything the night before and leave your house with all of the assignments in your bag, little time between classes to make sure you have everything and no time to finish or print things out that might have been misplaced. I'm sure there are jobs that resemble this, but not many.

In the world I live in, which feels real enough, I forget and misplace stuff all the time. When I can't find the lecture notes I thought I stuffed in my bag, I go print them out again. I always bring my computer with me to class because I know that sometimes I'll  forget to send myself the powerpoint, or somehow lose the notes or forget to print them out entirely. As long as the computer is there, all this can be managed fine. Ditto for any number of other screw ups with assignments or due dates. I sometimes just fix or change an assignment in class on the projector when I pull it up and see a mistake or a problem.  When I first started teaching, I got lots of comments complaining about being disorganized, but nobody says that anymore. I think I've just become so unperturbed about all of my organizational chaos that nobody really notices or cares.

As a note to hegemony-It isn't that I have no executive processing. If I have a job interview or a conference presentation, or some sort of immovable deadline, I can have everything double checked and ready to go. It's just that I have limited reserves of that kind of focus and attention. It's possible that your son is having an easier time now not just because of more flexible deadlines, but because he isn't spending all day trying to remember and keep track of small things and can actually focus on the important deadlines.

[kaysixteen]

Basic strategy helps like plan books, lists, etc., help greatly.   No one should dispute this.   If a student, hs or college, is forgetting to take his assignments to class, pass them in, etc., and does not even notice/ check off in plan book, that assignment has been returned, well now that is a real problem, but one which can be easily addressed.   The kid will have to do these things himself if he is away at college, but a hs kid, well, that is parental unit's responsibility to oversee.   This should not be difficult to comprehend, but very difficult to argue with.

[Caracal]

Basic strategy helps like plan books, lists, etc., help greatly.   No one should dispute this.   If a student, hs or college, is forgetting to take his assignments to class, pass them in, etc., and does not even notice/ check off in plan book, that assignment has been returned, well now that is a real problem, but one which can be easily addressed.   The kid will have to do these things himself if he is away at college, but a hs kid, well, that is parental unit's responsibility to oversee.   This should not be difficult to comprehend, but very difficult to argue with.

Don't want to speak for anyone else, but that kind of stuff didn't work for me. I got a lot of organizational coaching from well meaning organized people as a middle schooler and it almost all didn't work. The way I've come to understand it is an an adult is that I have a poor working memory. Basically that's sort of the background processing that you don't really think about it. I really notice this when I'm setting up the CMS or need to enter in a bunch of different things somewhere. I'm quite slow at doing stuff like that. I enter in the title, and then I don't remember which day the assignment is for, or which is section it is supposed to be, or whatever. It's not that I can't do it, it just takes me 40 seconds where it might take most people 20 for each entry.

This is a problem for all kinds of organizational systems. You can give me a plan book, but I'll get distracted and forget to write stuff in it. Or I'll misplace it, or leave it at home. The only way I'm able to remember to do small stuff is by just mental checking. Again, that's part of why high school was tougher for me than college. In college, I could just say at 7 at night, "ok what do I need to do for tomorrow morning's class" and go do it. For bigger projects I just had to keep reminding myself, which worked ok for the most part because I was motivated to do well. There were times where I'd screw up and a couple days extension really helped sometimes.

[kaysixteen]

What you are describing about yourself, as a k-12 student, can be greatly ameliorated by parental unit actually looking at the plan book, looking to see to it that materials are there, and then that work is done, and then put in backpack and taken to school.   PU can of course expect classroom teachers to see to it that planbooks are used, assignments written down in them, and required materials taken home.  But there are many more kids for teacher to worry about.

[Hegemony]

What you are describing about yourself, as a k-12 student, can be greatly ameliorated by parental unit actually looking at the plan book, looking to see to it that materials are there, and then that work is done, and then put in backpack and taken to school.   PU can of course expect classroom teachers to see to it that planbooks are used, assignments written down in them, and required materials taken home.  But there are many more kids for teacher to worry about.

There are so many places to slip up on this. For instance, in my kid's high school, the teacher would tend to remark at the end of the class, as the kids were scrambling to leave, "Oh yeah, read pages 42-56 for tomorrow! And answer the questions at the end!" The chances my kid would get this written down at all in his planner, much less accurately, were pretty low. Eventually the teacher was forced (and she was plenty resentful about this) to write the assignment on the board every day. So if the assignment was pages 42-56, my son would copy down "Read pages 52-56" (ADHD, poor working memory) and carefully read the wrong pages numbers and fail to answer the questions. Or "read pages answer questions," but not have any record of the page numbers. The psychologist we took him to suggested that he take a picture of the assignment with his phone. Sometimes he remembered. But he would have forgotten to charge his phone. Or he'd lose his phone. Or he would have forgotten to take his phone to school.

The teachers were also supposed to post the assignments online. Rather than having a central website for the school, each teacher had a separate website, in various places. So I'd have to remember to frogmarch son through checking all the teachers' websites every night to see if any assignments had been posted. But sometimes they wouldn't post them till 11 pm, whereas we'd checked at 7 pm. Sometimes they just didn't post them at all. Sometimes they had some assignments posted but it wasn't clear which class they were for, so my son would be on a wild-goose chase to figure out if "Read textbook, pages 10-20" pertained to his class, and if so which book was meant as "the textbook," and so on. One teacher kept saying she was going to set up a website, but never got around to it.

So much for planners being the solution. I really thought I was going to lose my sanity, dealing with all this chaos.