Benefits of Looping with Complex Special Needs Students

​Benefits of Looping with Complex Special-Needs Students

Have you ever heard a new song from your favorite artist and you're listening closely for the lyrics, but you can't catch them all? You might replay that song so that you can listen more clearly to the words.  Availability to loop or repeat the song satisfied the objective to identify all the words to more appreciate the song in entirety.  A parallel happens in teaching.  You want each student to be able to appreciate their life in entirety so you carefully find the clues to their thinking patterns so you can best build access to the entirety of life.  And if you’ve had any experience with more complex needs or super-fast AND more complex needs you will understand why it can take a while to learn a student.  In this writing I share experience with looping the teacher with the students.  You may be familiar with research that shows minimal effect, but I have found looping with students beneficial as it helps build stronger relationships, provides opportunity for robust and consistent instructional strategies, and has a potential to serve as a programming framework that could attract and retain teachers.
 
It would be unlikely to go on a search for the most important factor in a classroom for student success and not come up with the result that indicates that the teacher relationship ranks as one of the highest if not the highest on many scores.  Why is this important here when a few research studies have shown that looping has bare minimum effect on achievement? First the research studies targeted were Neurotypical students and did not delineate complex special needs students. Second have you ever tried to develop a relationship with the student who significant communication or regulation deficits?  I have. 

I've spent 12 years in a self-contained classroom for students with emotional behavioral support needs and then seven in a self-contained classroom supporting students with complex needs arising from ASD and intellectual disabilities.  My experience with these populations has been that it can be incredibly difficult to build relationships as it may take a while to find a communication pattern that works, or it may take a while for that student to learn regulation skills to be able to make connections.
 
Rate of progress is different for each student.   With one student it took nearly 2 months to extinguish transition tantrums and then two years before he felt comfortable to take his hoodie down in the classroom.  Fast forward 5 years later and this student was participating in after school track and a game club as well as included in several middle school classes.   For another student we went through an entire year just working through regulation & significant communication needs presenting as a series of tantrums and maladaptive behaviors. The relationship couldn’t be maximized until the second year with that student. Another student only ‘meeped’ as communication for most of the first year so learning about interest was a bit of a challenge on top of his regulation needs as he wanted to spend most of the day on the floor. After two years he was saying short phrases and spending 80% of the day OFF of the floor and I don't think he would've been able to open up if he switched teachers more frequently. These are just a couple of examples of why considering the benefits of potentially building more solid relationships is supported by a looping model.  Impactful progress with complex needs is only achieved after true understanding of the student.

​As a special educator also trained in the general education curriculum, I've always been an advocate for providing as much Academic instruction as possible just in case a student is actually capable of receiving more than what we think they are capable of.  My years of service have supported that this has been beneficial. Many students in the emotional support program were very capable of average and even above average and in some cases ‘gifted & talented’ academic achievement.  Then when I transitioned to teaching students with complex needs on the spectrum and having watched the movie The Accountant and Temple Grandin biography, I became concerned that I might be holding some of these silent students back if I didn't provide access to academic instruction since it was impossible to know what they could receive. This effort is incredibly difficult. 

Each academic skill is a new skill for them to learn and particularly with complex students the instruction requires adaptation basically for each student to help them make better connections and understanding. Just like building relationship, building the awareness of their strengths to support their deficits can take time. If you have one class for only one year or perhaps just two years (I advocate for at least three-year cycle model) you barely get to know how the student receives information, rate of progress and the most successful reinforcement.  It is only after you have a good understanding of these things that you can design the most impactful and accelerating instruction. I say impactful and accelerating because typically students with complex needs are way behind the average starting line regarding skill positions.  The goal is always to decrease that gap which necessitates high impact instruction. And if you give a teacher high impact instruction then the teacher will likely ask for time to implement it with integrity which is where the real impact of a second or third year comes in. 
Lastly, you’ve probably seen at least one article written about the dire shortage of special education teachers. Having served in the role for many years and seen many teachers leave, I feel confident in making the comment that if a building does not have a program to bring a new teacher into rather than having the teacher create everything all at once the teacher is more likely to leave.  Of course, I have other things to say about how they could fix the shortage, like paraprofessionals being paid much more but I won't digress on that now. I advocate for systems to try to create a special needs program that allows for looping. In an elementary setting K ,1,2 & 3,4,5 is typically an easy grouping. Depending on numbers even more ideal would be keeping only two grade levels in a room so that mainstreaming opportunities do not punch holes in the classroom instructional opportunities due to classroom staff being out so frequently to support students and mainstream opportunities. For every level mainstreaming may not be such a strain on classroom paraprofessional support. I speak from my experience working mostly with just K through eighth grade and very heavy on the K-3 track.  Along with deciding on the looping nature I recommend buildings flesh out even more details as to what they want their program to be. A new special education teacher is probably going to feel more confident, supported and as if they are in a more capable system if that system has clearly identified what they are expecting. This happens naturally with general education teachers typically, but often special educators are left to ‘figure it out, for the kids’ when it should almost be the opposite. Those specialists are going to be entering a world of wild at the beginning of the school year, just a sense of boundaries could help them out, but of course a developed program plan would be better.

Some links for reading more about looping students:
​https://adamgrant.substack.com/p/the-power-of-having-the-same-teacher
 
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2022/6/29/23188239/looping-teachers-academic-behavior-research/
 
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/looping-heres-what-happens-when-students-have-the-same-teacher-more-than-once/2022/06
 
https://dsc.duq.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2238&context=etd