Accommodations · In practice

What an accommodation looks like in your room

A plan tells you what a student gets. It rarely tells you what that looks like at 9:05 on a Tuesday. Here is the day-to-day of the six accommodations Learning Services actually provides — and the misread that quietly undoes each one.

Six is the whole list. That is worth knowing in both directions: it tells you what to deliver, and it tells you what you cannot assume is coming from somewhere else.

Almost every accommodation removes a penalty that has nothing to do with what you are teaching. The exceptions are worth catching: when a support collides with the very thing you assess — reading in a reading task, writing in a writing course, speed where fluency is the standard — do not decide on your own that it does not apply.

Take it to the student’s Learning Specialist. Quietly setting an accommodation aside because it felt reasonable in the moment is the costliest mistake on this page.

The six, day to day

1

Preferential seating

Looks like: the student sits close to wherever you actually present from. Learning Services is relaxed about the details — “feel free to consult with the student and seat the student in a place you feel is beneficial.”

The misread: that it means the front row, forever, decided by you. It means access to you and to what you are showing — which moves when you move. Ask the student where that is; they usually know, and being asked is the point.

2

Access to presentation notes

Looks like: your notes, slides and handouts posted in Canvas. Learning Services adds the part that matters most: before class, not after — “so they can annotate.”

The misread: that they will stop listening. The opposite — a student annotating your deck while you talk is doing more with your class than one racing to transcribe it. Posting the deck the night before is the whole accommodation, and it is the one most often delivered late.

3 — PLAN THIS ONE AHEAD

Please do not call on to read aloud

Looks like: you do not ask this student to read out to the class. Learning Services notes you will “see this included for students with dyslexia.”

The misread: that they are excused from the text, or that they cannot read it. Reading aloud is a public performance of decoding; understanding is a different thing entirely, and you should still ask them the hardest question about the passage. Decide who reads before class starts — this is the accommodation most often broken by a warm, spontaneous “take it from the top of page 40.”

4 — YOU KEEP THE AUTHORITY

Technology for notetaking and in-class writing

Looks like: the student takes notes and writes in class on their device rather than by hand.

The misread: that the accommodation overrides your classroom rules. It does not, and Learning Services says so plainly: students “are expected to use their devices appropriately; you may re-direct or restrict access when needed.”

The accommodation is the tool, not immunity. And when it is going wrong, tell the Learning Specialist — they ask for exactly that: “please contact learning specialists when issues arise so we address them.”

5

Extended time on tests — 1½

Looks like: ninety minutes where the class gets sixty. Most Learning Services students qualify. It can happen in the Learning Services office or in your own classroom — both are legitimate, and the second one is at your discretion.

The misread: that they think slowly. It is far more often reading or processing speed than reasoning — the removal of a penalty on being careful, not an edge.

If the test is a Canvas quiz, the extra time is a setting only you can enter, and only before the attempt starts. No proctor can add it later.

6

Testing in a separate environment

Looks like: the student sits the test in the Learning Services office — often on the ordinary test day, while the rest of your class tests in your room. Nobody was absent.

The misread: that any quiet room will do. It will not. Learning Services is explicit: “extended time cannot be provided in the Testing Center in the SIC.” One room supervises; the other is accountable for the plan.

The student books it with a test pass request; you get an Outlook invite and email the test to learningservices@regisjesuit.com.

**What is not on the list — and why that matters**

Six accommodations is the full extent of what Learning Services offers. In particular, and contrary to what many of us assumed: there are no readers and no scribes, and Learning Services does not supply assistive technology — the technology accommodation is the student’s own device, for notes and in-class writing.

This matters more than it sounds. A teacher who believes a reader is available stops looking for another route, and the student quietly gets neither. If a student needs something that is not one of these six, that is a conversation with their Learning Specialist — not something to improvise, and not something to assume is happening in another room.

It also points somewhere better. Six accommodations cannot carry the whole weight of teaching a student well, and they were never meant to. Everything past this point is design — and that is the next rung.

When you’re not sure

Don’t fill in the reason yourself

The plan tells you what the student is owed. It does not tell you why, and you do not need to know why in order to deliver it. Guessing at a diagnosis from an accommodation is both unreliable and none of your business.

Ask before you adapt

If an accommodation seems to collide with what you are actually assessing, that is a real question and a good one — take it to the Learning Specialist. What you cannot do is resolve it silently in your own favour.

Dropping in is normal

Learning Services invites it: “drop in to either LS office at any time to share information about your classes or chat with us about students.” GD Rm. 132 · BD Rm. 152A, moving to BD 167 in early September.

Who to Ask →

AI ON THIS

Rethink the class, not the student.

None of this is a deficit you fill in. It is taking barriers out of the way of learning that is already there — and then being able to see it. Differentiation gets talked about as extra work for particular students; read the other way round, it is how you find out what someone actually knows, and how you get to witness it rather than infer it from one narrow channel eight times a semester.

Cura personalis is care for this particular person, and in a classroom it turns out to be mostly design work rather than sympathy. Two moves below. The first points at your own material and asks what is getting in the way. The second builds what your students are already good at into the work everyone does.

You will never need to paste a plan, and you must not. An accommodation plan is a confidential record and it lives in MyRJ for that reason — no plan text, no name, no diagnosis, no “the student who…”, and that includes ChatGPT for Teachers. Nothing on this page asks you for any of it.

What the six are telling you, read as a set

Five of the six remove the same thing: doing it fast, or doing two things at once. Time and a half is processing speed. Notes before class is listening and writing at the same moment. The device is handwriting and spelling at speed. The separate room is filtering out everything that is not the test. Not reading aloud is decoding text in public, in real time. The sixth, seating, is holding attention in a busy room.

Not one of the six removes any thinking. That is worth sitting with. These are students who can do the work of this school and are getting to it by a slower or a different route — dyslexia, slow processing, attention, the usual ones, in a college-prep building. The plan is about the route. It was never about the ceiling.

Which hands you something you can check without knowing whose plan says what. If most of the plans in your room are removing time pressure and doing-two-things-at-once, then any task that quietly demands speed or multitasking is charging your students for something you are not grading. That is a fact about the task, and you can go and find it this afternoon.

1 · Ask what is hard to understand — about your assignment

Read the challenges half of any plan and a pattern shows up that is not really about the student: multi-step instructions, unclear expectations, a term nobody defined, a task that rewards guessing what the teacher wanted. Those are properties of the assignment. Fix them and the support stops being needed — by anyone.

Copy everything in the box

Here is an assignment, quiz or test I give my students. Read it twice.

FIRST PASS - as a fifteen-year-old reads it: once, quickly, at ten at night, on a phone. List, before you rewrite anything:
- every place they would have to guess what I meant
- every instruction carrying more than two steps in one sentence
- every term I use as though it were obvious
- what the task looks like it is asking for, versus what I said I would grade
- the first thing a student would get wrong that is my fault, not theirs

SECOND PASS - three specific questions, one for each principle of Universal Design for Learning. Answer them about THIS document. Do not give me general UDL advice and do not use UDL vocabulary in your answer.

1. REPRESENTATION - How many ways in are there? If every route into this material runs through reading dense text at speed, say so and name what else could carry the same content without carrying the answer with it.

2. ACTION AND EXPRESSION - How many ways out are there? If there is exactly one acceptable format for showing me the thinking, name two others that would let me grade the same thing against the same rubric.

3. ENGAGEMENT - What does a student get to decide here? Name every genuine choice this task offers, and say plainly where the relevance is stated rather than assumed. If the honest answer is none, say none.

For each thing you flag, tell me what it would cost me in preparation minutes to fix, and be honest when the answer is a lot. Do not tell me to make it accessible - tell me the one change with the best ratio of minutes spent to students helped.

Then, and only then, offer a clearer version that asks for exactly the same thinking. Do not make it easier, shorter or friendlier. Make it unambiguous.
THIRD PASS - check for these four specifically. They are what most of our students’ accommodations exist to remove, so if this document demands them, it is charging students for something I am not grading:
- anywhere a student has to read quickly to keep up
- anywhere they have to listen and write at the same time
- anywhere handwriting speed or spelling changes the mark
- anywhere the clock, the room or a transition is doing more work than the thinking is

[paste the assignment, quiz or test]

2 · Use what they are already good at

Every plan carries a Learning Profile, and half of it is what the student is good at — talks it through well, thinks in pictures, gets it right once they can see how the thing is put together, works well with other people. Somebody watched this student to write that down. It is the half nobody reads. This move keeps the standard exactly where it is and changes how the work arrives — and it goes to the whole class, because something one student is allowed to do and nobody else is is a spotlight, and they will not stand in it.

Copy everything in the box

I teach high school. Here is an assignment I give. I want to change it so more of my students can show me what they actually know.

THE ASSIGNMENT: [paste it]
WHAT I AM GRADING: [the thing I care about - for example, can they use evidence to back up a claim]
WHAT GETS IN THE WAY: [what I see in the room - for example, half of them can tell me the answer out loud and then hand in two vague paragraphs]

Give me three versions of this task I could actually run. For each one, tell me:

- what the student does, step by step, in the order it happens in class
- how many minutes it takes, and whether it fits an 80-minute block or a 45
- what I have to make before class, and roughly how long that takes me
- how I grade it with the rubric I already have, without writing a new one
- what I stop being able to see if I do it this way

Rules:
- Same standard. Do not make it shorter or easier. If you catch yourself cutting questions or lowering the bar, say so out loud instead of quietly doing it.
- It has to work for the whole class, not one student. Anything only one person is allowed to do singles them out, and they will not use it.
- I do not have a reader, a scribe, an aide or a co-teacher. Do not suggest one.
- The only accommodations available here are: sitting near the front, notes posted before class, not being asked to read aloud, using their own device for notes and in-class writing, time and a half on tests, and testing in the Learning Services office. Do not invent others.
- Do not tell me what students with dyslexia or ADHD are good at. You do not know that, and the research does not support it. Work from what I told you I see.
- Write it plainly enough that I could read one of these and run it on Tuesday.

3 · Four practices that take the same load off, and how to make them yours

These are not accommodations and they are not for particular students. Each one takes off a demand that our six accommodations exist to remove, which is why they help the room rather than an individual. Idea starters, not finished practice — none of this has been run at RJ and reported back on, and the classroom versions are a first draft to argue with.

The practice	What the research says, and its limit	What it takes off	Where it already lives here
A short untimed recall opener	Practice testing beats re-reading across 217 studies, works in real classrooms as well as labs, and the largest effects were in secondary school. Feedback adds surprisingly little; a longer gap helps. Limit: it is recall of what you taught, not a substitute for teaching it.	Remembering under pressure. Untimed, low-stakes, and it costs the same minutes in an 80 or a 45.	The cumulative retrieval opener on Eighty minutes, or forty-five — the one move identical in both periods.
Put the words next to the thing	Learners do better when related words and images sit together rather than apart: 58 comparisons, 2,426 participants, g = 0.63. Limit: mostly short lab tasks, and it assumes you know what your students already know.	Holding two sources in your head at once — exactly what notes before class removes. Label the diagram; do not narrate over a wall of text.	Accommodation 2, above, generalized. Post the deck the night before and annotation replaces transcription.
Start supported, then fade	Novices gain from heavy support and experienced students do better with less — 60 studies, 5,924 participants — and the asymmetry runs helpful: under-supporting a beginner costs more than over-supporting an expert. Limit: support means removing what is incidental. The moment it does the thinking, it is not support.	Starting from a blank page. Give the structure first, take it away as they can explain their own.	The fading trigger you already use: walk me through how you made it. If they can, drop a level.
Make them explain it to somebody	Giving an explanation is what produces the learning; receiving a bare answer is worse than receiving nothing. Limit: it only works if the structure forces the explaining — “discuss this at your table” does not.	Nothing — this one adds. It is a second way to see the thinking, which is the whole point of the move above.	Build groups that actually work, which carries the evidence and the structures.

Knowing the practice is not the hard part. Turning it into what you do on Tuesday of week two of your unit, with your material, is. That is the part worth handing over — and it needs nothing about any student. You do not need to pick one first. All four are written into the box below in plain words; tell it what you teach and what you want to fix, and it picks and builds.

Copy everything in the box

I teach high school. I want to try one thing in a unit I am about to teach, and I want it turned into what I actually do on specific days, with my own material.

MY UNIT: [what it covers, how many class meetings, and what students have to be able to do by the end]
MY CLASSES ARE: [80 minutes every other day, or 45 minutes - say which]
WHAT I WANT TO FIX: [for example - they forget September’s material by November; they nod along in class and then cannot do it on their own; the same four students do all the talking; they hand in work that misses the point of the assignment]

Pick ONE of these four, and tell me in two sentences why you picked it for my situation:

1. Start every class with a few ungraded minutes of writing down what they remember - from earlier in this unit, and from earlier in the year.
2. Put the words right next to the picture, table or diagram they explain, and post it before class so students can write on it while I talk.
3. Give them the structure, or one worked example, before they start - then take it away as they become able to explain their own work back to me.
4. Build the class so students have to explain their thinking to each other, not just discuss it.

Then give me:

- what I do in the first ten minutes of each meeting of this unit, meeting by meeting
- the actual questions or prompts for the first three meetings, written from my content - not examples of questions, the real ones
- what I stop doing to make room for it, and how many minutes that gives me back
- what I should see by the second week if it is working, and what I would see if it is not
- the one thing that will go wrong the first time I run it

Rules:
- Use my content. If you do not have enough of it to write real questions, ask me one question and stop.
- No jargon and no framework names. Write it the way I would say it to a colleague.
- Do not add anything to the period without taking something out. Tell me what comes out.
- If none of the four fits this unit, say so and tell me what would.

It will invent a seventh accommodation. Readers, scribes, shortened assignments, a quiet room we do not have — fluent, confident, and not ours. The section above tells you what is not on the list; check the answer against it.

And it will happily tell you what a diagnosis means a student is good at. It cannot know that, and the research does not support it — strengths are found in a particular student, never deduced from a label. Help a student find their strengths is the page that lays out the evidence.

What a diagnosis can and cannot tell you

It can tell you about conditions — what makes the hour work. Movement is the clearest one: across ten randomized trials with 474 children, physical activity moved attention by a moderate amount (SMD −0.48, 95% CI −0.85 to −0.07). Read the limit before you use it. Those were six- to twelve-year-olds doing 20 to 90 minutes of structured exercise over six to twenty weeks, mostly boys, with high heterogeneity between studies. Build movement into an 80-minute block because it is good practice for everyone. Do not tell a colleague the research proves a two-minute stretch fixes a junior’s attention — nobody has studied that.

It cannot tell you about talents. The familiar claim that dyslexic thinkers see the big picture or think in pictures does not survive checking: two meta-analyses find no creativity advantage (g = −0.02 across 20 studies; g = −0.03 across 13), and visuospatial ability comes out slightly lower on average — with a noticeably wider spread. That spread is the useful finding. Exceptional performers are real and they are not predictable from the label. You cannot deduce the strength. You have to go and find it in the person, which is what the Learning Profile in the plan represents — somebody went and found it.

Same for collaboration. Worth building in, but not because of anyone’s diagnosis — the reason is that giving an explanation is what produces the learning, and receiving a bare answer is worse than nothing. That argument, with its evidence, is on Build groups that actually work. The two pages agree: design the conditions, find the person.

Where to go next

Testing Outside Your Classroom

How extended time actually runs — both routes, the period ladder, the last-minute cases, and what to send the proctor.

Open →

Help a student find their strengths

The rung above compliance. What the research actually supports, what it does not, and how to build so a student can show you something the essay never asked for.

Open →

Teach to their strengths

Six learning profiles, what each often does well, where it shows up in your room, and the trap that goes with it.

Open →

Six accommodations, delivered properly, is the floor — and the floor is not optional. It is also not the ceiling, and it was never designed to be.

Jason Beyer · Educational Technology · Regis Jesuit High School · A.M.D.G.

HelpDesk@regisjesuit.com · 303.269.8080 · Aligned to the Learning Services teacher letter, August 2026 · LAST VERIFIED — 20 Aug 2026