Everything Student-Centered: ClassVR in Special Education

This post originally appeared on the ClassVR blog and is republished here with permission.

Key points:

Spaulding Academy and Family Services is a small, nonprofit special education school and residential center that serves students with a wide range of abilities, including many who are on the autism spectrum, some who have medical or physical limitations, some who have been diagnosed with other learning challenges and some who have been victims of trauma, abuse or neglect. Our students are with us because they need more support than their previous schools were able to provide, and it is fundamental to our philosophy that our programs and offerings meet the needs of all of our students.

From our latest blog post, we have worked hard to explore new and exciting ways to use ClassVR to support our students. The first step to achieving this was to continue leveraging our experts on campus. We have an extremely talented team of administrators, certified behavior analysts and physicians, social workers, speech-language pathologists, physical and occupational therapists, teachers, medical experts and staff who bring a unique perspective to this project, and their contributions and Support has allowed us to carefully expand the scope and methods of our ClassVR implementations.

ClassVR in staff training and social-emotional learning

Last year, our school experienced a notable cultural shift that centers SEL and Choose the Love program within our curriculum and daily operation. This change has already delivered results that have been inspiring for both students and staff to witness, and we were very interested in exploring how to leverage virtual reality (VR) in this area.

One important thing we have decided to do is use ClassVR as part of our staff training process. Our interest is in using virtual reality to strengthen compassion, empathy and perspective taking among new staff. We identified a video from the National Autistic Society (TMI autism), which consulted with people with autism to create a first-person simulation of what sensory overload feels like for them, and now we're using that virtual reality experience on ClassVR headsets to help train and inform new school staff . It is difficult for a 'neurotypical' person to truly understand the perspective of those who are neurodiverse, but this immersive experience brings tremendous value by helping our staff understand and empathize with our students; As a result, it helps staff provide them with better service and support. .

After staff experience the video, we have a discussion about how this new information may impact how we approach supporting our students at certain times, and how we can proactively take steps to avoid those situations or offer solutions in the future. moment; that could mean completely rethinking our learning spaces or proactively offering the student sensory tools like noise-canceling headphones, or anything in between. We are also working with our school's BCBAs and others to begin filming custom 360° perspective videos for use in staff training, in which we record simulated interactions between students and staff with the intent of showing the student a students perspective during various situations. The hope is that this will further develop empathy and understanding among our staff!

School Training Supervisor Brion Schaffnit Demonstrates ClassVR at a Staff Training.

With that same logic in mind, we also continue to explore virtual reality strategies in the world of SEL for our students. We want to move beyond using headphones as calming devices, so we're finalizing plans to create and film personalized 360° content that also focuses on compassion, empathy, and perspective taking. We are using various research papers as a starting point, but as usual, our creative and innovative specialists have taken the ideas and developed them to develop solutions that are most likely to work for our specific students.

The starting point will be to film simulated social scenarios similar to the perspective taking strategy mentioned above. Students will be able to experience social situations from specific points of view, and the intention is for teachers or clinicians to guide implementation and obtain feedback from students in the moment, while they are immersed in the experience. Given our focus on SEL and Choose Love, we will begin with scenarios that involve courage, gratitude, forgiveness, and compassion in action.

We also plan to create student-produced SEL content where students develop materials to interact with in other classrooms. This can take the form of 360-degree videos, which can be anything from a student-produced puppet show to students writing a scene and acting it out, but I'm also interested in having students create and code SEL CoSpaces personalized for other students. wear. Imagine having students build a 'Castle of Courage', filled with SEL information and videos and coded interactive elements, for younger students to explore and interact with?

ClassVR in proactive needs management

As highlighted in our latest blog post, one of our most established strategies for using ClassVR is to provide vestibular-ocular stimulation to students who require movement to be successful in the classroom. We have amassed a library of custom and outsourced 360-degree videos that meet the specific needs and interests of specific students, all of which provide different levels of sensory stimulation intended to “trick the brain” into believing it has received the necessary movement. .

With that in mind, our next step was to identify whether proactive Vestibular-ocular virtual reality implementations could lead to an overall improvement in behavior and time on task in the classroom. One of our students tended to hit a roadblock at around the same time every day, where he would lose interest in classwork and we would see increases in outburst behaviors. So, every day for two weeks, we deployed ClassVR to provide simulated motion about a half hour before the typical speed bump; We saw notable decreases in outburst behaviors. and Noticeable increases in time on task for the rest of each day after using VR!

The next phase is to preload headsets with content, customized for students in each classroom, that will be available to classroom teachers so they can more easily, proactively and reactively, provide students with immersive content that meets their specific needs. Once the technology is implemented, we will continue to use our data collection infrastructure to help us understand whether each implementation is effective.

ClassVR in medical applications:

Based on research work by oxford and others, who show decreased anxiety and pain perception when virtual reality is implemented during routine medical procedures, we began using virtual reality for select students who have difficulty with things like blood draws and vaccinations. This involved significant pre-teaching: we introduced virtual reality to the student to get them comfortable with the experience and to determine the level of sensory input they preferred, and then separately introduced them to the blood draw process. That included breaking down the steps of a blood draw and practicing using fake equipment in a safe environment. These steps allowed the student to feel comfortable with both processes when combining them.

Another specific need we have begun to address in the medical setting is the fear of unfamiliar or anxiety-provoking spaces, such as medical and dental offices. We have had several students who have significant anxiety around the dentist, which can lead to refusal to attend appointments or to cooperate when in the office, so we coordinated with our local dental office to film a 360° tour of all its facilities. We are guided on the tour by their chief dental hygienists, who greet us at the front door and accompany us as they describe each step of the visit, explain each piece of equipment, and assure the viewer (the student) that everything is safe. .

We then went a step further and filmed a second version of the video: in this one, a popular member of staff takes the student's place for a fake dental visit. The viewer watches the staff member as he walks into the office, sits in the chair, brushes his teeth, and assures him that nothing is painful or scary.

Paraeducator Pedro Pérez models a visit to the dentist.

This type of video modeling practice is well established, but the immersive nature of virtual reality video modeling has proven to be even more successful for our students. We've since expanded this strategy to other new or scary places, including filming personalized content for students who are being discharged from Spaulding to new schools (usually in their home districts). In a recent scenario, we traveled to a student's new school and filmed a 360-degree guided video of the student's new environment, including their classroom and other important resources. Transitions like this are scary, sometimes especially for students with autism, and the hope is that this strategy will help alleviate some of the anxiety that comes with them.

Thinking in the future

What stands out to me personally about all of this is how ClassVR uniquely expands our toolbox to help meet the individual needs of our students. Every day at Spaulding is filled with small and large successes, all of which inspire me, and I have found our virtual reality implementations to be among the most interesting and inspiring I have witnessed. There is something special about a team working together to find a new and innovative solution to a persistent problem, and then seeing a student do something she never thought she would be able to do, or experience something she had never experienced before. or smile more than we have ever seen them smile.

In the future we will continue to explore new and exciting implementation methods, always with the goal of meeting the diverse individual needs of our students, and we hope that these ideas will help generate other new and innovative ideas for you!