A New ‘Frontier’ for Special Needs Learners and Their Parents

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It’s no secret that the entire education sector wasn’t prepared for the repercussions of Covid-19. From immediately reworking the syllabus to adapt to e-learning for every course, to coping with the anxiety of quarantine, it’s been a stressful few weeks for educators and parents alike.

Students have been in e-learning classes for a few weeks now and they’re starting to settle into the time difference and learning environment change. But continuously creating new and engaging e-learning material is taking a toll on teachers, and not to mention, the new role in their children’s education that parents are now taking on as well. It can get stressful for grown-ups too.

The Learning Frontier is a multidisciplinary therapy center in Beijing that provides support services to children, families, and international schools here in Beijing. Their therapists and specialists are from the areas of occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, applied behavior analysis, mental health counseling, and educational psychology. Covering various disciplines, they closely work together to provide individualized support and enrichment opportunities for children’s unique learning needs.

Recently, in response to Covid-19, they launched new online workshops to help parents, teachers, and educators during this time of need.

We spoke with Director, Dr. Shu Peng, to learn more about these new resources, and how they continue to serve the community, despite staff, educators, and families being all over the world.

How have the new regulations implemented in response to COVID-19 been for you?

During this COVID-19 epidemic situation, the health and safety of our clients and staff are our priority and therefore we have suspended our center-based and school-based services. To maintain consistency, we have tried out different creative skills to move some of our consultation and therapy services to the online platform. Therapists are proactively reaching out to their respective clients by checking on their progress, concerns, and share activities and strategies with parents to practice with their children at home. We also started online therapy and consultations for the clients who are suitable and available to maintain therapy’s consistency. Apart from that, we are constantly updating and sharing articles on useful resources at our WeChat platform (乐学前沿) to keep everyone updated regarding our services.

How has the staff handled the situation and what kind of support has the school provided the staff?

The staff has been given the option to work from home during this period to reduce exposure to the virus while traveling. The company provides timely updates on government regulations and continuously updates its policy, keeping in mind the health and safety as the top priority. Although most of the staff are away from the office, team members from different functions regularly conduct online meetings, collaborate closely to support each other, and our students and their families during this period. Staff members who are not able to communicate in Chinese receive support from their Chinese-speaking colleagues to register and get their access cards from their residence compounds, and purchasing any materials that have been difficult to purchase during this time, for example, face masks. No matter where our staff are in this world, they are always committed to delivering instructions to reach the common goal of the company.

Tell us a bit about the types of workshops you organize for parents, teachers, and educators. What sort of support are you providing them during this time?

Individual check-in, email communication, online therapy, and online consultation are some of the methods we are using this period. We are updating our WeChat platform more regularly to share strategies and tips with parents/clients and even planning to incorporate video content on different activities to do at home. We also plan to provide tailored webinars to support schools’ needs.

Therapists are offering weekly follow up with existing clients by sharing activities and strategies to help parents continue working on therapy goals from home.

For instance, our occupational therapist, Nazneen Adam suggests, “since an online option has not been offered for occupational therapy sessions due to difficulty arranging tools to develop sensory-motor skills, the type of therapy may also require more physical facilitation from the therapist to ensure success which is not possible through online platforms. Parent training has therefore been offered instead to help parents use tools that they have access to at home so that they can continue to help their children develop specific skills according to their occupational therapy goals.”

Therapists will also continue to share strategies to support clients and parents through online communication until the center reopens.

What type of online teaching methods have you explored, that you find to be most effective in connecting with children?

The most effective way to connect with kids is through their parents. During this time, online activities become more fun and meaningful if both parents and students can try to explore and enjoy them together. We encourage them to practice interactive activities to facilitate essential social skills while still working on their targeted goals.

According to our speech and language therapist, Bronwyn Miles, “it’s most important to make learning fun and engaging. With online sessions, you’re not in the room together which makes this a little difficult sometimes! Games that involve getting up and moving are great! There is no reason that one cannot play active games in different locations. The screen share feature on Zoom (video conferencing software) is also great – we use this to play games together that work on lots of different skills (e.g. category naming apps; word games).”

How has this experience been for your therapists? Is it very different from face-to-face sessions?

Online consultation and therapy sessions have been quite challenging for our therapists and specialists, as there are new challenges involved between online teaching and face-to-face setting, and we believe in valuing relationships over teaching.

Our applied behavior analysis therapist, Jersey Li recommends, “some face-to-face work activities can be adapted for use in the online context. Online teaching may create an extra barrier for the therapist to keep effective interaction with the children all the time. Also, for the student without the school schedule, it can create anxiety among them. Some children or parents may feel that studying at home and facing the screen, instead of studying in the classroom, is not essentially a good learning method and could affect their learning motivation to achieve good learning results.”

Our mental health counselor and learning support specialist, Ellie Zhu suggests, “online counseling can be a choice for higher age group children who have more control over both the environmental factors and themselves (as they are more mature), and the session can be conversation based; yet with smaller age group children we use a lot of online activities, role play, sensory games.”

Our speech and language therapists (SLTs), Bronwyn Miles and Maureen Tanoy feel that, “Before providing online tele-therapy we have to make sure that we can provide and target speech goals given the online resources and activities available. Since younger students may require more assistance and supervision, we recommend online parent coaching together with online therapy to make sure that our speech goals are targeted. We are being more creative and we believe this is a positive and empowering experience for parents, as they take on a much more active role in therapy. Overall, the implementation of online therapy has been an interesting experience, and it’s great to broaden our service delivery model for the future.’

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Photos: Courtesy of The Learning Frontier, Alexander Dummer on Unsplash

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