School-like setting helps students adjust
Space designed to appeal to teen-agers
Patients in Bryn Mawr Rehab’s adolescent day treatment program attend class in an area that looks just like a high school classroom and hang out in an adjoining teen center with posters on the walls and a bumper pool table. The classroom includes study carrels and Macintosh computers just like those patients will use when they return to their home schools.
"We wanted to make the space more user-friendly for teenagers, rather than just having a therapy gym and treatment area," says Donna Gregory, program director of the Malvern, PA program.
Patients in the program, which began this fall, can anticipate being in the program about two months. Students attend five days a week, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. During the last part of the program, clients go back to school part time and come to Bryn Mawr part time.
The rehab staff may accompany the students when they first go back to school to help the transition. Classroom work is either cognitively or academically focused, depending on the needs of each teen-ager.
The staff collaborate with the patients’ home schools, using the textbooks the students will use when they return to school and keeping them as focused on their grade-level activities as possible. Students also receive help with memory compensatory strategies, visual scanning, memory sequencing, and other cognitive and remedial techniques.
To help with the transition to school, the Bryn Mawr staff talk with staff at the teens’ home schools to help them accommodate the students. They make recommendations based on the patients’ learning strengths and physical needs, and suggest ways the school can modify the classroom environment to accommodate the patients.
Some simple modifications include having kids sit on the front row, letting them tape lectures so they can listen to them repeatedly, and giving them a longer time to answer test questions.
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