Secondary teaching strategies for deaf and hard of hearing students
Equipping secondary school educators across Australia with the knowledge, confidence, and classroom-ready strategies to create truly accessible learning environments. Don't simplify the learning — make the learning accessible.
Navigating the secondary classroom landscape
Secondary school can present unique challenges for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students. Students regularly transition between multiple classrooms, each with different acoustic environments, teaching approaches, seating arrangements, and levels of background noise. Fast-paced group discussions, specialised subject vocabulary, verbal instructions, and multimedia presentations can create additional communication barriers and increase the effort required to follow classroom learning. Recognising these potential barriers allows teachers to make proactive adjustments that improve access, participation, and engagement across different learning environments.
Providing important information visually can support access to classroom instruction for deaf and hard of hearing students. Strategies may include written instructions, key vocabulary, visual schedules, diagrams and captioned multimedia alongside spoken explanations (AllPlay Learn, n.d.).
High-impact adjustments you can apply today
1. Make key information visual. Display lesson goals, instructions, key concepts, and subject-specific vocabulary on the board or learning management system. This provides students with another way to access important information alongside spoken instruction.
2. Make classroom discussions easier to follow. Establish clear turn-taking, identify who is speaking, and avoid giving important information while facing away from the class. These strategies can help students follow fast-paced discussions and identify where information is coming from.
3. Provide accurate captions for multimedia. Use captioned videos and multimedia resources wherever spoken information contributes to the learning. Check captions for accuracy before the lesson, particularly when resources contain specialised terminology, names, or technical concepts, rather than assuming automatically generated captions are accurate.
Practical frameworks and classroom toolkits
Build confidence in supporting deaf and hard of hearing students with practical resources designed for secondary classrooms. Classroom checklists can help teachers consider visibility, seating, background noise, and room acoustics, while accessible lesson-planning strategies support the use of visual information and alternative ways of accessing lesson content. Resources addressing collaborative group work, turn-taking, captioned media, remote microphone systems, and hearing devices can also help teachers identify and reduce potential barriers to communication, participation, and learning.
Captioned multimedia can provide an important form of access to spoken information for deaf and hard of hearing students. Research in mainstream secondary classrooms has examined the integration of captioned multimedia alongside other access technologies as part of creating more accessible classroom learning environments (McGrath et al., 2016).
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