The practical basics of teaching hearing-impaired students are constant regardless of teaching style. Teachers must speak slowly, over-enunciate for lip-readers, maintain less distance from students, rid the classroom of background noises and avoid silhouetting themselves against windows. Teachers with mustaches are encouraged to keep them trimmed to provide a good view of the lips. In some cases, signing is necessary, so ensure a good view of the hands. Technical supports, like screen captions and overhead projections, are also universally helpful for students who are good readers.
Teachers who employ an expert style present themselves as possessors of special knowledge. They can be extremely informative, though sometimes they can be intimidating. A teacher who uses this style can be effective with hearing-impaired students, so long as she adheres to the technical basics, and provided the students are an appropriate audience for the expert-style. This style is more associated with high school and college. An expert-style teacher who can sign fluently will establish strong credibility with deaf students who themselves sign fluently.
The formal authority style is associated with a stern-but-fair approach that emphasizes standards and maintains a certain personal distance between teachers and students. Again, whether hearing-impaired or not, differently aged students will respond differently to this style. The danger of this style is rigidity, and the danger of rigidity in a classroom with hearing-impaired students – especially if there are variously impaired and unimpaired students together – is that the formal authoritarian may have difficulty dealing with unexpected situations or the need to give certain hearing-impaired students the kind of special attention they might need.
Personal model teachers actually demonstrate what they are teaching students, using themselves as models for student emulation. This style is particularly well-suited for young hearing-impaired students, but it is also effective with adolescent/adult students in subjects where direct observation is an effective strategy. This demonstrative style is particularly helpful in teaching young hearing-impaired students to speak. Personal model teachers often display a great deal of empathy with students, and that personal connection is often well-received by students.
If the personal model style is especially well-suited for young students, the facilitator and delegator styles are particularly well-suited to young adults and adults. Facilitators are sometimes called Socratic teachers, interacting with students by paying close attention to them and responding to students with probing questions or suggested alternatives. Facilitators are pushing students to become more independent. Facilitator-style teachers will need to take special care in classes with the hearing-impaired to repeat all questions back to the class, and identify the authors of those questions. Delegators also place great emphasis on student independence by allowing students to work on projects and assignments without close supervision. Delegators, unlike facilitators, are more hands-off. This makes teaching the hearing-impaired easier for the teacher in the classroom, but the teacher must be prepared for one-on-one consultation with students because the delegator-teacher identifies himself as a resource to individual students.