Intern Year: Fall 2013: Week 2

       Through working in a small group in the resource room, I have noticed how it is more demanding than a general ed. Classroom in my opinion.  By working with a smaller group, I feel that the students expect you to work with them one on one and give them your undivided attention.  However, with a group of four, I need to work with all students and give them the assistance they individually need.  I also feel as if I need to get to know the students better with what they are able to do independently and what they need assistance with.  I do not want to provide them with too much assistance, but I also want to see what they can do independently.  Teaching in a special education classroom, has been a new experience for me and it is so much different than teaching general ed.  I feel as if I have to implement a new strategy for teaching a small group of students with disabilities.  They require different teaching methods and different assistance compared to a large class setting.

         My mentor teacher and I discussed my action research today, and we decided that I would work with a 3rd student who is categorized as LD in reading.  However, both my mentor teacher and his general education teacher would classify him as a non-reader.  I plan to work with him on identifying letters, identifying letter sounds, and identifying site words.  I want to look at how it increases his reading scores and increases his word identification and ability to read fluently and understand.  The student is very motivated to read, he never gives up, and always tries his hardest to complete the activities independently.  I feel that he could benefit greatly from the extra activities and strategies to help him to become a reader!
        It only took me 8 days with the students to catch a cold!  However, I am feeling more comfortable now just jumping in with my mentor teacher as she is teaching.  It is almost like we are co-teaching together and that is a great feeling.  We are developing a professional relationship and understand each other’s boundaries.  It takes time to understand each other as educators, and I feel as if we are on the right track to be able to co-teach well together to benefit the students.
During my small group with Sharon Hayes, we were talking about professional relationships and how we should be able to discuss our strategies and ideas with each other without taking it personal, and throughout my time in the school over the past few years, I have seen how some teachers take everything very personal.  They think other teachers are attacking  their character and strategies and are not focused on the students.  The student should be the most important aspect of every decision; I feel that the only person suffering is the student because they are not benefiting from the educators feeling as if they are being attacked.  It seems that we as educators need to be more open minded and realize that we each have our own way of teaching and strategies and that is okay.  It doesn't mean our way is right and theirs is wrong, but that some strategies work better in different classrooms and with different students.

I am still developing my action research question, but as I develop my thoughts and try to get them in order, my mentor teacher, teacher ed coordinator, and the student’s general ed teacher have given me many great ideas.  They all seem to think that phonetics is not working for him to learn to read and suggested sight vocabulary with the dolche word list and dell word list.  I would like to do baseline data with letter recognition, letter phonetics, site words, and a reading passage.  I will also use any testing that the general ed teacher or special ed teacher has on file for him to better understand him as a student.   I will do an interest inventory with the student to get to know him better to find passages that will interest him.  The student is always very willing to share and elaborate.  I may even try reading activities/tests to him and see if he scores better on them if he is read to and gives his answers orally then when asked to be written.

Intern Year: Fall 2013: Week 1

This beginning of the intern semester has been a very overwhelming but exciting time for me.  The Friday before school started, I had to switch placements to fulfill my special education placement.  I moved from Rivesville Elementary to East Dale Elementary in Marion County.  East Dale is very different from Rivesville; the first difference is that it is a much bigger school than Rivesville.  Also, East Dale is a much newer school and is set up as open concept classrooms.  The open concept classroom is a concept that I have only heard about but have never seen.  There are also many more faculty members and an assistant principal.  Getting to be placed in another school and experience how it is run is very eye opening.  I am learning a lot about how all schools do not operate the same, and rather on their own individual needs.  Being able to experience two different schools and how they operate allows me to take in the different school environments.  At first, I was very nervous about transferring to a different PDS, but now after my first week at East Dale, I am starting to very comfortable and a part of the East Dale family!  Everyone is very helpful and willing to allow me to learn in any way possible.

This week has also been a very eye opening experience being my first time in a special education resource room.  The first thing that I have noticed about being a special education teacher is the amount of paperwork that they are required to complete at the beginning of the school year.  The first few days was focused on getting the accommodations/modification sheets to the general education and specialists teachers, making the daily schedule, and additional paperwork.  After we started to see students on Wednesday, we noticed a few glitches in our system and had to readjust to be able to service all of the students on the caseload.  Before I was in my placement, I thought that we would only be working in our classroom with students being pulled into our classroom.  However, we will be co-teaching in a 3^rd and 4^th grade classroom with the general education teacher for math and reading.  Co-teaching will give me the opportunity to experience actual co-teaching for the first time.  It will allow me to cooperatively work with the general education teacher and develop a professional relationship with the other general education teachers.  Working with two different general education teachers will give me the opportunity to observe and learn from two different teaching strategies and classroom environments that will be very beneficial to me.  My mentor teacher has already given me many resources and experiences to learn from in the first week, and I look forward to learning more from her throughout the semester in an area that she is an expert in.  She gives me every opportunity to learn from herself and the students to make my placement successful.  I am greatly looking forward to this semester at East Dale!

            Now that I am starting to meet the students and get into a routine, I am starting to think about my students, what they need to work on, what areas could be improved, and how they could relate to my action research.  It seems that the area where the students struggle the most is with staying on task, reading fluently, place value, motivation to work, independently working, and learned helplessness.  I hope to focus on the learned helplessness during my action research because this is a reoccurring theme that I have noticed across the boards with students.  The students I will be working with range from kindergarten students to fifth grade students with disabilities ranging from Autism, LD, MI, BD, and ADD/ADHA.  At some points, I have felt overwhelmed with being the special education room with students and working with them one on one.  I do not want to give them too much help, but I also do not want to not provide them with the amount of assistance they need.  In the next weeks, I hope to get to know the students and their individual learning and ability needs better along with solidifying my action research question.