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.