Working with students with special needs in your classroom
This lecture was lead by Jason Holzemer he is a high school special education teacher in Cuba City. He started out as just having his general education degree, then went out and couldn’t find a job. He then went back to school and got his special education degree. He was then hired as a special education teacher at the middle school in Cuba City. After doing that for a couple of years he ended up being a social studies teacher at Cuba City Middle School.
During this lecture he went through ten main points about being a general education teacher working with a special education teacher and just how important it is. He also was able to give us pointers for each step.
Step ten: Regular education VS special education, make sure you work together in order for the students to get the most out of each day. Plan on working with the special education teachers. This way you will be able to know about any IEP’s students may have.
Step nine: Expectations, make sure you have expectations for each class. Make them simple reasonable and to the point.
Step eight: IEP, this stands for individualized education plan. This is much more work than most teacher may assume.
Step seven: IEP meetings, regular education teacher is required to be there in each meeting. This meeting is required once a year, but can happen more often. A can change to an IEP can happen with out a meeting as long as the parents agree to it. The students are not required to be at the meetings but once they hit middle school age they are strongly recommended to be at each meeting. This is because the students will than have a say on what is going well in the classroom as well what could be changed.
Step six: IEP is a legal document, It’s not that the students can not do the work, it just may take more time for some students to catch on to certain things. Any teacher can request to see their students IEP this is to help their students within in the classroom.
Step five: Communication, communication is huge! You are able to find out where the student is having success and try to do that in your classroom. You can talk to the student to see what he/she thinks works well for them as well as what does not work. Try to make the first conversation with their parents a positive phone call. This will make it easier to call home and talk to the parents about something that didn’t go well in the classroom.
Step four: Document and record, this way if the parents say that you did not do something that you actually did do you will have proof that you did. A good way to do this is with a journal.
Step three: Fair VS equal, some students may find this confusing. What is equal for each student may not fair. Students don’t all have the same background so you can not treat them all the same. His main advice for this was to focus on one student at a time.
Step two: Plan ahead, by showing the students the lesson plan ahead of time will allow them to prepare for what’s coming up. Google classroom is a great way to do this. Allow students to work ahead.
Step one: Its YOUR classroom. Its important to get to know your special education teachers so they are able to help you through the year. They will be able to be there to give you advice, but you need to do what feels right for you.
This was a very good lecture to go to because I was able to hear from someone who is in a special education classroom everyday what its really like. I was able to take a lot out of this lecture that I now can take into my classroom.