How Does Special Needs Improve Patient And Professional When Working With Them?

Throughout my life, I feel as though I have had many encounters with special education. Growing up, my grandmothers close friend had a daughter that had down syndrome. She was extremely sweet and loved company. Her parents had six other children who were grown and lived on their own. However, she lived at home with her parents her whole life. In elementary school, I do not remember many encounters with special education students. I do remember some kids being taken out of my class for part of the day, but that was my only experience during that time.

One in five American students has a learning disability this is according to the documentary “Misunderstood Minds’’ produced by WGBH. Children with learning disabilities are more likely to become outcasts in school and in society. The documentary follows five families dealing with a differently abled child; Nathan V, Lauren, Sarah Lee, Adam, and Nathan S. The film focuses on difficulties the families go through, professionalism or lack of it by school officials and demystification.

I have been a teacher of students with special needs for the last couple of years in alternative settings. The students I like best tend to be the most challenging both behaviorally and academically. Success can be more apparent, yet at times there is frustration. I feel I am good at it, but need to learn more. Most importantly I love teaching kids with special challenges. The key is to be creative and keep trying.

     When a child doesn’t seem to be learning, some teachers and parents in his/her life might criticize the child and think of them as stupid, or maybe just too lazy to want to learn. What they don’t realize is that the child might have a learning disability. But how are these children being helped? There are many programs, special schools and facilities, home teaching methods and many other ways in which children with Learning Disabilities are being helped.

There should also be hands-on time to include this strength, using magnet boards or sentence strips. Students with learning disabilities do have the ability to overcome the disability; it is just a matter of building on strengths and finding new ways that work for the student to learn. It is not that students with learning disabilities have something wrong with them, they only learn in a different way. In fact, all students learn differently and focusing on each student's strengths would benefit them greatly in their education. As teachers, we should apply methods we use in Special Education to all students. For instance, using accommodations such as graphic organizers or flexible means of presentation helps all students excel. The graphic organizers assist with students' overall understanding and attention during the lessons. The flexible means of presentation such as lecture, group work, and hands on work allows all students to learn the material as they each have a different primary mode of learning visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile.

In the educational world, there are countless programs, curricula, strategies, manipulates, and resources for teachers to pull from in order to aide in the teaching of concepts and learning of students. Whatever method(s) a school or district has deemed best practice, or adopted as their curriculum, tend to be the instructional practices or resources utilized the most by those teachers. Additionally, teachers will also have preference to teaching styles, resources, and materials they use for their students. While autonomy in any classroom is important to students’ academic growth, one must also be careful to select and implement instructional with great intention and purpose. Consideration to students needs is equally important as the mandate of teaching standards and demonstrating proficiency amongst students. Even when teaching non-disabled students, it can be time consuming and overwhelming to plan lessons so just how much more is involved when planning for students with significant disabilities (SD)? Better yet, what are appropriate instructional strategies to use for students with SD? Regardless of the instructional setting, these are considerations that must be given when teaching students with SD in order to maximize their learning opportunities to learn

As we grow in education, it always seems as in there is someone that is left behind. Educators need to be able to reach out as many students as possible, but some may argue that it does not feel this way. Often, students with special education needs are considered to be too difficult to teach, or simple just a “lost cause.” The way we interact and care for all students not only shows in each student, but it shows in the impact it has on the community as a whole.

A special education teacher needs to acquire a variety of different skills in order to succeed. “The majority of young men and women who major in special education bring a heaping helping of heart, personal commitment, and passion to the profession” (Hollingsworth). A special education teacher must enjoy working with children and developing activities and lessons to help them learn. Qualities necessary for

During my morning at Gray-New Gloucester Middle School, I sat in on a wonderful special education classroom. I started my observation at 7:15am which was great because I was able to observe the students coming into school and see how they settle in and see their morning routines. The students came in and put their bags away and got out their folders and pencils and sat down at their assigned table. Each student ate their breakfast along with working on their morning work. Their morning work was a worksheet having to do with subtracting money and working with decimals. While working on their morning work each student was very calm. I was able to talk with the teacher a little bit before class and she explains to me that the students in her class either have autism or an intellectual disability. While we waited for the bell to ring their was one little girl who took an interest in talking with me. She was showing me her stuffed animal and telling me his name and what they like to do together. It’s really great having the students interact with you even if its just as simple as that.

This past year at Audubon Elementary I had a great opportunity to work with a couple of our special needs students. I appreciated the experience and made some life-long friends. I understand more about the needs of these students and understand more about what they go through on a daily basis.

In an article written by Gong, Zimmerli, and Hoffer (2013), researchers Leiter and Maslach define burnout as “a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment.” This syndrome can be felt in any person regardless of experience, race, or profession. In professions such as teaching, burnout can easily be obtained due factors such as substantial paperwork, limited support, and poor workplace climate. It is imperative that burnout is reduced is order to keep qualified individuals in the profession especially when there are limited people in the field. Special Education Teachers make up one critical shortage area in the teaching profession that has a greater rate of teacher burnout and attrition. One reason for this is because special education teachers report higher levels of work related stress than their

Schooling for the disabled requires a special environment—one that only a few teachers have the gift to care for. Instead of looking out for the child’s

According to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, students with disabilities should be placed in a “least restrictive environment.” One of the main ideas of this act was to improve the learning experiences of students with disabilities by giving them learning opportunities outside of a special education classroom. The number of students with disabilities being placed in their general education classrooms is increasing more and more each year. The U.S Department of Education’s 27th annual report to Congress on the implementation of The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2005) indicates that the number of students with disabilities in general education classrooms has risen to almost 50 percent. This is about a 17 percent increase from the 1997 U.S

Being a special educator, there are different roles and responsibilities separate from a general education teacher. As a special ed teacher, you need to be able to be more flexible and open-minded when it comes to teaching. These students, whether in a self-contained classroom or an ICT class, will have such differing needs than their counterparts. While they may still have some same needs, most of them will be different and individual. Even though we may have several students with the same disability in our class, that doesn’t mean that we can treat them the same; each student has differing abilities that we must figure out individually. This is one huge problem that I see prevailing in schools today. Teachers tend to think that if a child has autism, they have the same issues and needs as another child with autism but this is not the case. One child might need headphones for noise-canceling features while the other child might be ok with sound but need more social interactions skills. The ability to discern what a child needs based on their own performance is a crucial aspect to supporting every student equally. As a special educator, we need to not only look at their deficits but their capabilities as well. To define someone by what they can’t do is such a negative point of view. If we go into the classroom trying to find what is wrong with a child, we may never notice what exceptional skills they may have. For example, in class when Mark Sarabian came to talk about the

During my placement in Jemison Elementary in Chilton County, I was placed in a Special Education classroom with four students, a teacher and a teacher’s aid. They students range in grade level kindergarten to second grade. They also had very different disabilities. The reason they were all put in that classroom together was because developmentally they all were within the same range of development of one other. One of the kindergarten students has Osteogenesis Imperfecta. This means that her bones are very fragile and can break easily. The other kindergarten student is in the class because of his behavior problems. He has a hard time paying attention and staying on task. The first grader is developmentally delayed. She is very far behind academically due to the delay in her development. The last student is in the second grade. The reason behind him being placed in this classroom is very sad. When he was a toddler, he was run over by a vehicle, therefore now he is developmentally delayed due to the severe head trauma. The teacher and the aid have both had many years experience in a special education classroom. They were very familiar with the roles of a special education teacher. They had a strict schedule that they followed everyday. The very first day I was there I noticed that the students are very acclimated to this schedule and pay a lot of attention to how their day flows. This is very important because three of the four students do not stay in that classroom all day. They actually return to their general education classroom after morning instruction to receive the student interaction in a regular classroom with non-disabled students. I was amazed to watch how the students knew when and where to go at certain times of the day. The were all very schedule oriented. The atmosphere of the classroom was very bright and fun, but with that being said, the students knew who was in charge. My cooperating teacher (CT) had a very well developed classroom management plan. She had a certain way of doing things and her students were very familiar with her way of doing things. I found that very amusing. Her and her aid had a great relationship with one another. They