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Learning Disabilities and the Classroom

Satisfactory Essays

Mary L. Burkitt
Grand Canyon University: SPE 359
July 7, 2013

Learning Disabilities and the Classroom With every classroom you are able to see a dynamic between students and their teacher. It takes a strong teacher to really make everything accessible to all students including student with learning disabilities. The class that I watched was Christina Hilliker’s second grade. The disabilities that were part of this great dynamic were Downs, Autism, ADHD, auditory processing and behavior issues that cause learning difficulties. Within the classroom I was able to see many ways that Ms. Hilliker was maintaining her classroom. For general classroom behavior she used a stop light method (red, green yellow). Each student had a …show more content…

I found it very strange to find out that the student with Downs was not labeled as a learning disability but was put into this category to access what she needed academically. I did not like the fact that due to funding most of the students like this were not on an alternative curriculum in all cases. I would however use Ms. Hilliker’s seating ideas because it seemed to help B.S. maintain his behavior and compete is work with minimal distractions and M.M. was close to the teacher at all times to ask for clarification. I did notice that M.M. was labeled as auditory processing disorder and there were few accommodations to help this student as an individual. While watching B.S. it was clear that there was the need to have some type of social skills expectations that should be worked with, this student was very immature and inappropriate at times. M.M. on the other hand had no social interaction with his classmates unless the teacher essential made him do it. I also saw that students that were higher sometimes made B.S. and C.S. get off task when they thought it would be funny for them to get negative attention from the teacher, this was normally right after the Para or teacher paid one on one attention to these two particular students. It was clear that Ms. Hilliker was familiar with this behavior as well because she was able to stop most of this behavior before it got out of hand and was

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