Learning can be a painful process; it involves struggle and failure as well as success. As with any worthwhile endeavor, enduring through the challenging times can bring great rewards. Teaching can bring its own challenges and can often feel like failure as well. Recent research has shown that many new teachers leave the profession within five years (Washington State loses 25% of its new teachers in this time frame). The teacher evaluation process may seem punitive but gives educators a chance to consider the goals they have for teaching and for students. They can reflect on student progress and evaluate how the methods they have employed thus far have affected student learning. (CSTP, 2012).
This process of setting and reflecting on goals can give teachers great insight into the struggles that students might be experiencing when trying to determine their own academic goals. In my initial post for this class, I said I wanted to help students set their own learning goals. I still feel that I want to help my students come to understand their objectives in the classroom. Through the course of this Instructional Strategies class, I feel that I have learned many new strategies that can help my students achieve their IEP goals and any personal academic goals they may set. Bruner discussed the environment in which a child learns. A child must know he can learn. He must know he can take information and use it—manipulate it, apply it. (Bruner, 1966). Special Education students don’t always have the skills or confidence to do that but they have more skills than they realize. The instructional strategies used in a classroom can help them discover their strengths and employ them to their best advantage.
Several of my students struggle socially. This can also affect learning because they are either worried about the reaction of peers or are not getting along with the others in class. Using advance organizers was one way I decided to determine the level of prior knowledge regarding body language cues.
Research regarding the effectiveness of advance organizers is varied largely because of the difference in methods used in the studies but anecdotal information would indicate that they are successful in determining prior knowledge and helping students engage in upcoming lessons as well as organizing information to be learned. (Dell’Olio & Donk, 2007 p.401) (Dean, Hubbell, Pitler, & Stone, 2012 p.51). These are all especially helpful when teaching students who have difficulty with executive function skills that include organizational skills.
I also used my video lesson to demonstrate a cooperative learning segment of a social skills lesson. Students today need to be able to function in a world that requires them to work cooperatively with others. I find it interesting that so many of our technology devices move us away from people but the best work in our large companies are still done as a cooperative group. Cooperative learning is more that group work; there must be interdependence and face-to-face work. This is something that students really need to practice in order to master. (Dean, Hubbell, Pitler, & Stone, 2012, p.36).
Language Arts and Reading are also subjects that I will be teaching and my students will be separated from their peers in that Special Education uses a different curriculum than the General Education core classes. While I applaud this choice and believe that it is in the best interest of the students, it can also be difficult for my students to not be reading the same novels as some of their peers. I developed a QAR lesson to be used in my Reading class to help my students to learn to read non-fiction texts and understand the important information. This lesson is the first in a series of lessons. The goal is to help them eventually ask their own questions and make inquiry without prompting. In the QAR method, answers can come “from the text” or “from my head,” and the “from the text” answers can be further categorized to: right there, and think and search; while the “from my head” answers can be categorized to: author and me, and on my own. These categories help students organize their thinking about the reading and what information they are gleaning from it. (Dell’Olio & Donk, 2007, p. 223).
My belief when I started my ARC program was that direct instruction was the best method of teaching Special Education students because it was the most, well… direct and simple. As I have grown in knowledge, I truly do believe that all children can learn and that the only way that these students will become life-long learners is for them to construct their knowledge. I believe that direct instruction has a place in the classroom, as do other methods of instruction. Many of the constructivist approaches to teaching and learning can be frustrating to students with learning disabilities because they lack some basic coping skills but having caring teachers who believe in them in spite of apparent deficits can do so much for self-esteem. I like the tripod analogy to teaching—content is one leg, pedagogy is another and the third is encouragement. Research has shown that teacher encouragement plays a huge role is student achievement.(Ferguson, 2011) Along with continuing my own professional development, using proven research based methods of teaching, and keeping great data, I plan to be a great cheerleader for my students.
References:
Bruner, J. S., (1966). Some Elements of Discovery: Shulman L. S. and Keislar E. R., editors. Learning By Discovery: A Critical Appraisal (1966).
Center for Stengthening the Teaching Profession, (2012). Retrieved from http://www.cstp-wa.org/sites/default/files/early_career_performance_expectations_2012.pdf
Dean, C. B., Hubbell, E. R., Pitler, H. & Stone, B. (2012). Classroom Instruction That Works: Alexandria, VA, ASCD.
Dell’Olio, J. M., Donk., T., (2007). Models of Teaching,Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage.
Ferguson, R., (2011). Inside the Mystery of Good Teaching: New York Teacher, United Federation of Teachers. https://bbweb-prod.spu.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse
