Peoples Top Picks is a new initiative that delivers insights on how educators across the country are addressing current hot topics in education.

Monthly Spotlight: Special Education

Teaching students with learning disabilities can be challenging. Working with an individualized education plan can mean rethinking lessons and lesson plans on the fly, or reinventing concepts multiple times for multiple audiences. Randy Pausch said, “The number one goal of teachers should be to help students learn how to learn.” 


Teachervision.com provides a few strategies appropriate for teachers of learning disabled students:

• Provide oral instruction for students with reading disabilities.
• Provide learning disabled students with frequent progress checks. Let them know how well they are progressing toward an individual or class goal.
• Give immediate feedback to learning disabled students. They need to promptly see the relationship between what was taught and what was learned.
• Whenever possible, provide them with concrete objects and events—items they can touch, hear, smell, etc.
• Learning disabled students need and should get lots of specific praise. Instead of just saying, “You did well” or “I like your work,” it is better to provide specific praising comments that link the activity directly with the recognition; for example, “I was particularly pleased by the way in which you organized the rock collection for Karin and Miranda.”
• When necessary, plan to repeat instructions or offer information in both written and verbal formats.
• Encourage cooperative learning activities when possible.

As technology continues to change, so do the tools we have as educators. E-Learning is a fast-growing tool that allows teachers to cater to multiple learning styles within a single classroom, sometimes even with options to customize for individual student needs. Karen Plumley, a writer specializing in parenting and education, discusses a few benefits of e-Learning for teachers of students with special needs on her Web site, karenplumley.suite101.com. “Using e-Learning solutions, teachers of students with special needs can help them learn at their own pace, and they can design lessons that are highly customized to meet their students’ needs. Using e-Learning tools, teachers can also help students with disabilities keep up with their schoolwork if they expect to be homebound. Finally, there are many e-Learning solutions for teachers who wish to further their own understanding of special education.”

Do you have any advice for teachers of students with special needs? What are some tips or strategies you know or use in your classroom? E-mail your thoughts to bnelson@peoplesed.com!

Straight from the Source

Opinion Editorials by a Seasoned Educator
           When families move, there is more at stake than new neighborhoods and jobs. Children are major concerns, even before the first piece of furniture is loaded onto the moving van, especially if the move is to another state, or even another school district within the same state.
         Moving elementary students seems simple, but it is not. Placing a third grader from Georgia in a class in Texas may create a crisis in skills, activities, and friendships. Moreover, when the student is in middle or high school, or proceeding from middle to high school, the first day of classes could open a gate to a maze.
         States often disagree in curricula, scope, and sequence. For example, if an advanced student in eighth grade takes Algebra I and moves to a district offering Algebra I only in high school, the result could be repeating the course, because the new district requires that it be taught only to high school students, by a teacher with high school math credentials. If the entering student is an upperclassman planning AP classes not offered, for example, in a foreign language strand, how does the student culminate the language before graduation? IB diploma candidates starting Extended Essay drafts may hit a wall until an EE adviser is located.
         Activities and electives are all parts of a complete education, because consistently applied talents and interests build social and emotional maturation. Not all schools make those opportunities accessible to newcomers, for example, when the campus lacks sponsors, or when teams have been chosen or officers elected the year before. Being a teenager in a strange school is difficult enough without losing one’s identity and joy.
         There are proactive ways to avoid insurmountable problems and negative reactions to a family’s move. Mobile families can benefit from the protocols initiated by the military posts and nearby school districts all over the United States and overseas, where transition specialists are employed. These knowledgeable, trained people route information on housing near school districts, expedite records, and facilitate communication between sending and receiving schools. In some cases, they are military liaisons to the districts near the posts, but in other cases, districts hire transition counselors and position them on the individual campuses.
 
—Deborah Seigman, retired teacher from Killeen High School, Killeen Independent School District, Texas

At Peoples Education, we continually seek input from educators at all levels to improve our partnership with schools and districts. Your opinion counts! Each month we will reach out to the education community for feedback on a specific topic. We will post what we learn in this newsletter and on our informative Facebook page. 

Join the conversation on Facebook and be heard!

See you next month!

Sincerely,

Peoples Education

View Past Issues