Building Special Ed Ucation Can You Answer The Qu
Here is week 2 article
http://www.rtinetwork.org/essential/family/schools-familes-and-rti
Resources for week 2
https://nysrti.org/resources/general/p:1/
Please answer the following three questions and then comment on two of the colleagues’ answers. I will enclose their answers.
How would you evaluate and ensure the implementations of these standards? One paragraph
How will you impact the implementation of RTI? One paragraph
Share your experiences addressing the diverse needs of your students ؟ One paragraph
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1-Katie Smith
Monday May 21 at 10:19am
As a special education teacher in a very small school, I have a very wide range of student needs. In our pre-K through 8th grade building, we only have about 30 students with IEPs that remain in district and about 10 students with disabilities in outside placements. With three teachers and two teacher assistants, I feel that we do a good job of addressing the unique needs of all of these students. The special education teachers each co-teach with several teachers to provide as many special education minutes in the classrooms as possible. I really do enjoy co-teaching because it allows us to differentiate all the time in the classroom not only for students with IEPs, but for all students who are struggling or exceling with the general curriculum. We try to incorporate different co-teaching models in the classroom when working with the diverse needs of students such as team teaching, station teaching, parallel teaching, and one teaching, one supporting during instruction. For students with IEPs, I meet their academic needs in the classroom through making modifications to the curriculum and providing support where needed. Then, all of my students come to me for special education study hall at the end of the day where we work on re-teaching and IEP goal work.
This inclusion model is very effective for most students, but scheduling becomes the biggest area of concern. Due to our small size and limited special education personnel, our students with disabilities get grouped together for services by their grade level rather than needs. For example, in one grade level that I work with, there are several students with emotional disabilities, learning disabilities, and Other health impairments. In this particular grade level, each student has extremely unique needs and they all need high level of support in very different areas. However, because there is only one teacher providing services, I co-teach with this grade level and provide support where I can. In a perfect world, several of these students might be better served with direct instruction. All in all, we do what we can with the resources we have and the co-teaching model has proven to be very successful with increasing student data and providing targeted instruction/interventions.
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Tuesday May 22 at 11am
I work in a Second and Third Grade building. As the Math Interventionist, I only see students who are struggling in Math. I work daily with my Tier 3 math students in a small group of 2 or one-on-one. I pull low Tier 2 students two to three times a week. In January, we made a shift from me trying to see all tier 2 to the teacher working with tier 2. This has been very difficult. Our math curriculum does have a built-in time for students to work in Work Places, like centers. This is when the teacher should be working with those that are struggling. The teachers are still having difficulty diagnosing the area that the student is struggling in. The progress monitoring is also not getting done properly. Our new principal is setting up our schedules differently for next year so hopefully more paras will be available to help. I am also working on a record keeping system and data review schedule that will not be too difficult to maintain.
Some of my math students are also ELL students. We have a wonderful ELL teacher who is willing to co-teach and we sometimes work together with a group. I have learned so much from her specially the importance of explicitly teaching the math vocabulary. So many math words are abstract, such as greater/less than, and she has helped me to teach many of these concepts to my students.
This year I had two students move from Tier 3 to Special Education. One was a student who moved into our school at the beginning of the year. We wanted to give this student time to adjust to new curriculum and environment. He is a very hard worker and still could not maintain the very basic skills within Number Sense. Parents reported many academic difficulties in kindergarten and first grade. This student did end up qualifying for both math and reading in special education. The other student came from first grade with an IEP for Reading. While he did well with me, there was not very much transfer in the classroom and he was falling further and further behind. This was also affecting him emotionally. I often see him walking in the hall now and I am so happy to see him smiling and engaging in conversation. The regular ed classroom was just too overwhelming for him.
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Read the case study and explain what action plan will be followed to solve that problem?
3-8. MISUSE OF THE Rtl INITIATIVE (ISLLC STANDARD 6) You are employed by a district that has a designated special education coordinator at each building. This is a low-level administrative position in that the building special ed ucation coordinator meets regularly with the special education faculty and provides di rection and support to them. The special education faculty includes special education classroom teachers in the learning disabilities program, the behavior disorders pro gram, and the emotional disorders program; resource teachers; the school psychologist; the speech pathologist; the occupational therapist; the physical therapist; and the social worker. You are the building special education coordinator, and you report both to the principal in your building as well as to the district special education director. Recently, the district office told all principals that they will have one full-time re source person to facilitate their schools’ Response through Intervention (RtI) initiative. Although the initiative is intended to provide interventions to students who might not qualify for special education services, in some respects it competes with the special ed ucation program. In your role as building special education director, you have the re sponsibility to make sure that the caseloads and assignments of the special education faculty are in compliance with state laws. Recently, some new families have moved into the district and into your school’s attendance area in particular. Each of these families has a child with an IEP, thereby increasing your school’s number of students needing special services. As you review the existing IEPs, you notice that three of the children need speech services. When you notify your building’s speech pathologist, she willingly accepts the additional students on her caseload, but she informs you that these students will put her over the maximum legal number of speech students she can serve. A quick check of the records verifies that the speech pathologist does indeed have a larger caseload than she should have. Knowing that the building has an allocation for one more resource person, you approach the principal asking for a half-time speech pathologist to bring the caseloads back into legal compliance. You are shocked when the principal tells you that he will not use the resource allocation for speech services. He is determined to use the allocation for an intervention specialist. You caution him that his school is out of compliance. His response is completely unethical in your eyes. The principal tells you to re move three students from the speech program, thereby bringing the numbers back into compliance. You explain to him that the children are receiving speech services because they have deficits that negatively impact their learning. They need speech services in order to improve their communication skills and ultimately improve their academic performance in their content areas. You also explain that none of the children currently receiving speech services is ready to be removed from the program. To do so would hin der their learning as well as their self-esteem. These children are self-conscious about their speech, and consequently they don’t communicate with others for fear of being embarrassed. The principal accuses you of being a “bleeding heart” and tells you to remove three students from the speech program. What would you do? Explain, in a bulleted format, your plan of action aligned with ISLLC Standard 6: An education leader promotes the success of every student by understanding, responding to, and influencing the political, social, economic, legal, and cultural context.