Sunil Santoni-de-Reddy
May 2007
Addressing the Special Needs of Students
Vignette:
I distribute the daily quizzes as I usually do just after fifteen minutes of class has elapsed. The students in the room, all six of them, release familiar groans because they feel as though they are going to fail the quizzes. I scoff at them, reminding them that their class quiz average thus far into my student teaching with them is a 90%.
“You guys are pros at these things,” I say as enthusiastically and as corny as possible.
“All teachers say that just to make us feel better about taking their tests,” one of my most cynical students in the room responds.
After the room becomes silent, brilliant math minds at work, I notice that Sam is not working on his quiz.
“What’s wrong, Sam? Why aren’t you working on your quiz?”
“Can’t I just work on it upstairs later?” Sam whines.
“Let’s see how much we can get through right now and then you can always take it upstairs to finish,” I say, agitated that some of my students do not put trust in their own ability.
After I walk around the desks of the other five students in the room and decide they don’t need me lurking over the work they are doing I move myself back to Sam to see how I can assist him through the quiz appropriately. Having worked with Mrs. Michaels, the Resource Room teacher who pushes-in to our classroom every other day, I know that Sam can do the work he is given but often needs a lot more time and needs someone to motivate him to begin. I grab a chair and pull it up to his desk as she always does so that he knows he has a support. While I always hope Sam will one day become internally motivated to begin on his own, I am not at a point where I can judge any of my students, especially students who have special needs like Sam.
“Read the instructions for the first problem to me and then tell me what you could do to start your solution,” I say to Sam, knowing that often he has trouble breaking down the problem and figuring out the most important information to use in order to begin.
Having read the instructions out loud to me, Sam decides that drawing a picture will help him figure things out. I experience a brief moment of accomplishment and visualize myself getting a pat on the back because for some time into our units involving shapes and angles I have been reasserting to the class that drawing a picture and labeling things that we know will help us figure out what we do not know. Sam draws his picture incorrectly but this is why I’m sitting next to him. Without drawing the correct picture for him I ask if how he’s labeled the vertices gives him the consecutive sides that he needs. He thinks about it for a moment and thinks his picture is still ok. I then ask him to tell me what the sides are in his figure and when he does so he realizes his mistake. I praise him when he erases two of the labeled vertices and switches them.
“Now, what’s the equation we will need in order to solve for x?”
Having gotten my prompt, and using his own intellect, Sam was able to finish his quiz and ultimately received a perfect score on it. While I will be happy to show him his score and hope it will serve as proof that he can do well on his own and utilize the time he’s given appropriately, I must be honest and admit that I have a long way to go before I get Sam to believe in himself and suppress whatever voices have told him that he’s stupid or that he can’t do anything without a professional aide holding his hand through each step of the problem set before him.
In any classroom there will inevitably be a large list of special needs that must be addressed by the instructor to ensure that each child in the learning environment has access to an equal educational opportunity as their peers. While there may be a formal set of suggested teaching strategies laid out for the teacher or required measures that a teacher must take, adhering to the Individual Education Plan of a student with special needs, for example, it is also true that non-classified students have learning needs that the teacher must be sensitive to when planning, teaching, and assessing what will be taught and how it will be taught.
There are some simple things that a teacher can do to meet a student’s learning needs. For example, throughout this past semester in each of the six classes I taught there were students for whom assigned seating was not a punishment but rather a necessity. I had to always make sure that a few of my students were sitting in the front row because seating them anywhere else would inhibit their learning during the seventy seven minute math period. There were two groups of students that I am speaking of—students who had to sit in the front because they needed to be front and center to see the chalkboard or Smart Board to take efficient notes, and other students who had to sit in the front because their inappropriate behavioral conduct in class made them a distracter to other students trying to learn; sitting these “behavioral problem students” in the front of the class allowed me to better control their disruptive acts. For the latter group of students, moving their seats to the front of the room was usually not received well at first but ultimately not only were other students less bothered during a lesson, but the moved student, with time, became more attentive in class and more willing to participate.
Besides constantly updating a classroom seating chart in order to give all students an opportunity to sit towards the front of the room or to sit away from bothersome peers, a teacher can also address the special needs of his or her students by diversifying their modes of instruction. Some students are better visual or auditory learners and so it is important to explain the lessons out loud in addition to having pictures or important information displayed on the board. I learned this semester that it is important to also frequently distribute handouts, reference sheets, or worksheets that the students can keep in their binders to organize the material being taught from a given unit. While some students are able to take very detailed class notes, other students who have a more difficult time identifying the most important information conveyed during a class period benefit from having the teacher create graphic organizers for them or other content maps that the students can fill out as the lesson is being taught.
It is also important that the teacher pays close attention to how much time he or she is spending in lecture with the students. Especially in a block scheduled orientation, class can become very boring and not engaging for students who are being expected to sit quietly and with full attention on the teacher presenting new information. The use of games such as jeopardy, the Classroom Performance System (CPS), math relays, and group puzzles helps break up the monotony of the standard classroom lecture. A deep knowledge of learners and learning is also important in this context because not all students will be excited to play jeopardy, for example. I had one student in my first placement who did not respond well to the activity, although she had fun, because the pace of the activity was too quick for her. This student needed more time to develop her solutions to the questions being asked and so the jeopardy game was too much of a high-pressure situation for her. Learning this, I understood some of this student’s needs and in the future I planned out activities that were slower in nature which allowed teams or individuals to work independently for an extended period of time before being required to share their answers or present material. Finding the balance is important for any teacher because it will be the case that some students in the room will learn best if given more thought-time whereas others need the fast-paced jeopardy to stimulate their minds and promote an excitement of learning.
Next, there are some students with special needs who need to be challenged by the teacher directly. Ideally, in the classroom each student would want to contribute, want to volunteer an answer or put their solution to a math problem on the board and discuss how they arrived at their answer. However, there are some students who do not have a strong internal motivation to stand up in front of their peers and try to solve a problem. For some of the latter population of students standing in front of the class stirs within them a deep anxiety and a teacher needs to be sensitive to this and not pick on these students by forcing them to do something that would make them uncomfortable. There are many other students who simply do not volunteer even though they do not feel stress when presenting information to the class. I had one student in particular who really enjoyed putting his answers on the board and talking the class through his solution despite never volunteering when I asked the class for a participant. I learned that in order for some students to participate or engage with the material it is sometimes necessary to “call out” the student, so to speak, not allowing them to get lost in the shadows or sit passively in their seat doodling or daydreaming.
The Academic Intervention Service (AIS) at Stockbridge Valley Central School is approximately a thirty minute period on alternating days of the week where students who have been identified as needing extra help in a subject go to their designated rooms to receive more individualized instruction from the teacher. Most of the AIS students I worked with at SVCS were either placed in AIS because they had failed a class or state exam once or more times or because they were not performing at an expected level in their current math class and were at risk of failing the course. I think the idea of the AIS period is a good one since I found it was very difficult to meet with students on a one-on-one basis or even in smaller groups during the regular class period when there are twenty other students who also demanded attention from me. Since many students work after school or are required to go home, it was hard to get students who were struggling with the material meet with me privately during the semester and instead I had students who did not need as much assistance using up that extra time. In twenty minutes the teacher is able to circulate the room easier and meet with students individually to assist them with whatever is their area of weakness with a given problem or lesson, and as such I think AIS is a great resource. Although it is unfortunate that AIS students get labeled “stupid,” they are at least getting more support and hopefully utilizing this time appropriately.
It is my opinion that the time allotted for AIS is too short at SVCS and takes place at an inconvenient time, if taking on a student’s perspective. The AIS time overlaps with lunch and so most of the students who are required to be in AIS do not want to be there while their friends are already socializing in the cafeteria. Additionally, by the time the students enter the room and start to focus on the work at hand, the thirty minute period gets shortened to twenty minutes. My only other criticism of the period is that it is too short. I think most of the students I worked with in AIS needed more than twenty minutes; it seemed as though just when we started to immerse ourselves in the material the second lunch bell would ring and the students would jump up to leave—either that or other students would enter the room for help and not be turned away despite not being in AIS. Students who are classified are given concentrated Resource Room time and I believe that students with special needs who may not have an IEP because they have not been classified still deserve more than what I consider to be a “warm-up” period.
I think the most important thing to consider when thinking about students who are classified with special needs is the special education teacher, also known as the Resource Room instructor. It was very comforting to enter SVCS and see how dedicated the Resource Room teachers are to their students: they serve as instructors, advocates, and second parents to the students on their respective caseloads. The partnership between the general instructor and the Resource Room teacher was very strong, from what I observed. The Recourse Room teacher, who I will call Mrs. Michaels, conferenced with me towards the beginning of my teaching at SVCS to let me know what the areas of weakness were for each child she worked closely with so that I would be prepared to help them learn better. I found out from her whom I should encourage to do problems at the board, or who needed a more direct presence by their desk in case they got lost on their own, or who needed everything to be written out for them or help with organizing their materials.
Mrs. Michaels knows when her students do not fully understand the lesson and in those moments she steps in to put things in other words or in another perspective that she knows might help her students better. It was a great support having Mrs. Michaels as well as my cooperating teacher in the room during first period because it meant there were three teachers in the room who could offer more individualized instruction to smaller groups, thereby making sure everyone was getting the attention they deserved. Mrs. Michaels always made sure to get each week’s assignments from me on Monday morning so that during her one-on-one time with the students she would be kept abreast to what we were currently working on or what was next on the list in case she was able to preview some material with the children.
While I believe there are many benefits to having the Resource Room teacher push into the classroom as opposed to the alternative pull-out system, and although the support these teachers provide I find remarkable and appreciate the extra help, there were times when I questioned whether or not the Resource Room teacher should be as invested as they seem to be at SVCS. I noticed very quickly into my student teaching that the classified students in the room sat in the back and did not feel they had to participate until their Resource Room teacher came in to offer more direct attention. During quizzes or exams, to cite another example, the students have gotten into the habit of writing a big “R” on the top of the page and circling it to denote that the paper should be sent to the Resource Room. While I understand that if a student needs more time on an exam or needs more concentrated help on an exam than I can offer, then the papers should be sent to Resource, but I do not believe it is acceptable for the student to do no work and simply slap a big “R” on the page. I always encouraged the students to try the problems on the page but usually the reaction I got or statements made to me were “Can’t I just work on it upstairs?” This type of statement I see as representing the system at place as hand-holding. The students have come to believe that they can’t do anything on their own or without the supervision of their Resource Room teacher. Thus, while I believe their special needs are met for the most part, I wonder if an injustice is done to these students as well for getting a message that they are not expected to perform singularly or at least make an attempt.