Special Needs Professional Observation Reflection

Carmen and I had already planned to observe in the EC teacher's classroom, so we decided to take advantage of the opportunity and keep our observation date. We observed a very interesting type of classroom. The school has two kinds of pull out for students with special needs. Students that have more special needs are pulled out of their regular classrooms for reading, writing, and math to work with the EC teacher. Students whose needs aren't as great are pulled out of their regular classroom into an inclusion classroom. This means that the teacher for this group pulls out typically developing students as well as students who need that extra help. The idea is to keep the students included in the classroom while also giving them more opportunity for individual attention.

When we observed this inclusion classroom, the teacher was working with a group of 8 fourth graders. She divided them into two groups. One worked with her on guided reading while the other did independent reading. She explained to us that the groups were a mix of EC students, ELL's, and typically developing students. She gave us the break down of each group before the students entered the room. Carmen and I talked about it afterward and realized that neither of us had any idea which students were the EC students. We had tried to narrow it down by picking out the obvious ELL's and then trying to determine between the typically developing and the EC students. That is what is really beneficial about this inclusion classroom because, though it may be a little more obvious to the students than they seemed to register, they all worked together as if they were working on the same level.
The teacher noted that she is having to balance several different reading levels with this group of students since their learning process are at such different stages of development. I would guess that she has to work even harder to differentiate the curriculum than their regular classroom teachers. I saw several techniques of differentiating that she used while we were there, and they were done in a way that none of the students really noticed that they were working on different levels. She began the guided reading working with the whole table, but then she had the students keep reading from the book while she turned her chair to each one to ask them to read aloud with her. Each student had something different they needed to work on to improve their reading. One boy was struggling with fluidity and timing when reading aloud, so she pulled out a piece of white paper and had him cover the lines he was not reading at that moment so he could focus just on the line he was reading. This helped him a lot. She also had him read it again and again until he could read it confidently. Another thing I noticed with this particular student was that she never told him when he did something wrong. He read "said he" as "he said," and she actually told him that it was ok for him to read it incorrectly as long as it didn't change the meaning. I thought this was a great tactic for helping to build his confidence and teaching him that we don't have to read perfectly to be great readers.

A few challenges I could see for this classroom would mostly deal with classroom management. The students come into the room at different times depending on when their classroom teachers have finished a lesson and can send them. This makes it difficult for the teacher to start the lesson on time and to make sure all of the kids are receiving the same instruction. Also, there is a different system of behavior management. If the students are only spending 45minutes to an hour in this room three times a week, it could be difficult for them to see any correlation between the behavior management here and the behavior management in their regular classroom. This could be especially difficult for students with BED or ADHD as a lot of their learning depends heavily on the behavioral management plan of the teachers. This would be something the classroom teachers and the pull out teacher would really need to work together to figure out.

Overall, I think that what I gained from this experience was a better understanding of how to use inclusion in my classroom. It seems like such a daunting task to include students of different abilities, and we are only exposed to readings and other peoples experiences to try to teach us how to do it. We need to see inclusion being done well and really experience it for ourselves to be able to begin to understand how to plan for it in our own classes. I think that is what made this a meaningful experience for me, and I am glad I decided to observe the class even though the assignment was changed.