Interview with a General Education Teacher with Special Needs Students (Grades 6-12)
Title: General Education Teacher (Seventh Grade)
District: Los Angeles Unified School District
Disabilities served in classroom: Asperger's Syndrome, Mild Mental Retardation
Classification of the classroom: Mild/Moderate
Languages Spoken by Students: English, Spanish and Korean
Cultures Represented in Classroom: Caucasian, Latino and Asian
1. The assessment tools I use to prepare the IEPs are the School Function Assessments and the Sensory Profile. With the School Function Assessment, all the members on the IEP team such as the general education teacher, the special education teacher, occupation therapist, speech therapist and adaptive P. E. teacher observe the student and provide an assessment of the student's performance in a specific area. The Sensory Profile is obtained from the student's parents to identify sensory processing difficulties that may interfere with the functioning in school.
2. The most successful instructional programs to use with special education students are as follows:
For English? Classroom Language Arts Program and the Reading Recovery Program
For Mathematics? Smallgroup Constructivist Mathematics Instruction Program and Classwide Peer Tutoring Program
For Social Sciences? Strategy-based Peer Tutoring Program
For prevocational or career education? N/A
3. For me, the greatest challenge is to accommodate the needs of the special need students in the classroom, especially when they are unable to keep up with the rest of the class. At the secondary level, the students are expected to acquire so much content knowledge in a wide variety of subjects. Furthermore, the students with special needs also lack the basic skills for organizing course materials, taking notes and listening attentively. The pace of the presentation of the content is also hard for these students.
4. If not fo...