What I Learned this Week: Special Education

Sarah Wilde

McKay Student Ambassador

Special Education (Severe/Profound Disabilities Emphasis)

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We are nearing the end of the semester, but things are not slowing down in the special education department! We are starting all our final projects and still getting our regular amounts of homework on top of it. This semester, I am in the fall block of practicum classes. Twice a week we are on campus, and twice a week we are in our elementary practicum settings. I like this structure because we get to apply what we are learning on Tuesday and Thursday on Monday and Wednesday! It also means we don't have classes on Friday, which is always a bonus. What are we learning in our classes? Let's get into it!

CPSE 420: Assessment and Evaluation

The last few weeks in my Assessments Class, we have been going over different types of standardized tests that are available to test our students with. For each assessment, we have discussed who can administer the test, who is eligible to take the test, what the test is designed to measure, and the pros and cons of the test. By the time we are done, we will have a collection of documents about these assessments to look back on when trying to select a test in the future. That's one thing I have loved about my classes this semester: my professors are constantly giving us resources to keep for future reference in our

careers!

CPSE 453: Explicit Instruction

In my Explicit Instruction class, we have mainly been learning how to write and teach explicit instruction lesson plans. Explicit instruction is when you explicitly show the student how to complete the task and make sure they know how to complete it themselves before completing it themselves. We use a lot of explicit instruction in Special Education!

This week, we have taken a step back and written a basic skeleton of a whole unit's worth of lesson plans! We started with what we wanted the students to know by the end of the year, broke the year up into units, and broke one of the units into lessons. Now, each person in the group is taking one lesson and making a more detailed lesson plan. When we are done, we will present our lesson plans to the class as our final projects! Wish us luck!

CPSE 443: Behavior Strategies

Because we already know a lot about Applied Behavior Analysis from past classes, we have been able to go more in-depth into behavior interventions in my behavior class this semester. We recently talked about teaching social skills. A lot of the time when students are acting out, they don't know what they are supposed to be doing instead! We often assume that social skills are inherently learned, but that is not the case. We learned how to structure a lesson plan for teaching social skills, how to go about teaching social skills, and why it is important to do so.

CPSE 425: Literacy

My Literacy Class's sole purpose is to prepare us to take the Foundations of Reading Assessment (FRA). We are required to take the FRA to obtain our teaching license. The interesting thing is that the test is written for teaching general education students, yet special education teachers are required to take the test too! This means that we have to learn strategies for teaching in a general education class for test purposes and strategies for teaching in a special education class for our career. This week, we are taking a practice FRA in class! This should take us about 3 hours. The real test, which includes multiple choice questions and short responses, takes 4 hours! Next semester, we will have another literacy class. The first half of the semester will be more test prep, and the second half will be when we finally learn to apply what we are learning to our future classrooms.

CPSE 467: Elementary Practicum

This week in my Elementary Practicum setting where I am teaching 3-6 graders, I learned more about going with the flow. There are some issues happening within our school that takes our mentor teacher out of the classroom a lot. While we do have substitutes and paras in our room, my mentor teacher is taking the opportunity to let my partner and I teach more. Sometimes we don't have lesson plans; she just gives us a topic and some supplies and leaves. It has been difficult yet fun to put our knowledge of teaching to the test. It's also been great for developing our skills of adapting to the moment!

Like I said, things are not slowing down in Special Education! If anything, they are speeding up! As a bonus, here's another thing I've learned this week: My professors LOVE the holidays! I have lost count of how many Christmas parties my professors are throwing, inside and outside of class. It's great for cohort bonding, and it helps us get to know our faculty. Special Education is a fantastic major!

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