Reality 101: CEC's blog for new teachers

Thank You!

CEC thanks Allisence, Jessica, Richard, and Theresa for a wonderful year of blogging! We have loved getting to know you, your schools, and your students through your posts. Thank you for sharing with us this past year; you will be missed here at Reality 101!

For those Reality 101 readers that have loved reading about our bloggers, don't worry, they won't be gone completely. Here's how you can follow them:

Allisence: on Twitter @allisence or on her blog, http://allisence.wordpress.com/.

Richard: on Twitter @ExceptionallyED or on his blog, http://exceptionallyed.wordpress.com/.

Theresa: on Twitter @MsTheresaQ or on her blog, http://mstheresaq.blogspot.com/. 

 

Jessica: 2012 American Librarians Conference

I recently attended the 2012 American Librarians Association (ALA) Annual Conference. This being my third big conference in one school year, I think I can officially call myself a conference junkie. What can I say, I’m a new teacher and I still have a lot to learn. This conference caters to librarians, but since its overall purpose is to promote the message that reading and having access to resources are important, I attended it.

As a rural district, the local library can be a huge – and free – resource in helping to meet unique student needs. I attended a number of workshops and panels in the educator’s strand, which gave me a number of brainstorming points to consider as I enter my next year of teaching.

Jessica: Budget Woes for Rural Schools

California is currently reviewing possible educational budget cuts and the last few staff meetings of the year included discussions on how we will be tightening the financial belt for the 2012-13 school year.

One thing that upsets me is that our budget seems to be determined by people who know little about the needs of a rural school. For example, our school district, and all the school districts of California, lost their transportation funding halfway through the 2011-2012 school year. Every school needs transportation funding, but a rural school cannot go without it. Rural busing is one of the district’s highest costs because students sometimes live 10-20 miles away from their schools, and putting the cost of gas and driving strain on the parents may literally cost more than rural families can afford.

Jessica: Five Movies for First Year Teachers

Seeing as many of us are beginning summer break, here’s your opportunity to catch up on movies. Chances are you’ve seen these five movies about real people in real schools, and been inspired. Of course, if your first year of teaching isn’t quite like this, don’t fret. Teaching in real life isn’t quite the same as teaching in the movies.

Stand and Deliver (1988)

Real Teaching: You may enter a classroom and discover it is overcrowded, not everyone speaks English, and not everyone has the basic skills necessary to study the subject matter you are teaching them.

Jessica: Go With the Flow

Last week, due to the number of overnight field trips taking place (science camp and 8th grade graduation trip), I wound up subbing with third, fourth, and seventh graders.  At a small rural school, it’s sometimes hard to hire substitute teachers, and it’s also hard to be the substitute teacher at our school, particularly when it’s close to the end of the year and the students are restless. I willingly agreed, and even thought myself prepared.

All the students had research to do on their countries that they will be presenting for International Night this coming Thursday. Third and fourth graders had France; seventh had Egypt.

Jessica: Fun with Word Clouds

Are you familiar with word clouds?

The easiest way to describe word clouds is to call them collages made with words. The fun part is that you get to decide on the words. When I was a kid, I used to cut words and pictures out of magazines to create collages that described me. This was a common art project used as an icebreaker to help get kids talking about themselves. Word clouds generated through websites offer a 21st century twist.

Jessica: Maurice Sendak—An Obituary in Book Recommendations

I just read about the death of Maurice Sendak, and felt that all-too-familiar twinge of sadness as I let go of yet another piece of my childhood. For many — including myself, my husband, and now my children — an oft-selected story for bedtime is Where the Wild Things Are. The book is a classic tribute to the wondrousness of a child’s imagination and the power of beautiful illustrations. Besides making the bedtime ritual in my household transition with ease, Sendak gave me a number of fun classroom moments as well.

Enjoy reviewing all of his titles, but here are three of my personal choices of Sendak books for use in the classroom. All three are Accelerated Reader (AR) books worth .5 points, and their AR book level is included below:

Jessica: Social Skills—Then and Now

While at the CEC Conference & Expo, I attended the Sunshine State Social, which was a party for CEC members from California and Florida. While I’m a California girl now, I grew up in Florida, so this social felt like it was made just for me.* Among the people I met at the social were representatives from Talent Assessment, a reading curriculum researcher, a SELPA director, and a couple CEC chapter heads. We talked about the paths that led to our job choices and our experiences within the field. Overall, it wound up a highly entertaining evening that ended with making new professional acquaintances. In short, I networked.

Jessica: Connections from Denver to the Classroom

I’m here in Denver right now, enjoying the CEC 2012 Convention & Expo, endeavoring to explore the vast, wild world of special education.

*Tip for attendees: use mini post-its to mark off the pages in your program with your desired sessions, and write the times on the post-its.

As a side note, I am also enjoying the metropolitan sights offered by downtown Denver, where I last set foot in 1993. A highlight of my stroll down the 16^th Street Pedestrian Mall was seeing a man on stilts dressed as Superman run down the sidewalk while a random passerby shouted, “Up, up, and away!” Ah, the city—my old friend.

Jessica: Can We Really Save Them All?

While still working on my credential, I observed a teacher who reserves a space in her classroom for the students who don’t want to learn. Students can choose to sit in the back of the room and joke around quietly with each other rather than waste her time and take away from the students who actually do want to learn. After she installed that routine in her classroom, she noted a remarkable leap in productive instructional time. The students who wanted to learn improved by leaps and bounds as compared to when she tried to teach them alongside unwilling participants. At the time, I was horrified by her plan and wrote my assigned reflection on just that thought: horrified that someone would give up on kids. Here’s a quick quip from that reflection: “If I am to succeed in Special Ed, I have to believe that there should be better expectations than the simple one of ‘be quiet while I teach the others.’”

Jessica: Teamwork Strikes Back

In my past two posts, I’ve written about the importance of teamwork and a common IEP team scenario wherein the parents and school district fail to reach agreement on how to address the needs of a child. In the grand spirit of Star Wars, I am going for a trilogy of teamwork-related posts.

This post focuses on when the general education teacher and specialist (you) fail to agree on accommodations and modifications. Unless you’re Darth Vader with the full backing of the Dark Side, you’re going to have to learn how to reach an accord with colleagues.

Jessica: When Teamwork Goes Wrong, Part I

In my previous post, I stressed the importance of teamwork and emphasized how an individual’s needs cannot truly be met without a successful team. A commenter posted the following question: what happens when the team doesn’t agree? I don’t know about you, but if I had a single, definitive answer to this question, my life would be a whole lot easier. In this post and my next one, I will address what I consider the two most common obstacles to achieving team consensus and action:

• The parents do not agree with the recommended services.
• The general educator does not agree with the specialist’s recommendations regarding accommodations and modifications.

Jessica: A Team Effort

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard, read, or said it: the “I” in IEP stands for individualized. Indeed, the goal of special education is to come together as a team to create an appropriate learning environment that meets the individualized needs of our exceptional students. In a larger sense, the aim of all education is to recognize every student’s needs and differentiate within the classroom to see to it that all their individual needs are met.

Hmmm. Everybody say it with me, “Easier said than done.”

Let me explain my work environment:

Jessica: From Conference to Classroom

As I noted in my previous post, I attended the California League of School’s Technology & RTI Conference. I will also be attending the CEC Conference this coming April. Which brings me to a point: I like conferences. Why? I like interacting with like-minded people who aren’t my everyday comrades in arms. When you teach at a rural school, you know everyone’s life story, as in every student in my district’s entire <100 student population. It’s like I go to work every day and it’s a great big family reunion: this makes it much harder to be objective about lesson planning and teaching technique. Attending conferences is my outlet to find out how other educators are getting by in the classroom, educators who know nothing at all about my students.

Jessica: Changing Her Luddite Ways

This past weekend, I attended the California League of Schools (CLS) Technology & RTI Conference. The opening speaker was Will Richardson. His inspiring message challenged all teachers to become students again. He referenced a rather fabulous quote by Alvin Toffler: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, relearn.”

Richardson opened with two stories, the first about his daughter’s history exam questions on the middle ages and the second, about a young man who had created a name for himself as a cinematographer. The latter was essentially self-taught, having learned all he needed to know about video editing through online communities. These people represent two kinds of learners - those learning what they are told to learn and those learning what they love to learn.

Jessica: Making Every Minute Count

Just because I’m still on winter break doesn’t mean I’m not planning things for the upcoming weeks. I find it ironic that some of my favorite days at school are the days when there are no students, though I use this time to organize my room and prepare it for their return. Being a fairly new teacher, I’m also still learning about what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to classroom organization.

For example, you know what doesn’t work in my classroom? My current pencil system. To all of you veteran teachers out there, feel free to have a good laugh at me right now because I’m on the losing side of the battle between me… and my classroom pencils. It’s like this: from August to December, several students would daily break their pencils and walk to the pencil sharpener, at which point the situation dramatically worsened because if more than one person was in line, they would talk, and if they waited in their seats, they would only be paying attention to when they could get up to use the sharpener. Lest we think the problem ended when the bell rang, the number of students who left my classroom with my pencil diminished the number of pencils for use the next day.  

Jessica: Recipe for Learning

As we creep towards winter break, I have begun calling family and friends who I will be seeing on my days off. Several of my friends were in the process of buying ingredients for, or making cookies for, holiday cookie parties when I called. In case you haven’t been to one, a cookie party is where everyone brings a several dozen homemade cookies to a party. At the party, you taste everyone else’s cookies, and then you leave with a handful of new cookies, as well as new recipes to try out. I love these parties, but regrettably, I wasn’t invited to any holiday cookie parties this year. It’s not a big deal, though, because I’ve been waaaaay busier this year than in previous Decembers.

In addition to my regular job duties, I am the director for the winter program. For the past several weeks, I’ve been working with the entire student body on reading lines, singing songs, and making crafts and costumes for a winter program involving forest animals explaining the meaning of Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. As I near performance night, I know there will be mistakes. The sound system may produce ugly feedback. Students may exit to the wrong side. Someone will probably forget their lines. But it is what it is. I have reached the point where I have fixed what I can and accept what I cannot fix.

Jessica: Where It's AT

Have any of you seen the movie Soul Surfer? It’s the true story of a surfer whose arm was bitten off by a shark and despite this loss of limb, she made it back into the professional surfing circuit. I was mesmerized by this movie. One of my favorite moments in this movie, I must admit, was when the girl’s father adapted her surfboard by adding a handle to the center so she could duck dive with one arm. When he revealed it, I said to my husband, “That’s assistive technology.”

Assistive technology (AT) is a growing source of interest to me. It started with this amazing video I watched about the many AT devices used by Richard Devylder, a man who has lived his whole life without arms or legs. It really showed me how people with even the most seemingly unconquerable disabilities can achieve success and independence in life. Then, last February, I attended the California Association for Resource Specialists’ annual conference. It was the first time I’d attended a special educator conference, and it made for a great first experience.

Jessica: From Hopeless to Hopeful

That feeling of being overwhelmed is a recurring theme with my fellow bloggers, and I am compelled to throw my hat in the ring.

Here’s the deal: No matter what I do, I wish I could do more.

I work with my students, both individuals and small groups, all day long in varying push-in and pull-out sessions of 30 to 80 minutes. I hope I’m helping them, yet I always have that feeling in the pit of my stomach when the words “OK! I’ll see you tomorrow!” escape my lips. It’s that feeling that tells me, Gosh, I wish I had more time with them.

Jessica: The Other Side of the IEP Table

I hope I’m not late . . .
I hope I am dressed okay . . .
I hope I don’t say anything stupid . . .

This was me. Going to my first IEP. I was curious, hopeful, nervous.

First, introductions were made. Then, presentation of reports. I was very impressed with how in-depth the speech and language specialist’s and school psychologist’s reports were. I was probably thinking something like. Wow, they did a lot of tests . . . hey, that test has the word Hawaii in it . . . too bad we couldn’t have done the test in Hawaii. . . .

Sounds like I knew what I was doing, huh? In reality, I didn’t even know what “IEP” meant. I didn’t know about procedural safeguards or timelines, either. I only knew that everybody at the table was there to talk about my son.

Jessica: Have You Hugged Your SELPA Contact Today?

Every county (in California, at least) has at least one Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA). This group is collectively my one-stop-shopping experience for all things special ed. In fact, my SELPA regional contact is the person who first told me about the Council for Exceptional Children, so you know they’re awesome! During the last two school years, I attended trainings in specific curriculums and effective instructional strategies, IEP writing, and assessment administration — and they were all FREE.

Recently, my SELPA held its annual special education orientation to kick off the school year. While the target group is special educators, any educators within the SELPA were invited to attend. It included a presentation on how the different divisions within SELPA work together to make sure we are providing appropriate services to our students with exceptionalities, as well as a reminder about our new IEP forms and the Student Study Team process.

Jessica: Conflicts and Conflict Resolution

Tell me if you’ve ever experienced something like this:

Student: Teacher, Guy called me stupid.
Guy: Only because Student said I was a jerk.
Student: But he took my lunch spot.
Guy: I got to the table first.
Student: No, I got to it first.
Guy: No, I did!

(a quick glance at the lunchroom shows a good 20 empty seats)

Name-calling and petty arguments are the types of conflicts that most commonly occur at my school, and they are difficult for a third party such as myself to resolve. This is because of emotional investment.

Jessica: Hot Fun in the Summertime

I have two schools. First, there’s my working school. As the name suggests, it is the school where I work. It gives me paychecks and fun lunchtime conversations. I get a nice summer break from this working school.

Then, there’s my other school, the one I attend. I just finished the last of my credential courses and am now working on my master’s. This schooling sometimes feels like it will never end, which means that on good days I fancy myself the perpetual student, and on other days I call myself a glutton for punishment.

I’m entering my second summer in a row when I haven’t been truly “off” from school, due to textbook-reading and paper-writing assignments. This summer, I have the added pressure pleasure of these lovely, looming words: literature review.