Field Experience Presentation

Overview

Over the course of 3 separate observations, I was able to gain extremely valuable firsthand experience of a special education classroom. Ms. Collins, the teacher I observed, has an extremely helpful, caring, inclusive, gentle, and hands-on approach when it comes to her students' learning. I found myself looking forward to my observations every week, as her classroom feels like a much-needed break from the usual hustle and bustle of teaching elementary school art (my current job).

Classroom

Environment

- Calm, welcoming environment

- Classroom is limited to 6-8 students at a time, never feels cluttered with people - enables every student to recieve help and attention

- Clean, organized, no unecessary visual

distractions

- Desk seating for students arranged in a "U" shape; observed to be conducive to a collaborative environment

Observation 1 (2-1-2024)

Observation 1

Students are shown a photo of two children covering their eyes and smiling. The group discussion centers around gathering context clues from the image and formulating a story from it.

Questions asked: Do you think they are friends or siblings? Why are they hiding their eyes? Where are they? The students make connections that branch out into short, guided discussion with the teacher. At the end of the lesson the class formulates and writes a sentence together describing the story they came up with for the image.

Observation 2

(2-15-2024)

Observation 2

In this session, some students are finishing a math assessment as well as working on their laptops using a program called Lexia, which includes reading-based learning games. Ms. Collins also breaks students into small groups to complete a group reading activity.

Students take turns reading different sentences, along with the teacher who helps them through the short story sentence by sentence. The students are quite proficient for the most part, reading through each word slowly and needing some coaching with certain words.

“What is the setting of the story?” “Who are the characters?” Students then answer the rest of the questions on the reading assessment on their own, with Ms. Collins assisting when needed using a scaffolded approach.

Observation 3 (2-21-2024)

Observation 3

For this lesson, students all sit on the carpet, on the smartboard, students are shown letters that make a certain sound and practice saying words that include those letters along with the teacher. “Ph” makes an “F” sound, students say “phone” together, come up with various words that include the specific letter combination, distiguishing between the amount of letter sounds in a word and the amount of syllables. This then transitions into a spelling activity, in which students return to desk and use erasable markers to write a word on the desk. Ms. Collins calls out the word and students will have time to write it.

Students are then challenged to change one letter in the word to turn it into a different word stated by the teacher.

Next a whiteboard game is played in which students pass the board to each other, each of them taking turns writing the next letter of the word being spelled. With this lesson, spelling becomes a fun, interactive team exercise.

Making Connections/Conclusion

Ms. Collins does a fantastic job in her special education class of making her students all have equal opportunity to learn and participate in each lesson. She maintains high expectations with her students, never treating them as if they are lesser than or patronizing them - she instead guides them to the answers, ensuring the students do most of the work themselves. This scaffolded teaching style helps to promote self-sufficiency in students, which has become more and more prominent of an issue with students in recent years. The environment is non-restrictive, it is clean and organized with minimal visual distractions around the classroom. Overall it is clear that Ms. Collins is an experienced professional who utilizes research-based teaching practices in her special education classroom. These observations have helped me to grow immensely as an educator and have inspired me to use some of these practices in my own teaching in the future.