Special Education, Talented & Gifted

Special Education
For this portion of my coursework, I spent some time meeting with Toby McQuire, a special education coordinator in the Forest Grove school district. Toby was kind enough to walk me through the steps for securing special education services for a student from the perspective of my future role, as a general education teacher. Based on the discussion I had with Toby, I realized how important it is for teachers to be vigilant when it comes to assessing the needs of a particular student. I learned about the entire Sped process from pre-referral to the difference between specially designed instruction, accommodation, and modification. I feel that teachers in training, or those without years of experience, are at risk for being unprepared to teach, or unwillingly neglecting, students who require special education services. I am grateful that services are available to all students, but also that a supporting network of IEP specialists are available for general education teachers.

From my previous classroom experiences and the conversations I've had with Toby and my fellow classmates, I think that I have a solid foundation for identifying when a particular student will require special education services. In addition to my experiences and conversations, I think my teaching philosophy that each student is an individual person that learns and behaves in their own unique ways facilitates my understanding of what strategies best help a student learn. A large part of this perspective stems from addressing the needs of ESL students. I've found that many parallels exist between providing instruction for students who require special education services and those with limited English proficiency. Therefore, my mentality as an ESL educator is frequently in-tune with best practices that help special education students.  Developing strategies that create authentic learning experiences for students is not mutually exclusive to one type or group of students.  I find that I am comfortable with thinking about how I will identify and accommodate students with special needs as I learn more about ESL education, and vice-versa.

However, I do believe that behavior related issues resulting in Sped services for a particular student is an area where I am lacking experience. I hope to have an opportunity to observe or discuss an IEP for this type of service at some time before my teaching practice begins.  As I stated previously, I feel confident in my ability to identify special needs and adapt content and/or instruction, but managing behavior related special needs is an area where I'd like to gain more knowledge.

Talented & Gifted
Working with students explicitly labeled as Talented & Gifted is an area where I have nearly no experience to date.  I did spend time in a "gifted" program of sorts as an elementary student, but my memory of that is limited now.  With some research, I found the Kingore Observation Inventory and subsequent publishings to be wonderfully useful in identifying and working with TAG students.  I firmly believe in the necessity of differentiating instruction and authentic learning for all students, so I was excited to read about strategies for applying those strategies to enriching education for TAG students.

As I stated previously, I have no experience teaching students whom I've known to be labeled as "talented" or "gifted", but I have worked with a lot of very intelligent students in South Korea who I believe would certainly qualify for TAG services in the U.S.  The learning characteristics of those students were often quite similar regardless of their overall personality.  They would frequently finish their assignments thoroughly well before their peers, and would often express themselves or their ideas with diverse language or perspective more frequently.  Even though it was sometimes a challenge to engage these students and get them excited about learning more English, I found that they were my favorite students to engage in conversation.  These students put in a lot of effort to learn English, but they also really enjoyed talking about subjects or events unrelated to English at an intellectual level well beyond their own age.

One thing I occasionally tried in my classroom in South Korea was writing in cursive script instead of block print on the whiteboard during a lesson.  I used this a few times with my more advanced or older students when I felt that the material I had been provided with to teach was not engaging them well enough.  I found that most students had no experience decoding and reading English in a cursive writing format, and I found it fascinating to observe which students were better at learning and adapting to the new letter characters.  More often than not, the students who I perceived to be intellectually gifted were the ones who picked up reading cursive writing the quickest.  However, other students who I had heard were excellent in other subjects such as Math struggled a bit more to learn some of the different letter characters, but inevitably they would develop some sort of learning tool for themselves that helped them identify the entire English alphabet in cursive after a few of my experimental lessons.  I strongly believe that this type differentiated instruction, even though I didn't realize that was what I was doing, was extremely beneficial for some of my students.

What I took away from the experience is that many students who are perceived to be intellectually gifted are often self-starters.  Yet, they can become bored very easily when the teaching material or subject content is too easy or repetitive for them.  Experiences like the one I described are a huge reason why I strive to find multiple means of engagement when teaching students, and also because it can provide indicators that may suggest a student has unique talents or gifts in the classroom.