Menu
Hello all! This is my first attempt at a blog and my first blog post, so please bear with me as I learn! My name is Taylor Howard and I am a kindergarten through fifth grade special education teacher at Mitchellville Elementary in the Southeast Polk School District. Mitchellville is a small town about fifteen minutes away from the capitol of Iowa, Des Moines.
The purpose of this blog is to shine a light on what is going on in our school, and more specifically, what is going on in the special education area of our school. For my first post I wanted to get everyone up to date on where I am at in my teaching career. At the time of writing this I am in the process of finishing my capstone project for my master’s program in special education. For this project I researched students with IEP’s and the amount of referrals for behaviors they received. I wanted to research if the referral coordinated with their documented disability. I used data from two elementary schools within our district and what I found is that overall, our schools do a great job of serving these students. Most of the time, the student’s referral was for bus behavior for both schools. This was not just for students with IEP’s however, this was for all students. Also, both principals who I talked with stated that if they, or the IEP team, feel that the referral is related to their disability, instead of punishment or consequence, they like to use direct teaching and instruction instead in order to help the student learn. If you have any questions please feel free to email me on my contact page and I will be glad to go into more details. Overall, I was pleased with these results and proud of our district. It is easy and fair to see that some type of disconnect is happening when students get on the bus and we are working to find ways to improve this. My final thought for this blog post is my thoughts on improvement. As teachers, whether you are teaching art, science, drivers education, or English, we need to strive to improve. Finishing these two years of my masters program meant a lot of late nights after school was over, Saturdays, and Sundays spent working on papers. However, it was worth it to improve for the students I serve, and owe it to. I plan on being a lifelong learner and making a commitment to improving each day, week, and year will help me achieve this goal.
0 Comments
|
Author: Taylor HowardI am a kindergarten through fifth grade special education teacher. ArchivesNo Archives |