Drink the Coffee. Teach the Things.

Welcome back to another blog post on Drink the Coffee. Teach the Things!  Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy!  First Sip Story : I am helping my CT acclimate the students to using Seesaw as a literacy center choice during guided reading time. There is one available activity where the student focuses on one sight word and does various activities with that word like, tracing it, typing it, circling the word, etc. The last step in the activity is to record themself saying the word. So, one day I was going through the submitted Seesaw activities and every student just said the word into the microphone, except for one student who sang the word to the tune of Happy Birthday!! I loved his song so much that during circle time, I asked him to share his "him" song with the class, and not before long the whole class was singing the word him. Kindergarteners are the best!!  Advocacy.  This is a word that I have been thinking a lot about since our Thursday discussion ab

Hello world! Drink the Coffee. Teach the Things. is back in business!  It has been wonderful to be able to scroll back on my posts from Foundations of Special Ed and see all of the growth I have made in my understanding of special education, and really just teaching in general. I hope that more and more aspects of Foundations return to my brain as we delve into assessments. My hope for this class is to also get a sense of how teachers keep track of the endless amount of tasks they must keep up with, such as lesson planning, implementing instruction, progress monitoring, attending meetings, and keeping track of data at the same time. This is a part of education that I still feel unsure about, even though I have shadowed many teachers and have discussed their schedules and job responsibilities with them. It might be one of those things that comes with experience, but I feel slightly daunted by the multitasking and brain split-screening requirements of teaching. So grab a cup of co

With the end-of-semester craziness in full swing, I wanted to use this blog post as a space to step back, briefly reflect on the last pieces of content we have covered in class, and then zoom out and think about EDU 342, the semester, and my progress as a pre-service teacher. In class this past week, we discussed stakeholders in special education, as well as the procedures and details about transition services. As a whole, the week was a lot more broad in terms of content than past weeks, where we would focus on one disability, or process, such as RTI. We definitely zoomed out and analyzed the "bigger picture" of special education. I really enjoyed, and learned a lot, from the FlipGrid activity we did in class on Tuesday about different stakeholders in special education, and how to best navigate collaborating with them as special educators. It is so important for all of the stakeholders to be on the same page in order to best support the students, this includes parents

Act I: Reflecting on Reflection.  Sometimes I feel like I am double majoring in education and in reflection. I can reflect on literally anything at anytime. I reflect on not only what I do, say, or think, but also what others do, say, or think, as well. As a pre-service teacher, I see great value in proper reflection, as it is a major tool used to improve teaching practices. Meaningful reflection requires a balance of positive and negative comments, and analysis of how to improve or what to differently. In this blog post, I will be reflecting on the good parts of my UDL lesson and the not so good parts. My lesson was on Thursday from 9-10 (even though it ended up being 9:15-10:00...), which is whole group reading time. I taught a lesson on shades of meaning, which pulled from their prior knowledge of synonyms, and fit nicely into their word meaning and context clue unit that they began earlier in the week. Act II: The Good.  I recently observed a few parent-teacher confere

I know I've done another blog post that explains what Universal Design for Learning is, and how it can be implemented, but during the past few weeks of class, it has become apparent to me that UDL is so so so helpful in supporting students (duh! but also it is just SO RELEVANT!). I feel that we have been forced to cover a lot in a quick amount of time due to classes being cancelled, and life happening. So,  I would like to backtrack to the past few disabilities we have covered, and describe some strategies that can be built into a learning environment, a class routine, or a lesson so that every student becomes equal, and has access to the same materials, curriculum, and supports. This will help me process the information we covered in class. Autism Spectrum Disorder.  Book definition: "... a variety of related disorders that affect a child's social development and ability to communicate and that include unusual behavioral manifestations..." (p. 143) Tier I/UD

In my EDU 211 class, we often discussed the value of evidence-based practices to guide our teaching. We explored a plethora of evidence-based practices used by teachers, and then went into the field and watched our own CTs use them. I left the class having a lot of knowledge surrounding the idea of evidence-based practices, but discovered a hole in my understanding during our EDU 342 class about data. I never thought about how the "evidence" part, and where teachers get their evidence from. I just assumed that an education researcher conducted a study and proclaimed a certain practice to be "evidence-based", and then everyone used that practice in their classrooms. It never dawned on me that teachers frequently use their own class data as evidence to create their own evidence-based practices. It makes perfect sense, considering every class is different, just as every student is different. Teachers use their own data to tailor their instruction and interventions spec