Community & School Context

Community Context
Laredo Elementary School is part of the Aurora School District and feeds into East Middle School and Hinkley High School. Laredo sits in between 6th Ave and Colfax Ave just East of Chambers Road.

A few statistics about Aurora, Colorado:

Area - 154 Square Miles
Population - 351,200

Median Age	33.2
Median Household Income	$61,570
% Male	49.25
% Female	50.75
White	70.3%
Black	17.9%
Asian	6.1%
Hispanic	28.5%
Other	5.7%

School Context
Laredo Elementary has many before and after school programs for students. Programs such as Girls on the Run, school plays, ukulele club, yoga club, sports clubs, student council and many others offer students the chance to engage with other kids and explore their passions outside of school hours. The school wants to support students and keep them involved in their community.

Laredo has also recently assembled an Attendance Team to investigate the situations of students with chronic attendance issues. The team does everything they can to find out what is going on with students at home and how it can support them to keep coming to school on a regular basis. Home visits and conferences with parents are frequent, and the attendance rate has been rising in the past year.

Another amazing resource for the school is ReSolutionaries, Inc. They come into the classroom to support a restorative environment of empathy, equity, and healing. They believe in the 5 R's Framework: Relationship, Respect, Responsibility, Repair, and Reintegration. It is their goal to reduce the instances of classic 'punishment' for wrongdoing and refocus the goal on restoring relationships and repairing harm that has been done. This program has improved the culture of the school greatly.

Classroom Context
I will be primarily gathering information on this student in the context of his homeroom fifth grade classroom. I currently have the role of one of his 'co-teachers' and I have worked with him in whole-group, small-group, and one-on-one instruction.

Ben sees me as an assistant to his homeroom teacher, my clinical teacher (CT). He therefore sees me as a resource and a new person who will potentially give him more wiggle room than someone who has known him for a longer period of time.

Photos
These photos were retrieved from the Laredo Elementary Facebook page. More photos of Ben's classroom and playground to come!

School Entrance: The Gateway to College

School Awards Assembly

February Notes

Wednesday 2/3
My CT and I discussed the three possible students in our classroom that I could work with for this assignment. We agreed on 'Ben' for a few reasons:

1. Ben is 'doubly exceptional.' Not only is he on an IEP due to his autism, he is also considered to be gifted in math and receives special services in middle school level mathematics.
2. Ben's parents are very involved in his education. His mother works at the school as a paraprofessional, and his father frequently visits and checks in with his teachers.
3. The school has frequent cases of students transferring schools midyear, and we knew that this student would be staying the entire semester because of his mother's employment at the school.

I am hoping to learn more about Ben's experiences in school and his goals for the future. Ben is a very bright young man who is very talented in mathematics. He has anxieties and perseverations that can sometimes keep him from reaching his full potential in the classroom setting, but he has great potential for the future. I want to learn more from his family about their hopes for him, as well.

As for myself, I hope to see areas where Ben has the capability to succeed independently with the rest of his peers without intervention or assistance, but to also observe where he needs help and to determine the least intrusive, most effective way of supporting him. I believe, from what I have seen of Ben so far, that the more he can learn to support himself, the more successful he will be in his academic career in the future.

I intend on interviewing two teachers from his team of educators, including my clinical teacher and his SPEd teacher, as well as his mother. These interviews will be completed between the weeks of February 29th and March 21st.

Thursday 2/4

I had already spent quite a bit of time with this student, so I spent some time recording things I had observed about him over my first month in the classroom. I noted things that he liked and disliked as well as academic subjects/tasks that he is drawn to versus ones he dislikes.

Wednesday 2/10

Today I wanted to look specifically at classroom disruptions. Ben has a difficult time when the class is working on topics that he does not prefer such as food, war, or reading fictional books. He also highly dislikes taking tests. I wanted to tally how many disruptions occurred throughout the day and what triggered them.

Thursday 2/11

We had Acuity testing today, and Ben's IEP requires that he take the tests in a different room and be given extended time. I did not have much time to observe today. Ben had a bit of anxiety surrounding the testing and was very fidgety and vocal in class today.

Wednesday 2/17

There was a substitute in specials today. Ben has a difficult time with both schedule changes and strangers. He came back to our class very agitated and requesting something to 'calm down.' I offered to go for a walk around the building with him, but he felt that if his mom saw him needing to go for a walk she would be disappointed in him. Instead we spent five minutes reading from a book about gemstones together, one of his passions. He was then able to focus on the work in class without being disruptive.

Thursday 2/18

This week, we had a meeting with Ben's parents about his writing. Ben had recently turned in an opinion writing piece that he had worked on at home with his family. The writing had drastically changed from the product we had been seeing in class, and my CT felt as though it was not his writing so she graded him based upon what he had done in class. Ben's family felt that this was not appropriate and requested a meeting to discuss his grade and the work he had done. 

My CT had felt that it was difficult to grade Ben's work because it was extremely different from his paper that he had been working on in class. The sentence structure, word choice, and voice sounded different from any of his samples of work from class. Ben could not talk about his paper and explain his introduction or reasons. She was concerned that a family member had written a large portion of the paper for Ben. Therefore, she chose to grade his rough draft from class.

The parents expressed their frustration that Ben was not being graded on his hard work he had completed at home and felt that this poor grade would discourage him from wanting to work hard on writing in the future. They did not feel that my CT was understanding of the way their son communicates, and that the reason he could not talk about his paper was not because he did not write it, but because he has autism.

In the end, my CT agreed to give him a grade based upon the paper he had worked on at home, and we all discussed options to better support Ben in the future. We plan to send home rubrics for the papers we will be writing in class beforehand so that his parents can go over expectations with him, and we will be giving him extra time to complete his writing in class so that he does not have to take it home and we can see his writing process at school so that we can know where to support him in the future.

Student Introduction

The student I have chosen to work with for the Learner Analysis project is a fifth grade boy who has Autism. He has been a part of the Laredo school community since kindergarten and is involved in the school play, among other activities. I have chosen the pseudonym "Ben" for this student and will be referring to him by that name from this point on.

Ben and his family live in the neighborhood surrounding Laredo Elementary school and he walks to school with his mother and younger sister every day. Ben's mother works at Laredo as a paraprofessional for the SPED department. She works one-on-one with a first grade student down the hallway and is therefore always available for her son. Ben's family is supportive of him and very invested in his education. Currently, they are trying to get him into Aurora Quest, a K-8 school for gifted students. He is considered to be gifted in math, and works with a teacher separately in the afternoon on 6th grade material.

Some of Ben's interests include weather, the number seven, and gemstones. Ben is able to count by sevens  to the number 5,243. There are drawings of the number seven in the some of the classrooms he frequents (homeroom, SPED, and art). He has become less interested in sevens lately and is now very fixated on gemstones. He carries several books about gems with him to school and knows everything about the four C's of diamonds, as well as facts about the rarest gemstones in the world. He will frequently discuss gemstones in Community Circle, a classroom discussion time. Ben would like to be a meteorologist one day.

Ben's IEP was recently reviewed in the annual process and will soon be re-evaluated in collaboration with the middle school team to prepare him for his next step in education. Many of his services are on consult only when needed. He does not receive any weekly time with the SPEd teacher, but is pulled daily for roughly one hour for math support as a gifted student.