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.