Creating Effective Management Strategies

Classroom management was something that I felt that I had little understanding of when I first started my internship last fall. When the beginning of the school year started up, my schedule was chaotic, my assistants tried to go by last year's schedule and routine, and I was trying to figure out how to manage the various behaviors of my students and how to integrate a class-wide management system that my assistants would buy into. Unfortunately, the first few months were somewhat tense, as my assistants would try to implement their own ideas of classroom management over mine. Some of their ideas were good, and others were....well, not my ideal. We dealt with a lot of interruptions to teaching time, as some of my assistants would actually interrupt my lessons to deal with what they thought were offensive misbehaviors. It took the whole first half of the school year to finally figure this out, and to come up with a solution that my assistants and I could all work with.

My goal for next year? To have all of this stuff figured out BEFORE the assistants walk through the door, and to make sure that before the students arrive, we are all on board and understand what the expectations are. Also, I want to have a better understanding of what might occur in the classroom, and this can be accomplished by talking to teachers who have previously had my students, and carefully reading IEPs. More than anything, I want to avoid the chaos and feeling of stress that was present those first few months, and make my classroom a well-managed and stress free area from day one.

Instructional Strategies

This last year, using a variety of instructional strategies was something that proved to be a difficulty. While I had dreams of varying my classroom instruction and using a large bag of strategies to help student learning, I never was able to finally get things settled enough to actually fully integrate them into my daily plans. I felt like I was sort of flying by the seat of my pants, so to speak, and used a lot of energy to get lessons off the ground, manage the classroom, and resolve student or assistant issues. Generally speaking, I used direct instruction very regularly, and then threw in other strategies when I could. My classroom overall could have benefited tremendously from a wider variety of strategies, especially for some of my students who functioned at a higher academic level.

Anyway, next year I want to greatly increase my use of different strategies in the classroom, and make more of an effort to use them regularly. I would especially like to incorporate more cooperative learning opportunities, as well as some discovery learning strategies.

Technology in the Classroom

For this blog entry, I hunted down a website dealing with technology and special education. This website can be found at www.techlearning.com.

This was a nifty website. Some of the links that can be found include Digital Learning Environments, Model Intelligent Classrooms, and 21st Century Connections. The websites that you can link to are full of great ideas and lots of inspiration. However, at techlearning.com, I found one article that I particularly liked. The article was entitled "Assisting the Special Needs Student Through Technology". A direct link to this article can be found here. This article reminded me so much of what was covered in our technology classes through Pacific. However, I found it to be a great reminder of how common technology can be a great help to our students, and how some of the most basic programs can be utilized in many, many ways. If you look at the article, there is a great table that gives suggestions for different technologies that can be used with students who have various disabilities. I found this table to be one of the most interesting aspects of the article. The suggestions listed seemed like common sense (but, as we all know, sometimes it's the simple things that we don't think of right away).

Anyway, I found this website and this article to be quite interesting, and hope that it can be helpful or interesting to someone else as well. :-)