Hi everyone!
I've never done a blog before, but for my SPED 310 class at BYU-Idaho I will be making a blog every week to reflect on what we did in class.
This is the first week we will reflect on class. It was a busy week and we learned a lot of things.
Just to catch you up to speed last week we did a lot of work on learning each others names. When we know the other people in the class then we feel more comfortable and are more likely to share and discuss more, which will improve our learning environment.
We read a lot of things about the importance of teaching and learning this week. One of the main themes was letting people act instead of being acted upon. This can apply to Sunday school lessons, Relief Society lessons, public school, private school, and even just parenting. We must teach and then invite the learner to act. When they act on things then they will learn better and be able to use what they learned.
A big thing I thought about was not to be afraid of silence. This may seem like a difficult thing when you are the teacher. Many teachers like to ask questions, but they don't like to have the silence between asking and someone finally answering. While the silence may be a bit intimidating it is not bad! The spirit teaches during silence. When there is no one talking we can listen and think for ourselves. It is okay to have some silence.
One thing I connected to past experiences, but wasn't directly said, was apathy is the enemy of learning. For those of you who don't know what apathy is, it is not caring. When the learner doesn't care or have any desire to learn then you cannot force it. As much as we may want to force people to learn it doesn't work that way. This is a challenge as a teacher because you don't have control over whether your student learns or not, but all you can do is try to help them want to learn.
This is a special education class and as such we talk about legal cases and things we can do to help people with learning disabilities. This doesn't just include them though, we have to think about the classroom as a whole. The case we discussed this week was the Daniel RR case. This was about a child in Kindergarten who was not catching on to everything in a regular classroom. The school district tried to keep him with his classmates, but it became too difficult and they pulled him out on a regular basis. However, the child did get to stay with his classmates during lunch, recess, and other electives like art and music.
The parents didn't like this and sued the school district. When it got all the way up to court then the court ruled on the side of the school district. They came up with two criteria to situations similar to this one. First before they moved the child out of the regular classroom they had to modify the curriculum, provide accommodations and services. The second was that after they moved the child out of the classroom they had to keep him with his peers as much as possible like lunch and recess. This law suit brought up some interesting questions.
Everyone has different opinions and none of them is necessarily right. Our teacher put statements on the board and we had to say whether we agreed, disagreed, strongly agreed, or strongly disagreed. This was interesting to see how everyone had different opinions on things. While most often I could see their point in having an opinion opposite of me, I still didn't agree with it.
Every week we will learn about a different disability. This week some of our fellow classmates did a great job in teaching us more about autism. I have not had very much experience, if any, with autism. They told us what it does and thing that it makes more difficult in a learning environment. One of my favorite parts of their presentation was the video we watched called Carly's Cafe. It showed us autism from the perspective of someone who is autistic. It was interesting and gave me a new sympathy for those with autism.
As you can see this class is a great learning experience for me and not only that, but my teacher is inviting me to act! I am acting as I write a reflection. It is important to think about what we learn within a week. I think if we all try a little harder to be a better learner and teacher then the world will be a better place in general.
Thanks for reading!
