Being a Special Education teacher... what it means to me.

I am currently in my 23rd year as a special education teacher. For Twenty years I taught students with severe multiple disabilities who required full assistance for most all of their care and educational needs. The past three years I have been teaching Life Skills to students who have multiple disabilities including visual impairmants. During this past 3 years I have also been enrolled in classes at MTSU to obtain my vision endorsement.  I choose to continue and to complete a master's degree in vision disabilities. This is my 2nd masters in special education with my first being in severe/profound special education. I have devoted my life to working with and learning from the many students who I have had the priviledge of serving over the past 23 years. I have learned so much about life and how to appreciate everything I have, to not take things for granted, to appreciate every accomplishment (even the very small ones), to smile, to laugh, to cry. I truely believe I am where I am suppose to be in life and I am so grateful for all of the life lessons my students have taught me over the years. People say to me that I must be special to do this kind of work, but I feel that I am blessed by the work I have been led to do.

Pre-vocational goals and activities.

I have been looking for a checklist or assessment that outlines a good progression of activities to be addressed when it comes to pre-vocational skills.  After numerous searches, I have not been able to find any such thing. It seems weird to me that vocational goals must be addressed on IEPs yet there are no good resources for specific goals and activities involving vocational skills when it comes to students with severe disabilities. I have been working with students who have severe disabilities for years and have worked with them on the progression of skills that matched materials I had or could get and that made sense to me. I moved from basic pick up activities, to packaging them, to one to one correspondence, to 2 hand take apart activities, to 2 handed put together activities, to multi-step assembly activities. If anyone has a good source for such goals please let me know.  I have been reserching this issue for a co-worker.

Technology and special education.

Today I was working with a couple of my students who have vision impairments and they were helping to teach me more about the technology that assists them each day at school. One uses ZOOM text which is a magnification program which enlarges the print.  She needs the letters to be about an inch to 1 1/2 inches in size in order to read the print.  The other student has no functional vision and he uses the JAWS program on the computer which reads everything on the screen.  They both also use BRAILLE Plus devices which are small handheld braille devices that have recording systems.  These devices can be downloaded to the computer to print out their assignments.  I am amazed everyday with the abilities of my students to overcome their disabilities and to handle all of the challenges they face with using these devices and just simply with daily living activities.

Planning and collaboration...where does the time go?

Actually, when is there time to do proper planning and how do teachers with completely different schedules get together to colloborate?  Planning is such a crucial part of the teaching process yet all to often, teachers are provided with very limited time to work on planning especially when they are working with other teachers.
Communication is essential in all collaboration situations.  There needs to be a supportive environment, parity among those collaborating, a purpose, and common goals that are being addressed. When done right, collaboration can make a meeting or a lesson go smoothly and without conflict.  Support from administration by providing joint planning time is essential to a positive outcome for the students they are teaching.