Week 1: Key Concepts, Main Thoughts

In this week, it was discussed that reading and writing work best while combined. Historically, reading and writing were seen as separate subjects, rather than taught in conjunction with one another. Recently, views have shifted in order to include reading and writing as a combined subject. Reading and writing should be taught together in order for students to write about and respond to their reading, and students will learn content and writing styles and mechanics through reading works of other authors. Students will be taught not only to use reading and writing to express themselves, but also to analyze content, such as primary documents in a Social Studies class or biographies about important inventors in a Science class. Teacher collaboration is crucial as well for student success. In our reading, the authors discussed collaboration among educators as being key to successful classroom learning. If the general education and special education teachers plan together to incorporate all aspects of the curriculum into their lessons, all of the students would benefit. Unfortunately, it becomes more and more difficult for teachers to come together and collaborate when instruction is so heavily influenced by political policies. Even as a pre-service teacher, I realize through field placements and working with teachers at other locations that the demands on teachers to match these political policies becomes stressful and incredibly demanding. Whether a teacher can continue to have a job or not frequently depends on how well his or her students perform on state-mandated assessments. Collaborating is crucial for classroom teachers to review teaching practices and analyze lessons, learning from one another to teach meaningful lessons in their classrooms. 

In addition, we read the article "Going Beyond the Math Wars" from Teaching Exceptional Children. This article emphasized blending direct instruction with inquiry-based learning, and focused on multiple strategies to use in the classroom to help students become independent learners. With the challenges students in special education already face, they need careful planning within their lessons to scaffold their skills to build upon basics and achieve higher levels of learning. In my field placement last semester, it was difficult for my students to even transition from using the same manipulatives in a concrete manner, and switch to using the same manipulatives in digital form through an iPad app. When teachers blend explicit and indirect instruction, students build more meaning from class.