1 Guest Speaker Written Reflection The questions I developed for the speaker(s) were: 1.

How did your teachers develop relationships with you? 2. How do teachers help you work up to your potential? 3. What were your experiences with group work? How could your teacher have structured group work to make it a more positive experience for you? My reflections on this presentation: Before meeting our guest speakers, I wondered how I should treat students with special needs in my classroom in order to enhance their sense of belonging and their performance. Should I express interest in their family lives and general emotional states, or should I keep distance out of concern that they may interpret my actions as "picking on them"? Should I push them in their academic performance when I think they could be doing better, or would they be annoyed and suffer from my naive actions? Should I assign them to groups as I would any other student for group work, or would such actions result in bad experiences for them? Our discussion with the guest speakers shed light on some of these questions and helped me begin to envision how I will make my classroom a welcoming space for students with special needs. To begin with, I was curious as to what degree special needs students wished to have teachers express interest in their personal lives. Overall, they expressed that they needed and appreciated teacher interest in their personal lives. In fact, one of the speakers even expressed that she was upset when teachers did not acknowledge an event in her personal life. These findings surprised me because I thought that high school students enjoyed their independence and privacy from their teachers and would feel that such privacy was being invaded if the teachers found out aspects of their personal lives and brought them up in school. Moreover, one of our speakers described an incident in which she told a teacher about her personal life and mandated reporting

2 led to a worse situation for her and a broken relationship with that teacher. As such, I am left with mixed messages as to what extent I should be expressing interest in my students' personal lives and whether or not such depth in relationship would be beneficial for them. Secondly, comments during the discussion left me with questions about to what degree I should demand rigorous academic performance from my special needs students. One of the speakers described her negative experience with a teacher who saw she wasn't doing homework and then required her mother to check to ensure she would get it done at home. During my current experience working in a high school, I have read, heard, and experienced high school students' abilities to manipulate their teachers into giving them less demanding coursework. Should I be the teacher that listens to their students and makes the coursework less demanding, or should I be the teacher that maintains rigorous standards and expects every student to meet them? Should I treat the special needs students differently in this respect? Moreover, when adaptations are made for special needs students, how can I assure that these adaptations do not lead to students lowering expectations of themselves? If I don't think they are working up to their potential, how can I confront them and help them without hurting their senses of dignity? With this topic, the guest speakers left me with more questions than answers, and I hope that future classes will further address how we can adjust curricula to make it more accessible to students with special needs without cheating them of academic rigor. The last main question that I brought to the discussion was how to make group work a positive experience for special needs students. In LouAnne Johnson's Teaching Outside the Box, I read about how bullying must be taken into consideration in classroom arrangements and group assignments. Otherwise, placing bullies next to the bullied may lead to discomfort among students and classroom management problems. At the same time, in our discussions with

3 students at Roosevelt High School (EDHD 5020 on 2/27), one student mentioned how his teachers went out of their way to have him work with students who he did not know well so that he would become more familiar with and comfortable with them. When asking the speakers about their experiences during group work, I was aware of these differing perspectives and wondered if they had any thoughts on how to structure group work as to best meet their needs. Overall, our guest speakers' responses indicated that group work was a positive experience for them. Tom (pseudonym) said that he particularly enjoyed working with some students who he had contact with through sports and implied that teachers made efforts to let them work together. Kendra (pseudonym) emphasized that group work was enjoyable when everyone carried their share of the workload. Their responses were no different than what I would expect from any other student. At the same time, I am left wondering whether or not their responses ring true for all special needs students. For instance, are there some communities where special needs students are not well-integrated into the classroom and may be subject to exclusion from the groups? Also, do EBD students need special consideration when forming groups for group work? How do I ensure that group work is a positive experience for everyone? I hope that we will further address these questions in our studies. On the whole, the guest speakers highlighted the importance of trust and sense of belonging for the special needs students. They enjoy being treated as part of the group, but they also appreciated individual recognition and acknowledgement of their experiences by teachers. I am still curious about how to adjust work without lowering expectations for certain special needs students. I am also left wondering about EBD students' opinions on topics of student-teacher relationships and efficacy of group work. Would they express similar viewpoints? What I have

4 learned from these guest speakers will directly inform my work in the classroom, and I hope that in the future we will have opportunities to explore these issues with consideration to other groups of students with special needs. Reference Johnson, L. (2005). Teaching outside the box: How to grab your students by their brains. (1st ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John & Sons, Incorporated.