Jami Shlensky Phase 3 Integrated Reflection This semester has been filled with a surge of confidence in my ability to manage

a classroom, as my practicum experience and coursework have pushed me to analyze the classroom, individual students, and the way that my behavior as a teacher impacts their success. My semester of practice in teaching as well as learning about strategies to implement has given me the tools I need to be a prepared and equipped special education teacher. Over the course of the semester I was able to implement many of the skills and knowledge that I have acquired over my coursework and previous experience in the special education program. At my practicum setting I worked in a self-contained cross-categorical special education classroom. I collaborated with my cooperating teacher, as well as with paraprofessionals, to deliver instruction and support to seventh graders in the areas of math, reading, and writing. I worked with many different students who had a range of disabilities. From the very first day at my practicum setting, I noticed a need for a behavior management system with some of my students. In order to complete my managing the learning environment assignment I selected a student who was easily distracted and would engage in verbal outbursts approximately once every minute. After taking baseline data on the students behavior, I designed a program to help him self monitor his talking out and work towards a reward that would mitigate his verbal outbursts. I created a tool for MG that was called a blurt chart. After implementing the self-monitoring program I saw dramatic success in the students progress towards appropriate classroom behavior. My

program can be seen here and its results can be seen here. After having immense success implementing a behavior program that encourages self-monitoring in order to work towards a reward, my cooperating teacher and I decided to implement a classroom wide program called Class Dojo. This online monitoring system helped shape the behaviors of all of the students in our classroom. The classroom transformed from one that often involved a refusal to participate, disruptive behaviors, and a lack of student effort into an environment where students felt pride for their positive involvement in the classroom. Both of these programs helped me learn the value of student motivation and positive reinforcement. Often in education, students fall into a rut of acting out or exhibiting disruptive behaviors in order to gain attention or escape academic tasks. However, when students learn that eliciting appropriate, respectful behaviors will help them obtain the things that they want, it creates a self-rewarding prophecy for them to continue to shape their own behavior! My coursework also afforded me the opportunity to analyze the function of student behaviors. During phase three I completed a functional behavior analysis on a student. In order to do so I observed, took data, and analyzed the maintaining consequences of a particular student and an undesired behavior that he elicited within the classroom. With all of this information I was then able to analyze the purpose for the behavior and devise possible implementations and manipulations to the classroom environment in order to create a more efficient, positive behavior for the student. My analysis and manipulations can be seen in my functional behavior assessment project here. Over the course of the semester I composed and implemented a program in order to instruct students on how to learn long division. The program can be seen here. The

students, when the program started, did not know the first step in completing a long division problem. In order to break the strategy down into simple steps, I used a chaining procedure in order to link the knowledge to form a method for the students to use in their mathematics computation. The program proved to be successful and its results can be seen here. This taught me the value of keeping operations and instruction simple in the classroom. Although there is a time and a place for higher order thinking, it is often easier for students to understand and tackle problems when there is a methodology to the instruction. In my coursework, I had the opportunity to take a class that focused on communication disorders and alternative and augmentative communication devices. For this class, I was able to partake in a project that allowed me to survey, assess, and draw conclusions about the communication needs of a particular student. I put together a communication assessment project in which I observed the student, performed interviews with her teacher, and assessed her communication abilities and interests in order to design a program where she would be able to work towards attaining the identified communication goals that I had determined from my assessment. The assessment can be seen here and the program I composed can be seen here. Perhaps one of the most unique experiences that I was afforded during the semester in my practicum setting was that my cooperating teacher treated me as if I was one of her colleagues and we formed a collaborative relationship that boosted student success and also allowed for us to bounce ideas off of each other, work together to devise plans, and implement programs that contributed to student development. Our open communication as coworkers allowed for seamless functioning within the classroom but also for a support

system for both her in her teaching and me in my development towards becoming an educator. This professional relationship allowed me to bloom in working with all of the school professionals, not just my cooperating teacher. This semester I sent a professional development goal in order to work on my questioning and communication techniques when working with students. I realized that when communicating with students if questions were vague or open-ended the correct response from the student was not elicited and lead to frustration for the student. In order to mitigate this issue I set a goal to improve the way that I pose questions to students. Throughout the semester I worked on asking questions that the student had the ability to answer and would allow them to attain success when working towards a difficult academic task. This allowed me to break down my instruction to its simplest form and remove much of the student frustration, which created a more positive, successful classroom environment. Due to the academic setting I was placed in for my practicum experience, I spent much of the semester reflecting on grading procedures and holding students who receive accommodations and support accountable for their own work. In a middle school special education setting, many of the students have acquired a learned behavior that if they wait out a teacher, they will eventually give them an answer or help them through it. As a result, from the beginning of the school year, many of my students would say that they needed help or were unsure of doing a problem that I had seen them complete independently in the past. With many individuals to support the students coming in and out of the classroom such as paraprofessionals, tutors, and other teachers, it was easy for the students to manipulate someone to help them who did not know that they were able to independently

complete the work. As a result I learned to hold my students accountable for what they are able to do. Learned helplessness is often present in the special education field. As a future educator I know that it is my job to bring forth confidence, within my students, of their abilities so that they can independently go into the world and put forth their knowledge. Although providing a student with assistance may seem like the polite or right thing to do, students often need to engage in independence and learning that is not dependent on others. The semester has allowed me to build on my previous knowledge and experiences in order to foster independence, self-monitoring, and successful experiences for my students. This semester has afforded me an opportunity to create a successful classroom environment that encourages student learning that will allow the students to navigate their education and engagement in the world outside of school.