Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Week 2: Misunderstood Minds
I found this activity extremely engaging for myself due to my background as an educator in a special education environment. The Misunderstood Minds website provided compelling activities that helped me gain insight to what my students encounter on a daily basis. My staff and I often say “I wonder what so and so is thinking about right now.” By utilizing this website it helped me gain a better understanding what my students are experiencing in the areas of math, reading, and writing and what they experience when we ask them to complete various tasks.
Currently, I have several students who lack the ability to decode while reading. I witness them day after day become increasingly frustrated while we work on reading. The decoding activity made me realize why they have such difficulty because they don’t posses the vital foundational skill and how much that is interfering with his reading ability. During the activity I found it very difficult and frustrating trying to decipher the message even with the code substitution and that was with just a small passage. I now know what my students are going through while reading. I can’t imagine having to look at an actual book with more words and pictures to concentrate on as students who lack decoding ability often rely on illustrations for word meaning. As an educator I owe it my students to find a way to help them read. I believe I can do this through incorporating audio books through the use of an iPad or laptop.
Common Core sets the bar extremely high for students, especially those with disabilities. Misunderstood Minds only confirms my thoughts, I have come to the realization that some students are just not ready for what they are required to do now under these new Common Core standards. My students struggle enough with number recognition, asking them to solve multistep is very unreasonable. However, standards dictate otherwise. As a result become increasingly frustrated like they did during reading. After going through the Misunderstood Minds activity, I found myself extremely frustrated and irritated. My goal as an educator is to make learning fun, more so even math. I have used a few different apps in hopes to make this happen.
Taking into account all the difficulties students encounter given a learning disability I feel it important that teachers continue to find strategies to implement into their teaching to provide students with the opportunity to overcome their disability. Assistive technology can help bridge the gap. However, this site offers that unique opportunity to do so and gain a deeper understanding of what our kids are coping with.
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I completely agree with you on Common Core for special education students. I know you work with older students, so I can only imagine how much more they must be struggling compared to my young ones that have only just begun their educational journey. While I am not required to use Common Core modules to teach in my classroom, I do have to use a curriculum called Unique which is Common Core aligned. I have found that for my young students, ranging in ages from 2-5, the material is just not geared towards my little ones, and many of my older ones can hardly comprehend half of what is being asked of them. It frustrates me as an educator because I do not want to see my students (many of which struggle with language, and some are nonverbal) be considered "failing" because they cannot answer a "simple" question about the text. If my students cannot talk how are they supposed to do this? Of course Unique provides me with picture prompts that I can use for my nonverbal kiddos so they can simply point or glance at an answer, but that requires them to be able to label pictures and objects with meaning, a task that most of them have not yet mastered in this context. I know my students can learn, and I know they know a great deal about the world, our classroom, and even the curriculum, but finding ways to help them express themselves or to answer reading comprehension questions is a daily struggle.
ReplyDeleteDale,
ReplyDeleteYou are right for, some of our students the bar is way to high. When it is set so high that the students cannot see it they feel like they are failing, even if they are making gains and achieving their IEP goals. Audiobooks and iPads are both good strategies to use. However, one issue you may run into with iPad apps, is finding age appropriate materials for older students who are at a lower reading level.