Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Sped. Instruction and Testing
A large barrier that we, as a special education team, have been dealing with is the difficulty of meeting both testing needs (ie., small group testing) and maintaining consistant special education instruction. Inevitably, students need to miss their small group Sped. instruction because another student requires small group testing. This is a big barrier, as (by law) we are required to meet the minutes allocated on student IEPs. The same barrier arises in my room (EBD Resource) when I am scheduled to meet with a social skills group while another student is acting-out or requires my full attention. Scheduling becomes very difficult to make up "missed" minutes. This is more of a stating the problem out loud thing :), I am not sure what the answer is. I konw that rescheduling missed time is probably involved. However, we can't take students out of their core content areas to make up this instruction.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
As a classroom teacher I understand your frustrations with so many changes in schedules and accomadating our special education students. I have heard that in other districts that during testing seasons (longer than we like it to be) they hire substitute teachers to continue to meet the minutes required by their IEP. As we all know the special education students need all the instruction that they can get, so we do not want them to miss out on their learning time. Hopefully our school/district could make some policy changes on this so that students are not missing out on instruction. I feel your pain Ryan.
ReplyDeleteI can see why that would be really frustrating, Ryan. It sounds like you are legally required to be in too many places at once. Nothing like being asked to be a magician!
ReplyDeleteI hope the district can find some money for subs. We know it is out of your control. Just keep trucking :o)
ReplyDelete