LAI 574 FInal Portfolio

Competency Six Effective Practice for Planning and Designing Co-Teaching and Collaboration With Peers The world of teaching is a diverse world. Each teacher brings their personal beliefs, experiences, and values to their teaching practice. Yet within this broad range of teachers and strategies, it is easy to recognize some best practices that can consistently encourage the best from our pupils. Evidence Based Practices and High Leverage Practices are frameworks that help us think about these practices.  For our EBP presentations, we each focused on one strategy that has proven to be successful over the course of multiple studies and has withstood the test of time. For my presentation I chose the practice of activating prior knowledge. This practice uses what a student already knows and is familiar with to connect to future learning. This enables the student to feel learning is more possible, as well as give the student another way to remember or access the learning in

Competency Five Applying Positive Behavioral Supports and Interventions to Address Student and Classroom Management Needs PBIS is a well used and successful program aimed at helping students be behaviorally successful in their school. While a teacher's classroom is their personal domain to manage, schools have found is successful to implement a set of rules for the broader school community. This ensures that students understand the rules for the cafeteria, specials rooms, the hallways, and the classroom at all times. Clear and precise expectations are outlined and the consequences of not meeting expectations are effectively communicated. Consistency in implementing these rules throughout the school is essential to ensuring student success.  I appreciated thinking how important consistency, clear expectations, and a secure classroom environment are in helping students focus on their academic achievements. Students respond well to boundaries, realizing that the limitat

Competency Four Individualizing Instruction Just as each person has a different view of the world based on their personality, personal experience, and personal abilities, each person can learn more easily in varying modes of instruction. We are all aware of our own personal learning preferences--maybe I can remember almost anything someone says. Maybe I have a great visual memory and if something is written down or represented graphically it is stored away for later use. Maybe you learn better in a quiet environment, maybe in an energetic and collaborative environment.  Individualized Education Plans are a way for schools to acknowledge that different environments, different learning accommodations, and different technologies can assist students in learning.We as educators can recognize that every student has a preferred learning condition, but the only ones with an official plan are those with a classified disability. For those students, it is required that we teachers

Competency Three The Special Education Procescs, State/Federal Special Education Laws & Regulations, and Response to Intervention (RtI) As has been previously mentioned, it is vitally important for a school to follow federal special education laws and regulations in order to recieve funding from the government. While this funding is necessary to fund the special education process, failing to follow special education framework laws can make federal funds inaccessible for the general operation of the entire local education agency.  In order to ensure the students with special needs are assisted in a reasonable way, the federal government has issued basic guidelines and best practices for schools to follow in their handling of students with exceptional needs. One such aspect to ensure adequate assistance is offered to students is the RtI framework. This framework offers a three tiered approach to assisting students. The first tier is the general education tier. This tie

Competency Two Identification and Remediation of Disabilities Identifying our student's needs is an important step to take. Without that classification, basic services are denied this student. Universal screening is one way school try to make sure no student is left behind in regard to needed services. By having each student screened during kindergarten registration, the school district can hopefully avoid denying students supports they immediately need upon enrollment. Later identification is make possible through the RtI framework, that attempts to remediate the student's struggles through more focused teaching. If the student is not responsive to that assistance, they are sent for additional testing.  Once we have identified a student's area of need, how can we ensure we are supporting them as thoroughly as we can? In today's society, we are offered a wide variety of supports that teachers in past decades could only dream about. The advances even in th

Competency One Categories of Learning Disabilities The word disabilities is defined as  "A physical or mental condition that limits a person's movements, senses, or activities." This term covers a multitude of conditions that professionals like to classify as one condition or another. While we understand that labels are not conducive to empowering our students, we also acknowledge that the bureaucratic world needs labels to be able to offer assistance to these students. Due to federal laws, classifications are required to ensure students are receiving adequate support and help from their school community. If a student is not classified as needing assistance, the school cannot access federal funds that could provide that assistance.   In creating our PK handout for learning disabilities, Sandra Grimm and I investigated the broad range of disabilities represented under the umbrella term "learning disability." The broadness of this category m