Journal Drop #1

9/15

Life as an IA

Working as an Instructional Assistant (IA) can be a frustrating job at times. I sit back and watch a lesson being taught from a very interesting point of view. From my position I can see students engaging with the material in many different ways. I can also see how easily students can be distracted and become disinterested when lessons and lectures are boring. In fact, I find myself tuning out at times during a math lecture. This school year I have begun to take notes during the classes that I work in. I am looking for ideas of what “works” and what doesn’t. In one particular class I see the same pattern of a long lecture, interrupted at times to discipline misbehaving students, followed by a very short period of time to complete the day's investigation and example problems. This work then becomes homework which many of the students have difficulty completing because they have a very limited understanding of the material and only about 5 minutes at the end of the period to try it on their own and ask me questions.

This particular class is very frustrating for me because I enjoy helping students understand and even find their own enjoyment of math. As an IA it is hard to find the time or a comfortable way of addressing some of the issues I see. For now I will use this as a learning opportunity where I can see what works and does not work in more traditional direct instruction environment.

9/20

Challenging Students: Applying action research

I have a class called Learning Lab where we are tasked with helping our students, many of whom are on an IEP, support their learning with extra lessons and review of their mainstream math and language arts classes. Only five days into the school year and we are seeing many challenging behaviors and learning disabilities (which can lead to more behaviors). I am also taking SPED 510 Behavior Management this fall. I have found myself in a unique place to merge theories and ideas from two classes that I am currently taking and implement them in the real life environment of a special education classroom.

The behaviors we are observing are creating questions for myself and my coworker. “Why does he constantly talk out?” “Why is she out of her seat multiple times during class?” and many more… I am attempting to find the root of the behaviors and address them there rather than only responding with “Raise your hand if you want to talk” or “stay in your seat till you have permission to get up” These thoughts have driven me to create a google form that I am using in class to quickly note student behaviors. This data is sorted in a spreadsheet and we are going analyze it at the end of the week. I am enjoying seeing how my interests and my personal classes are meeting in my job. While I do not yet have answers for these challenging behaviors, I do have a plan to track them and then apply some of the research we are studying in Behavior Management to the biggest problems.