Thriving as a Special Educator Tip #3: Beg, Borrow, and Copy

So, I now sell my uber fancy IEP Success Kits. The real story though is in how they came to be. When I was a paraprofessional, I worked with specialists who just gave me what to teach. When I started teaching, I mostly worked with late elementary students with extreme behaviors who were academically at grade level. The only specialized curriculum I needed was for teaching self-regulation. Then, in my third year of teaching, my district changed its approach to special education and I became a generalist. That year I got S. on my caseload.  S. probably remains, to this day, the kindest, most socially aware student I have ever taught. She could assess your mood at about a hundred yards and always knew the right thing to say to make your day brighter. The challenge for S. was that she couldn’t read. She was in 5th grade, the age of a 7th grader (great job district in retaining her TWICE and not helping her), and reading at maybe a 1st grade level. I had absolutely and utterly no idea what to do. I didn’t know how to do assessments or write an IEP for a student with learning disabilities and I had no idea how to find materials to support her. I was completely lost–and also really freaking out because I really liked S. and was feeling like the worst teacher ever.

That’s where Mrs. P. came in. She was the site’s actual generalist, a 20+ year resource specialist veteran and she had the wisdom– and the resources– that came with those years of experience. Mrs. P. let me sit in a few of her IEP meetings to learn how learning disability focused meetings were done (believe me, the focus and rhythm is different). She gave me her informal assessment packet and talked me through how to use each part and turn it into a readable IEP. She even shared her reading intervention resources and broke more than a few copyright laws to ensure that I had the resources I needed to help S. I wish I could say that my district stepped in or my admin gave me the resources I needed to help S. but, in reality, without Mrs. P. we would both have been lost that year. Her kindness and wisdom and my extreme willingness to beg for help made a difference.

So flash forward a year. The district has finished its model shift and I am suddenly at a new site, as a generalist, case managing kinder and first grades. By this point, I have worked in special education for at least seven years in upper elementary to middle school. About all I know about kinder and first is that letters and numbers are a thing. I went to all of my special education colleagues to figure out what I am supposed to do with the pigtailed terrors  who are about to come my way and get blank stares. I went to my admin and got… less than nothing (He didn’t like to talk– unless you wanted to hear about God. He was very helpful then– which helpfully led to his demotion the following year). To say I was getting desperate is an understatement. I was googling EVERYTHING and the school year was about to start… and I was in full panic mode. So I went door to door to all of the kinder and first grade teachers. All. A few were like this is your job, go away. A few were like, here are some worksheets, please go away. But a few, including Mrs. B. were like okay let’s talk. They walked me through the curriculum they use, how they approached teaching the basic skills, what would work to work on in groups to complement what they were doing in class, and the most useful ways to support students in their classes during push in. They loaded me down with resources. We probably broke every copyright law again, and I definitely broke my copy machine budget (hate those), but I started to feel like I had a sense of what I could do to help the students. 

I planned out my groups and things started good… and then I got a nonverbal kindergartener with Autism added to my caseload. This was suddenly beyond what the kinder and first grade teachers had prepared me for and beyond what my special education colleagues knew… So I went to the speech and language pathologist and begged and the occupational therapist and begged and I called the district’s Autism support program and begged. I would have gone to my school psychologist and begged but he was about to retire and would lock the door if he thought you were bringing him more work. I googled some more. The OT was overwhelmed and not willing to talk about anything more than her own interventions for him (which I totally stole because they were good). The district’s Autism program didn’t come through for me for months. But the SLP really explained augmented communication to me, reasonable goals, what support needed to look like across settings and walked me through everything. 

Besides the theme of my district being evil and changing my job just when I started to get good– and the theme of never being given the resources I needed to do my job well (that theme kept on for the rest of my time teaching), my big takeaway was that beginning, borrowing, and stealing– and being really willing to ask for help of EVERYONE who might be willing to take pity on me– could work miracles. 

If it wasn’t for the help of my colleagues, I would have been an incredibly cruddy teacher those two years. I’m not saying I was the best interventionist because, like, obviously not– but my students grew and I used the materials that I begged and borrowed for the rest of my career. 

I got into the habit of every time I met a special education teacher asking them about their favorite programs and what they did in groups and if I could make some copies of their materials. I amassed collections (possibly not legally) of all of the major interventions that folks were using in my district so that I had many to draw on. I wound up with copies of most assessments that folks used, assessments that helped me create my own.

I wish I thought it was different for new special education teachers now– that districts and schools actually budgeted to get the wide range of specialized programs and materials that they need and trained them on the nitty gritty when their jobs changed. But nothing I have heard and no one I have talked to has made me think that things have changed much (except for better Google results and possibly some cool hacks from GPT). 

Until things change, to thrive as a special educator you need to become a magpie, always on the lookout for something shiny– new programs and new resources that folks might share with you. Begging, borrowing, and stealing saved me time after time and, while some people were pretty nasty when I went to them with my problems, there were enough kind colleagues that looking hella ignorant was totally worth it. And it was cool when I got to the point where I was the one with resources to share and felt like I was finally paying down some of my karmic teaching debt.