Surviving & Thriving in Special Education: Create Change
Teachers are change makers. This post tells the story of one teacher and how she changed her school to make it better for her students.
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Behavior Support in the Classroom: Making it Fair
The depressing reality is that discipline in our schools is not fair– Black and Indigenous students are massively overdisciplined. The good news is that there are many, many different research-based solutions out there. This post goes into a few!
The How of Inclusion: Student Motivation
This post is on the secret sauce of student learning– motivation– and what the research says on how to increase students’ motivation. The bottom line on motivation is that students don’t, for the most part, roll out of bed and think “Gee whiz, I really want to learn fractions today!” And if students aren’t motivated, if they just don’t care about what you are teaching, they have all sorts of fun ways to check out or subvert it (Levin, 2000). I mean, they are almost as bad as teachers at a PD they wish they could have skipped… So how do you get there?
The How of Inclusion: Coteaching
If you think coteaching is easy, you 1) have never cotaught, or 2) are seriously the most chill person in the world. For most of us, coteaching– where two different teachers try to share the same space and work together to deliver content to students– can be complex. My goal here is to look at some of what the research says about how to make these partnerships work.
The Why of Inclusion
I started teaching at segregated schools, moved to segregated classrooms at integrated schools, and wound up as an inclusion teacher. I believe that my students were well taught and well served in all three settings. Yet, having taught in each environment I have also seen first hand how much it matters for students to have a general education home. I believe in inclusion. This post though is not on my beliefs– it’s on what the research says about inclusion and time in general education settings.
Surviving & Thriving in Special Education: Burnout
Special education teachers deserve to thrive, not just survive. The problem is that far too many aren’t even surviving in the field. This post looks at what the research says on how pervasive burnout is– and what causes it.