Blog 6

350 

Hello classmates! 
On Wednesday in 350, we focused on IDEA, which is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This specific law governs and oversees students with disabilities and their education. 
The IDEA requires students with disabilities a "free and appropriate education." 
This aligns with NC Teaching Standard 2: "Teachers adapt their teaching for the benefit of students with special needs." 
We briefly touched on the topic of IEP's (Individualized Education Plan) and LRE (Least Restrictive Environment.)

There are 4 total of settings for LRE: (ranked 1-4, 1=least restrictive and 4=most restrictive)

1. Inclusion (What I will teach/traditional classroom in which EC kids are functioning below grade level, but with support, can be in a traditional classroom. Kids are included in traditional day and we just provide accommodations.)
2. Resource (The EC kids are still in the traditional classroom, but they go to a resource teacher as they are pulled out during different times of the day.)
3. Self-contained (EC kids are still at your school, just in their own classroom.)
4. Separate setting
5. (May have a few students that are on monitoring… these kids have an IEP and the EC teacher comes in and checks if they’re still progressing)
    
   Outside Research: 
   I continued to research this Act because I just started learning about it and the way it is implemented in the classroom.  
    
   This website I found talked about implementing this act in the classroom.
    
   “The intent of LRE is to make sure that kids who receive special education are included in the general education classroom as often as possible" 
   I think this is such an important statement to reflect on. 
   An inclusion classroom is a general education classroom that has students who receive special education. Inclusion is a teaching approach that focuses on including students with special education needs in the school community.
   Inclusion goes beyond placement in a general education class. It also aims to have a child participate in the classroom, lessons and extracurricular activities.
   
   https://www.understood.org/en/school-learning/special-services/special-education-basics/least-restrictive-environment-lre-what-you-need-to-know
   
   
   

 410-

Natalie led our seminar really, really well this week. The topic was rubric use in the classroom.Teachers and students can both benefit a lot from rubrics and that was the class decision at the end of the seminar. We read some super interesting articles and I think the whole class engaged well in the conversation. 
We agreed that this was basically our definition of rubrics:
"A rubric is a scoring tool that explicitly represents the performance expectations for an assignment or piece of work. A rubric divides the assigned work into component parts and provides clear descriptions of the characteristics of the work associated with each component, at varying levels of mastery."

This article was one I found on my own and it talked a little more about the advantages to using rubrics. 
https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/rubrics.html

Using a rubric provides several advantages to both instructors and students. Grading according to an explicit and descriptive set of criteria that is designed to reflect the weighted importance of the objectives of the assignment helps ensure that the instructor’s grading standards don’t change over time.

 Grading consistency is difficult to maintain over time because of fatigue, shifting standards based on prior experience, or intrusion of other criteria. Rubrics can reduce the time spent grading by reducing uncertainty and by allowing instructors to refer to the rubric description associated with a score rather than having to write long comments. 


Finally, grading rubrics are invaluable in large courses that have multiple graders (other instructors, teaching assistants, etc.) because they can help ensure consistency across graders and reduce the systematic bias that can be introduced between graders.

 




Future classroom:

My classroom will always follow strictly along with policies and guidelines that make my classroom an inclusive and safe environment. Rubrics are something that promote organization and clarity in a classroom and for those reasons I will include them in my future classroom teaching.