Chapter 7: Special needs

In reading this week we covered alot of material regarding behavioral disorders, mental retardation and learning disabilities. We learned about IEP's, the good and bad regarding ability grouping and other ways to mainstream children who otherwise would be left out into our classrooms. My own experience with mainstreaming is rather weak. I may not get to say it for a while so here it goes: Back in my day ........ we didn't do alot of mainstreaming I remember a few students who I saw only during P.E or lunch who had such problems as we have discussed. I cannot say for certain but I can never remember a time when I actually had one of them in a "real" class.

This week in my educational blog " a view from the middle" he had some interesting observations about teenagers and non-verbal communication. How quickly they are willing to turn on one another, and how funny it all is. He made a great statement in that "if you can't laugh in this job you have no business being here." I thought it was quite apt as my oldest mouthed off the other day, something she rarely does and after sending her off to her room my wife looked at me and said" she's gonna make a FINE teenager."

Alot of good stuff on the boards this week, most seemed in lockstep but a few jumped out. Our group project was great and I learned quite a bit in researching material for it. I hate to use my own as an example but a couple of things that didn't make the final post really are going to stay with me and help out I think. This site had some great info about using technology for dealing with children with emotional and behavioral disorders.

http://www.knowbility.org/research/?content=improve

Ability grouping I feel like has it's place in teaching, but as i have said many times and I'm sure I'll say again, it depends on the kids as a whole and individually. I leave nothing off of the table, I've always been a proponent of try anything, a view that could have lead to trouble in my younger, less mature, days, but didn't. It's a fine line between segregation and ability grouping and kids know, they know what you are doing when you group them. They may have LD's or Disorders or even Retardation but one thing they almost always are is perceptive of their place within their peer group. You just need to be careful when doing this type of teaching so as to not alienate children who may and probably do have a skewed view of their place in life. As far as modifying the idea, well I would say it depends on the kids again but that's a cop out. I would say use it but be aware of the way you mix the children. I would be more apt to use it in class rather than grouping in a separate class, and use an offshoot of scaffolding to do it rather than grouping all kids with problems together.