Ellen Semeniuk

EDL 642
Steven Kelish
March 25, 2017

Students with Disabilities Power Point Presentation

In my seven years as a Special Education teacher, I have encountered

many situations when the General Education teachers do not feel

comfortable or do not agree with the modifications/accommodations for

some of our special education students. At the beginning of the year, each

teacher is given a binder which includes parent information, specific

accommodation/modifications for each students and the services that each

student receives. At my current site, we again have a few teachers that have

difficulty understanding just what each special education student may

receive in their classrooms or honestly how to modify work in general. In

December of last year, I sat down with one of the teachers, our site principal

and our district superintendent to discuss this matter. We had a two hour

discussion where multiple examples of supporting students in different ways

was discussed, teaching in different ways was also presented and specific

ways to modify curriculum was debated. Unfortunately this meeting did not

go very well and to this day, the problem continues to exist. During that

meeting, I had asked my superintendent to possibly bring someone from the

county SELPA in to try and explain how to modify student work to the staff as

a whole. This for some reason never happened. As this continues to be a

problem at our site, the three Special education teachers at my site got
together to come up with a plan to solve this problem. We put together a

Power Point presentation that we all worked on together and edited. We also

developed a few other slides to present to the whole staff at our school site

staff meeting. We have presented half of it so far and we will use our next

staff meeting time to go over the rest of the presentation.

In Humboldt County, we have a very high number of students that rate

high on the ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) scale. Trauma as a whole

has been a huge topic in local schools for the past 5-10 years. According to

the article, This is your students Brain on Trauma, by Mary Ellen Flannery,

one in four students will witness or experience a traumatic event before the

age of 4 and more than two-thirds by the age 16. These events have

lasting effects on a childs brain and over time change the developing brain.

According to this same article, areas affected can include, retention of

memory, regulation of emotion and the development of language skills.

These are all areas that are included when testing students to determine if

they have a Specific Learning Disability. Students that may have these types

of issues may need assignments to be divided into chunks for better

understanding or may need to use their books to find information. Large

chucks of material to be memorized cannot always be done by these

students. As educators, we must be able to know our students and be able

to understand which students are capable of what. We need to grade them

based on their understanding and the effort they put into their work. We

cannot grade them based on the same rubric that the other students are
given and we must not expect them to follow the directions to exactitude. In

the article, Regular Primary Schoolteachers Attitudes Towards Inclusive

Education: A Review of the Literature, it states that a review of 26 studies

revealed that the majority of teachers hold neutral or negative attitudes

towards the inclusion of pupils with special needs in regular primary

education. In my opinion, this has to do with the fact that some teachers

feel that the accommodations/modifications that special education students

receive are not fair to our other general education students. This points out

the idea of equity vs. equality. In the article, Achieving Equity in Education

by Nicole Anderson and Kim Hendricks, they point out that fairness is often

equated with equality while equity deals with accommodating and meeting

the specific needs of specific individuals. The idea of access for all is

presented so that all teachers can provide support at various levels to all of

our students. In the article, Diversity Matters, Leadership Counts by Mark

Anderson, it is explained that the concept of equity states that you provide

the support that each person needs. This article goes on to say that

conflicts arise in our education system because of lack of equity. He further

states If we do not embrace the diversity and work to understand and

support the diversity through equity, these conflicts become barriers and not

learning experiences. These exact ideas are why my team chose to put

together a PowerPoint presentation for my school site. We as educators

need to work together, seek outside help when needed and use each other

as professionals to help support our students and create equity for all.
Teachers were also provided with graphic organizers, writing structure

prompts for all students needing extra support and specific work samples

from students showing how students are willing to go back and edit their

work once they have their main ideas down. Their simple sentences can be

made more complex with just a few revisions. I believe this presentation was

very useful and I will use it again in the future to present for staff employees.

I feel it would be a good idea to start the year with this presentation.

Resources:

Flannery, Mary Ellen. This is Your Students Brain on Trauma. NEA Today
Magazine (Winter 2017): 42-45. Print

De Boer, Anke, Jan Pilj, Sip and Miinaert, Alexander. Regular primary
schoolteachers attitudes towards inclusive education: a review of the
literature. Google scholar. Pages 331-353, Published online: 29 Sep 2010

Anderson, Nicole and Hendricks, Pam. Achieving Equity in Education. ACSA

Magazine-Leadership. November-December 2014. 8-10. Print

Anderson, Mark. Diversity Matters, Leadership Counts. ACSA Magazine-

Leadership. November-December 2014. 12-15. Print