Qualities of a Good Special Education Teacher
By Sue Watson, About.com

Have you ever wondered what makes a great special education teacher? What separates a mediocre teacher from a terrific teacher? It's not easy to define, however, here's a list of qualities listed by parents, principals, educators and students.

Are you a Top Special Education Teacher?
1. You love your role, you love being with your students and you couldn't imagine doing anything else. You were meant to teach special needs children, you know this in your heart.
2. You have a great deal of patience and know that little steps in learning go a long way.
3. You know your students well and they are comfortable and at ease with you, they enjoy having you as their teacher and look forward to going school each day.
4. You provide a non-threatening, welcoming environment that nurtures each of the students you work with.
5. You understand your students, you know what motivates them and you know how to scaffold activities to ensure that maximum learning occurs.
6. You take each student from where they are and provide experiences that will maximize success. You're always discovering new things about your students.
7. You are very comfortable working with exceptional learners and learners with diverse needs.
8. You thrive on challenge, can easily build relationships with your students and your student's parents.
9. You are a life-long learner and committed to the profession.
10. You have a never ending willingness to ensure that all students reach their maximum potential. You constantly strive to 'reach and teach' every student under your care.
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I think most of this list is for others to judge if I fit the descriptions. I don't feel like I'm quite there just yet, but it is nice to know where I am headed, if I ever get there. I know I love my students, and I hope they like coming to school every day, and if they learn one little thing from me and I learn one little thing from them, then it has been a very good day in my estimation.

Pros and Cons--Portable Classrooms

Cons:
My portable has a very old porch and wheelchair ramp. There is a kind of dip in the deck in front of the doors, probably the result of more years of use than the structure was originally intended for, that collects water. On cold mornings, this thin sheet of moisture becomes a skating rink which makes the ramp an adventure. Later in the day, it settles into a small pond.

If it rains very hard, the small pond slowly leaks under my door, saturating the carpet all the way over to the foot of my desk. I shudder to think of the dry rot going on under there.

There is no overhang of roof to cover the porch. Kids wanting to be on time to class must stand out in the rain until I race to my classroom after early-morning meetings that invariably run right up until 8 o'clock. Kids wanting to stay dry wait in the hallway by the back of the gym, only racing the thirty or so yards to my door at the four-minute bell, or when they see the whites of my eyes. On rainy days, I rarely keep track of tardies.

My door is off-kilter. Probably again the result of the overuse of a TEMPORARY structure. It neither closes nor opens without the considerable application of force.

The main power switch to the structure is on the OUTSIDE of the north wall. There is a large handle that can be easily pulled down to rob us of power. Local jokesters have identified this bright red handle and enjoy pulling it periodically, particularly, it appears, over weekends when I have a large amount of paperwork to catch up on. I can reach it if I bring a chair outside. (I have to smile thinking about a tower of sixth-graders on each others' shoulders, working so hard to inconvenience me.)

We trip power fuses frequently, and have had to rearrange computers, printers, lights and portable heaters several times in order to balance the drain of power between the three fuses. Once again, the tripping generally occurs at very opportune moments--like after writing an IEP but just seconds before the mouse icon gets to the SAVE button.

We have ants. They have spent weeks trotting in long lines across our desks, from the windows and up and down the walls...doubtless through the cracks created by years of use and the unchecked dry rot that occurs after the rooms flood. The district pest control folks only come out when the ants are sleeping in, and they won't do anything about them unless they actually see the buggers out and about. Our building janitor cannot spray because it's toxic to a learning environment. I have to brush them away in order to work at my computer.

Our building has four-minute passing periods. It takes ME about four and a half minutes to walk, in long quick strides, from my door to the resource room on the other end of the building--and this is BEFORE school, when I don't have to navigate around and through seven hundred students, and then only if I don't have to stop at the bathroom. I only count kids tardy when I can't see them racing for my door after the bell has rung, and if they have to go to the bathroom five minutes into class, I have a hard time telling them to wait until I'm done directly instructing. It's difficult to teach with all that wiggling going on, anyway.

Pros:
Visiting district bigwigs apparently don't fancy walking that far just to wait, standing in a puddle in the rain, while I try to open my door for them.

Arithmetic

The school year has now been in session for 50 days. That's 48 student contact days, one inservice and one "data" day. If a teacher's day is to be 7.5 hours long with a .5 hour lunch, that means I should have put in 350 hours to date. According to my records, I have put in roughly 565 hours so far this school year. That means I have effectually donated 215 hours of my own time to this job, this school and this district. (For the record, that's 21.5 hours per week, or an extra 4 hours per day.) The district is paying me about $43,000 a year for 180 days of work, or 1,260 hours. That comes out to just a little over $34 an hour. By that calculation, then, I have given this discrict over $7,300!! If I had picked up even a minimum wage job instead, at $8 an hour, I could have earned $1,700 for those 215 hours, which would have neatly covered the $700 I've already spent on supplies, books, rewards and manipulatives AND given me about $500 extra per month to put toward rent, car payments, student loans and my VISA bill.

I think I need to have my head examined.

Sincerely yours,

To the principal and vice principals of the school where I once worked....

Thank you for hiring me in the first place. Thank you for my first-day tour, and the mentor you arranged for me to have the first month I was there.

Thank you for smiling at me in the hallways, and for telling people that I fell from the sky.

Thank you for always coming to my room to help out when I called to say I needed a little backup. Thank you for sending me and my class away so you could deal with the problem yourself if need be. Thank you for standing there, outside my classroom, in the hallways and even in the gym while the child who had the problem screamed, kicked, flailed, pooped, and otherwise tried to wear you down. (Thank you for finding the humor in all of this.)

Thank you for chuckling whenever you spotted me wearing a new colour of shoes. Thank you for noticing that they matched my shirt.

Thank you for your support, your encouragement, and your high expectations. Thank you for offering to help when you found something going a little askew in my classroom.

Thank you for knowing all of the great things there were to know about my kids. Thanks for not blaming them if we didn't quite meet AYP. Thanks for realizing that special education students are wonderful, valuable members of the school community. Thank you for creating this tone in your building. Thanks for talking to them in the cafeteria--they always told me if you did.

Thank you for fighting tooth and nail for sufficient aide time.

Thank you for protecting me from an onslaught of district trainings and requirements that had nothing to do with me anyway. Thanks for letting me spend inservice time in my classroom. Thank you for being the wall between me and overbearing parents, for setting limits to their well-intentioned madness. Thank you for being the place where the buck stopped. Thank you for realizing that enough was enough.

Thank you for the positive feedback whenever you came into my classroom.

Thank you for that little silver keyring flashlight on the retractable string--the one you gave me for teacher appreciation day that said "you're appreciated" on it. It SAVED me from freaking out when I discovered (at 9 o'clock at night) that the exterior lights at my new school are turned off on the weekends.

THANK YOU FOR MDT's!!!
Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou for MDT's. For the weekly chance to meet with all of the colleagues I needed to talk to in order to do my job. For taking the lead on this, and keeping yourselves in the loop. Thanks for always expecting us to be there at 7:30 sharp and done by 8 sharp, and for refusing to schedule ANYTHING else at that time.

Thank you for the peer tutor program.
Thank you for the "bottomless" supply of free bussing for field trips. Thank you for believing, as I do, that kids who don't have book skills need life skills.

Thanks for showing up for IEP meetings.

Thank you for asking me how I was doing, and staying to listen to my reply. Thanks for knowing that "I'm fine" doesn't always mean "I'm fine." Thanks for actually being there when you said you would be there if I needed help.

Thank you for recognizing me as a professional, and treating me like an intelligent, skilled educator.

Thank you for giving me a master key.

Thank you for keeping my program out of the portables at all costs. Let me say that one again--THANK YOU for keeping my program in the heart of the building, right where all of the other kids are.

Thank you for letting me schedule my kids into general education classes, even if they couldn't quite do the work, because you knew they needed to be with non-disabled peers.

Thank you for stopping by for our "Family Dinner" event every year--the kids were always so tickled when you did, especially the ones whose parents couldn't make it.

Thank you for always making sure I knew how to do what you expected me to do.

Thank you for telling me you'd hire me back in a heartbeat. It is a sentiment I cling to.

Three at last!!

Okay, well, to be perfectly honest, I didn't leave until 3:15, but STILL!! That marks only the 5th day since school started that I put in less than 9 hours (not counting weekends or days I was trying to pass kidney stones,) AND one of my earliest times leaving.

That was yesterday. Today I left at 3:30 again--that makes two days IN A ROW! But today couldn't be helped. My brain had been turned to jelly by an inservice that was frustrating, confusing, irritating and really quite wasteful.

A friend of mine called things like this "the church of what's happening now" meaning full-scale belief of and preaching about a "miracle" solution for a district with many schools in AYP jail.

Thanks to No Child Left Behind, the measure of a good school now comes down to test scores on impossibly difficult state assessments. Doesn't matter what their background is, what their native language is, or what disability they might have--and not even mentioning learning styles or test-taking skills--all students must take and pass the same test, or the whole school fails to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). If a school fails to make AYP for two years in a row, it goes into a state of intense scrutiny and general overhaul called "AYP jail."

As a result, the teachers are subjected to regular trainings on "new" and "innovative" programs and teaching styles that, according to numerous vague studies, are proven to raise test scores when used with fidelity.

While relatively new teachers might look at these programs with genuine wonder and optimism, anyone who has been in the biz for around 10 years or so raises a skeptical eyebrow. That is because, in their 10+ years of service to public schools, they've seen "new" and "innovative" programs introduced EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Each one throws the veteran educator into an extreme sense of deja vu, as being quite similar to one of it's predecessors, but with a new twist or flair. The veteran educator can, by now, quite accurately identify a flash-in-the-pan, or church-of-what-is-happeing-now program. The mutterings are similar--"well this is different. Wonder what we'll get next year." No program is allowed to mature or be implemented with fidelity because, of course, AYP must be made or interventions must adapt and continue each year. Is it November yet?

But today's "training" didn't cover much that was new, or anything that was particularly useful. It began at 8:00, and by 8:20 I'd pretty much shut down. Unfortunately, ex-teacher administrators almost NEVER teach adults the way they tell us to teach children. They lecture. They point fingers. They walk around waving their arms. No visuals, no clear objectives, no fun activities to tie in the instruction to something meaningful.

I hope I'm not quizzed on it later, because I heard maybe 20% of the litany.

But hey! I was so exhausted by my lack of brain useage that I left school in time to throw a few things in overnight mail to my parents, stop at the store and make it back to the house while it was still light out!

Hitting the wall appears to have been a good thing. I've had to stop, look around, pick myself back up and start all over again. But this time, I ran in the direction of the mall, bought a game FOR MYSELF and shopped around for wacky-coloured shoes.

And tomorrow, I think I'll COOK!! I haven't done that in MONTHS! It would be so nice to eat a meal that wasn't frozen, freeze-dried or canned!

PLEASE VOTE THIS NOVEMBER!

Splat!

In retrospect, perhaps I should have entitled this blog "The Non-Life of a Sped Teacher." In fact, I saw a button the other day that said "Pick two: Sleep, Job, Social Life. Welcome to Teaching." Doesn't that just about say it all? I honestly do NOT know how people do this when they have spouses and families!

So, I'm back in my first year of teaching. Emotionally and organizationally. (Well, in paycheck too, considering that I had to have my principal sign off for my Master's Degree, so I'm still being paid at the Bachelor's Degree rate. I still can't figure that one out!) I cannot seem to get my head above water this year. My mother calls this hitting the "October Wall." Well, if that's the case, I think the force of the splat is still echoing through the halls.

Here comes my vent. For those of you who know me, this might sound familiar. Believe me, from the inside, it feels like crisis no matter how many times I've been through it.

I am trying to teach 14 kids, working at 3 different levels, with a single aide. The admin wants my "lesson plans" which should incorporate a component called "Snapshot." The theory of the snapshot seems sound--it is a tool to be posted each day, detailing the day's purpose and activities. The point is to let kids know what they will be learning so that they can make connections faster. Problem is, I don't teach lessons, I teach kids. I have a legal responsibility to work on each child's INDIVIDUAL goals, and collect data on their progress once a week. And nobody seems to be able to tell me what a snapshot would look like for this, but daily snapshots are still expected of me. Huh. The few times I've asked for help, I've been told that I need to differentiate, or plan a single unit or lesson with three levels of activities for the groups. Doing a little math, that would mean I need three activities each for four different classes. That's twelve activities in a day. That's 60 activities in a week. That's a lot of time spent at my whiteboard writing up a snapshot.

I don't get enough positive feedback in a day. I never realized how much I depend on little positives, particularly from my superiors. An open-air school does make for a very isolated feeling anyway, but being out in the portable as well, I am even farther away from anyone or anything that could make me feel like I'm doing the right things.

The general education staff doesn't seem to be aware of the fact that the special education teachers, including resource, emotional/behavioural and ELL, have their own classes. I'm serious! They seem to think we each have our list of students, an empty classroom, and all the time in the world to come into every classroom where our kids are and spend the whole period supporting them. OR that we are able to work with any student any period on missing homework or make-up tests. "Can I just send him/her to you for the test?" is a popular question. I'd love to help. I WANT the child to succeed. I will be writing into many IEP's that work should be done in small groups if not individually. But how can I help someone take a test when I've got 8 others waiting for me to teach them?

I have another flair idea: "Pick two: teach lessons, attend meetings, do paperwork. Welcome to Special Education!"

Okay, it's after midnight and this is about as disjointed a journal entry as I have ever composed! I must sleep.

But I have to make just one more note. A good ending place. We are now into our 7th week of school. I have put in over 450 hours, averaging 10 hours a day and working out to about 65 hours per week. I have spent, on supplies, furniture, games, reinforcers and books, over $750. That's a little over $100 per week.

That I am able to breathe is a marvel. That I have no life is observable. That I've gone 5 weeks without doing laundry is lamentable. That I've thrown out a ton of moldy, past-date food, some of it in unopened containers, is unenviable. That I've splatted was inevitable.

OMG

Dear Parent,
Due to stipulations outlined in IDEA and NCLB, as well as the WAC, our school's MDT team would like to revise your child's IEP in order to help our school achieve AYP. Placement in the RR was found appropriate, however, participation in the WASL might not be. We recommend the WAAS. The team did consider a 504, as well as ESY, however, we feel the current placement is the most appropriate. We believe this will provide FAPE in the LRE. Your child is eligible under the category of SLD, with a secondary of HI, which has to do with ADHD. We would like your input as we update the FBA and rewrite the BIP. We will keep the EALRs and GLEs, as well as RTI data, in mind as we look at goals. The SLP, OT and PT will all be providing services. It is necessary for you to sign and return the enclosed P to T ASAP, so we may administer the WJ-R. If you have concerns, please look at the handbook provided by OSPI to review your rights.
Thank you,
Miss Mandy
RR SPED Teacher, -MS
-EA

All hail, Kleenex!

The obligatory first-of-the-year cold has settled into its familiar spot in my sinuses. Kid germs are voracious and fast--and unilaterally inescapable. But I still managed to put in over 13 hours today!

*sniff*

And of course, to steal a quote from George Burns "I can't die now, I'm booked!"

*cough, cough*

My calendar for next week is SOLIDLY booked with meetings. I might see my kids for about a day and a half.

Right now, I have to go to bed. (Of course, to do that I must cut out all of the things that I laminated today so they will no longer be piled on my bed!)

Hours

I have decided, on a lark, to record the actual hours that I spend in my classroom each day. I'm sure lots of people have done this, but hey, I'll add a hit to anyone who might google "teacher hours" in a vain effort to prove us all wrong.

I actually began this journal in July, when I first went to my new school to pick up the keys to my room and fill out some housekeeping-type paperwork--what username did I want for the Intranet, Health Card and the like. On July 31st, therefore, I began the school year with an hour on campus. Couldn't get into my room yet, however, because the previous teacher still needed to move out so the maintenance staff could shampoo the carpets. (Anyone who wants to survive in a middle school MUST be interested in the yearly shampooing of carpets--this is a necessity!)

It must be noted here, I think, that I have just moved back to my hometown after five years in Boise, ID. So, this beginning is twofold: a "new" town and a new job!

So, the countdown begins. Five weeks out: First contact! Get keys. Four weeks out: First full truckload of boxes is unloaded into my classroom. Three weeks out: 16 hours spent in my classroom plus 6 hours of training in something called "Direct Interactive Instruction." Met the Special Education staff from the district, as well as my own, brand-new building Special Education team. (We're all new to the building. The E/BD teacher has a year of experience in the district, I have 5 years' experience in Boise--so basically, on a whole different plane of existence--and the other two Resource teachers are fresh, new, "baby" teachers. Don't let the nickname disillusion you--they are ALL highly qualified young women!) A total of 23.5 hours spent working on my program so far.

Two weeks out: Two full days of "Algebraic Thinking" training, and four hours of caseload review and management with the department co-chair, a highly educated and extremely talented paraeducator who is an eight-year veteran of our school and our primary link to "how things work" at this middle school. Ten more hours spent reviewing IEP's and setting up my classroom for a total of 27 hours, bringing the grand total to 50.5.

One week out: One more full day of "Algebraic Thinking," a full day of "Welcome to Our District, an Orientation," a trip to the District Office for fingerprinting, signing my contract and getting my badge, and a full-day staff "Retreat" at the middle school. At this time, I still don't have a class list or a finalized schedule--my planning hour seems to flip-flop between fifth period and sixth, and I have no idea which of the 25 kids on my caseload will actually show up at my door next week. Throw in one parent meeting, a two-hour cram of how-to-use-the-IEP-program, and three informal parent meetings during 6th grade registration, and the grand total of hours is now 89.25. Mind you, only about 37 of those hours are considered "contract" and will eventually be added to my paycheck.

And so school finally begins!!