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Effective strategies that general education teachers can use while teaching students with severe disabilities
Special education teaching techniques
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Recommended: Effective strategies that general education teachers can use while teaching students with severe disabilities
The first time I watched Rick Lavoie’s FAT City, during one of my undergraduate courses two years ago, I slept through almost the entire film. As an individual whose heart was set on entering a helping profession, and not on becoming a teacher, I did not find the concepts discussed in this thirty-year old documentary relevant. Now I realize just how significant the topics he discussed actually are to a school counselor-in-the-making.
Lavoie transforms a panel of primarily general education teachers, parents, and school faculty members into a room full of students with learning disabilities. He uses techniques such as fast-paced interrogation, anxiety-provoking activities, cognitive manipulation, and rhetorical questioning to create nearly impossible learning situations for any learner. As a typical learner, I had never
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Is my ego coming into play, or do I truly want him to challenge himself?”
• “Am I asking him to look me in the eye to show me the respect I deserve, or do I truly want my student to gain the adequate social skills to interact with others?”
These are examples of where an abuse of the hierarchical relationship between a counselor and student may come into play, and are the exact areas in which I hope to distance myself from in my practice. The idea that every conversation I have should end with the other party feeling empowered is one that really resonates with me, and a goal I will continue to strive towards.
When I watched FAT City the second time around, I made sure to stay awake! I paid close attention to the genius of Rick Lavoie’s experiment. He manipulated the operation in a way that enabled every participant, spectator, and at-home audience to identify with a student with learning disabilities, which is the most effective way to empathize and improve one’s interactions with students with learning
“The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal” by Jonathan Mooney is the story of his journey around the U.S. in short bus nonetheless to meet with different children and their families who have faced challenges in school due to ADD, ADHD, Autism, and other learning disabilities. Jonathan Mooney himself faced the disability of Dyslexia and often had to deal with many challenges in school himself, but he appears to be one of the more fortunate ones, who was able to grow from his disability and ultimately get a degree in English. Needless to say, his book and journey lead the reader to question what really is “normal”, and how the views of this have caused the odds to be stacked against those who don’t fit the mold. Throughout, this story, for me personally however, this story gave several events that I found moving, and had the potential to influence my further work in education.
Perhaps if everyone realized the wisdom in the famous proverb, “before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes”, people would have more empathy for those who may seem to be atypical. The video How Difficult Can This Be? The F.A.T. City Workshop presented by Richard D. Lavoie effectively gets participants to experience the feelings and stress of children with learning disabilities. Lavoie draws his participants into the classroom experience with well developed exercises that elicit the frustration, anxiety, and tension of children with
Counselors may want to reduce students’ stress, but a blanket ban is not the solution. Students are often well aware of
F.A.T. City is a workshop held by Richard Lavoie, an expert on learning disabilities, that let’s an audience experience the frustration, anxiety, and tension children with learning disabilities deal with every day. In this video, Mr. Lavoie does several activities with the audience to let them experience what it’s like to be a child with a learning disability in the classroom.
A counselor should always keep their thoughts to themselves and remain open-minded about the situation. The only time a counselor should share their thoughts is if it helps the client with their situation that they are dealing with. “Counselors must practice only within the boundaries of their competence (Standard C.2.a.), and, if they “determine an inability to be of professional assistance to clients” (Standard A.11.b.), they should facilitate a referral to another provider. (Kocet, M. M., & Herlihy, B. J. (2014). Addressing Value-Based Conflicts Within the Counseling Relationship: A Decision-Making Model. Journal Of Counseling & Development, 92(2), 180-186 7p. doi: 10.1002/j.1556-6676.2014.00146.x).” Keeping your thoughts to yourself is
Students with high incidence disabilities or HID are the most common in schools. The group of high incidence disabilities include students with emotional, behavioral or mild intellectual disabilities as well as those with autism, speech or language impairments and attention deficit disorder (Gage et al., 2012). Students with HID are usually taught within the general education classroom. There are either co-teachers or a resource teacher that takes the students out of the general education classroom for short periods of time to work in a more individual, structured environment (Per...
School counseling has evolved over the years into a significant component of the educational system. School counselors are taking on new roles in schools as leaders, working with “school administration and staff in developing student attitudes and behavior which are necessary to maintain proper control, acceptable standards of self-discipline and a suitable learning environment within the school” (Secondary School Counselor 2012). Counselors work in “diverse community settings designed to provide a variety of counseling, rehabilitation, and support services” (Counselors, 2010). When working in a school district as a counselor, you can either be an elementary school counselor, middle school counselor or a high school counselor. This essays explores a recent interview with a high school counselor.
The first student was Nathan, who struggled with phonemic awareness. I was interesting in seeing Nathan’s problems rhyming and how that was how his disability was diagnosed. His disabily was only seen in his written language and did not influence his communication skills. I thought that it was interested in hearing that a student’s avoidance of something that’s hard can be commonly mistaken for attentional issues. While I was watching the video I came up with ideas that I thought that the special education teacher should do with Nathan. Some of my ideas were for Nathan to work on
Students with learning disabilities can learn; each student has his or her own strengths and weaknesses. Educators must continue to focus on the strengths of each student and building on them, creating a stronger student and person. Identifying the weakness is at the core of getting a student help with their learning disability, but after this initial identification and placement, the focus should shift to the strengths and adjusting the student’s schoolwork to reflect these strengths. For instance, if a student is weak in reading but has wonderful group interaction skills and is good with his or her hands, the students' reading tasks should then be shifted to reflect these st...
Knowles, M., Holton, E., & Swanson, R. (2011). The adult learner. (7th ed.). Burlington, MA: Taylor and Francis.
there will be good days and bad days and the counselor must be careful not to allow the emotions of helping others become the main objective in
In today’s educational environment, all students expect to receive the same level of instruction from schools and all students must meet the same set of standards. Expectations for students with learning disabilities are the same as students without any learning difficulties. It is now unacceptable for schools or teachers to expect less from one segment of students because they have physical disabilities, learning disabilities, discipline problems, or come from poor backgrounds. Standardize testing has resulted in making every student count as much as their peers and the most positive impact has been seen with the lowest ability students. Schools have developed new approaches to reach these previously underserved students while maintaining passing scores for the whole student body. To ensure academic success, teachers employ a multi-strategy approach to develop students of differing abilities and backgrounds. Every student is different in what skills and experiences they bring to the classroom; their personality, background, and interests are as varied as the ways in which teachers can choose to instruct them. Differentiated instruction has been an effective method in which teachers can engage students of various backgrounds and achieve whole-class success. When using differentiated instruction, teachers develop lesson strategies for each student or groups of students that provide different avenues of learning but all avenues arrive at the same learning goal.
Within the individual psychology relationship the counselor has several roles that they hold. The counselor establishes an egalitarian relationship, working as teachers in their relationships. They model, teach, and assess areas of the client’s life such as how Ana grew up the middle child and her ways of responding and functioning. The counselor’s role is also to direct and encourage Ana, being warm and human, and admitting their own mistakes when necessary (Gladding, 2005; Murdock, 2013).
In Imagining the Urban: Politics of Race, Class and Schooling the urban jungle is described as, “Black, Brown and Yellow bodies, which are poor and dirty, criminals and dangerous, violence and drugs tied with the images of majority of urban people.” Leonardo (2007) This perception of urban fails to look outside of one’s own stereotypes and attributes some character perceptions to describe a group as a whole. The media also plays a big role in our depiction of the urban, men and women who live in urban walls are seen as villains. An example of this is in the 2015 movie Fast and Furious described by IMDb as a “Crime film/Thriller.” Here we see an increasing majority of the character’s to be men of color and the themes of the movie were fast cars, vulgar language, violence and gang affiliations. The media constantly shows in the news that the response to manage the villain living in the urban is jail or death. The end result for most teachers who see urban in this way believe teaching students in these various demographics as a “waste and hopeless.” This perception held by policy makers and teachers has attributed to what Brenzel and Kantor (1945-1990) have described as a “crisis” that needs to be fixed, “urban schools receive insufficient funding, and have out dated facilities leaving them far below the achievement gap and increasing their dropout rates.” That was the case in the 90’s and is still the case today 25 years later. So in conclusion our perception as educators has a true impact on all students, the way we see them early on and relate to their urban can save them from prison and/ or death. It is challenging to be fully invested and truly help children if you do not trust them, as future and existing teachers we owe it to our students to think beyond the media, and our own