Jan 21

1. First, provide brief reflection on those learnings from the course that you feel have been most helpful in your development as a teacher:

I have learned much in this class about how to approach, interact, and help students with disabilities of all kinds. I have also started to learn what it is like to be disabled in other ways aside from my own personal learning disabilities. This insight will be a extremely helpful tool throughout my teaching career and my life.

2. Second, provide brief reflection on those learnings that still need 'brushing-up' -- possibly on your own or possibly in class.

One aspect that I think I will need a lot of getting use to will be the people first language. Not that I don’t agree with it, I do, but it is faster and easier to say the “disabled child” then the “child who has a disability”. It will take time and effort to accustom myself to using the longer yet more people first approach. I am also curious to know if people first language should be used for more positive titles such as “honors student” or “Dr. Smith”. If it is more appropriate for negative then why not for positive?

3. Finally, provide brief reflection on specifics you hope to see in the last half of the class.

I think it would be good to see actually blank IPP forms and documents so we will know what to do with them when we come across them out in the schools. I feel this is very important so that we can maintain our professionalism.

Today in class we had our test and I thought it was a good solid test that tested us on the useful and core knowledge of the subject matter. I was worried about it going in because of the amount of material we had to study for the test and in the end I felt like my studying was too broad and that I could have focused in more.