Special Education Observation

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Pages: 5

I observed a 5th grade class with seventeen students. The students were all around 10 years old. The class had students from multiple ethnic backgrounds, including the following: Caucasian, American Indian, Hispanic, and Asian. The class also had four students with exceptionalities. The teacher told me that one student was gifted and an English Language Learner. Two students struggled with moderate to severe mental health issues and acted out often. The other student with an exceptionality was classified as developmentally delayed. He was much smaller than the other children in the class and he did not grasp concepts like the other students. I arrived to the classroom before the teacher and the students, so I waited outside the room. Shortly …show more content…
The two students with mental health issues and the developmentally delayed student were normally “pulled out” of the general education classroom and placed into the special education classroom during math. The teacher told me that the special education teacher was in a meeting, so these students would stay in the general education classroom for the hour. The students were told to grade their own homework sheets with a red marker as the teacher went over the correct answers. Maybe I was thinking too negatively, but I expected to see a student pick up a pencil and attempt to change his/her answer while grading. I watched the students intently, but not one student put down their red marker. The students asked questions about the questions they missed and some attempted to argue their answers. After the grading was done, a few of the students who did well made a point to tell everyone in the room that they only missed one …show more content…
As she was leaving, she instructed the students to work on the next three problems while she was gone. For the first twenty seconds or so, the students worked silently. Then one student asked another for help and that lead to the majority of the students talking and giggling. When the teacher entered the room, the students returned to quietly working. Their reaction to the teacher’s absence was not a surprise to me. I also feel like most of the students had forgotten I was in the room. I would say that this is how they respond the majority of the time that the teacher is out of the