Providing special services for students K-5, I am working hard with my special education colleagues here at Eagle Creek to identify our "best fit" within the PLC model. I was fortunate to join our building's PLC team at the Summit this summer and feel that I have a strong grasp on the procedural and learning focused outcomes for the model. However, key barriers/topics to address for us as special education teachers include:
-Time restraints of attending two PLCs, attending both a general education and special education community (IEP and Eval. meetings make our morning availability tight). Should we participate in only one? How do we prevent a dichotimous relationship between Sped. and Gen. Ed.?
-Creating SMART goals for students we impact across grade-levels and abilities.
-Devoting our time as a "special education resource" to the achievement of students without IEPs (this barrier was raised as our services/funding comes through special education) and how do we be a part of a team/commit time towards general education student goals when we are also responsible for student IEP goals/needs/objectives.
-Creating formative assessments/common data sets across our disparate caseloads of students.
Thoughts to chew on as we move towards this way of doing to affect all student learning :). The goal, really, is that all of the students are all of our students, as we move towards inclusion. Thank you for any reflection you may have!
I also have a lot of questions that are still unanswered pertaining to the PLC time and framework. I am definitely ok with changing things up a bit, but I am still a little apprehensive about the unknown. My team and I have gotten off to a great start and have set up some student assessment due dates, plans for where to go next and goals for where we want our students to be by the end of September.
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