PhyreBards

Everything in my semester has been about writing. Process, product, high order concerns, lower order concerns, adapting what you're doing for students with different needs, reading papers aloud, sitting on to the right of the writer so my writing hand is farther away from their paper.

A lot of what I'm doing, however, concerns my input as a peer, not as a teacher or authority. So, though I'm gaining some strategies, I'm not sure how they transfer from equal to authority. I guess I can teach all of it to my students for peer reviews and writing groups.

What interests me more with writing is how I'm going to use all the different theories and pedagogies in my classroom. I feel like I'm learning a lot in Writing Studies Survey about different methods of teaching writing, but I also hear about all of the critiques of each method. So I guess it's one of those things where you cut off the best pieces from all of the pedagogies and come up with a mix that tastes best to you.

I do not know why I struggle so much to remember to do these blogs. Get ready ... because I have 3 weeks of thoughts to get through. Here's the post for the week of 10/1-10/7

My practicum classroom is an English IV, college prep, inclusion classroom with 8 EC students out of a class of 20. While the majority of those 8 are ADD or LD in either reading or writing, one is physically "disabled" and the other appears to be high functioning with impaired social skills. The latter student is easily distracted and becomes flustered and reactive when overstimulated. He either responds by getting frustrated and lashing back inappropriately at students or by completely shutting down, staring into space and pacing. While confidentiality prohibits the teacher from ever directly addressing this student's differences with the class, it is clear that everyone recognizes his differences.

Three weeks ago, I observed a very disheartening scene in the classroom. The class was playing a whole-class review game which required students to occasionally answer a review question in front of the entire class. When this particular student had his turn, the majority of the rest of the class would call out to him and pressure him to answer quickly, purposefully trying to distract him and get a rise out of him. I was shocked that seniors in high school were engaging in this behavior and had the audacity to join together to pick on a student who can clearly not handle being teased or distracted. The teacher quickly recognized what was happening and sternly reprimanded the class without specifically mentioning the problem, but it made me wonder what I would have done in this situation. How do you create a sense of community in an inclusion classroom and prevent student bullying of students with disabilities while maintaining confidentiality? What would you do?