Jace Flores Student Teacher Blog

I think perhaps the weakest spot I had was accounting for special education students. At Freire they are called Student Services or SS for short, and are students who have some sort of additional educational need. They have staff dedicated partially towards helping these students and monitoring their progress in other classes. In my classes we had a fair few SS students, particularly in 4th period, which I think helped with the weakness. I did not take over 4th period until later in the student teaching period and thus simply imported my methods from the other periods to this one. I did not make work dedicated to them and relied more on grading on a curve and having them do a few of the questions. A janky system in hindsight not the best suited for their needs. Another part was I did not know which students were actually SS, which in part was because Freire never shared that info with me (which I think would have been a smart thing to do) but also lack of initiative on my end to seek that info out. I did not think about doing that until the end of the period which made it fairly pointless. I guess if there is a silver lining is I have quite a few lessons on what to do now to better support SS kids in the future.