I'm Thinking- Reflection 5

hus far my experience working with students with special needs has been a real eye opener experience. I have to some extent, completely let go of what I think the best teaching style is for my students, and have let my students show me what works best for them. I am currently teaching in a Special Day/Resource class and for most of the day I have five or less students. My fifth and sixth period also called Read 180 has about 15-20 students. The Read 180 class mostly consist of group work that is poorly implemented and has no real structure to it besides grouping students by five and spreading them out in different areas of the classroom to do work that can be done individually. For many of the students, they find this class a joke and take signing up to go use the restroom more serious than their teacher assigning them mundane reading tasks.  

I have seen group-work done properly and members within a group reap the benefits of collaborative efforts. However, this is on a college level where the instructor has trained students on the roles and specific behaviors that accompany those roles along with cooperation skills needed for members to work successfully and respectfully within a group. I agree with Cohen, there must be some type of training of roles and cooperative skills if group work is going to work at its best. I also agree that it is important for teachers to be able to let go of their authority and delegate authority to students, while still maintaining authority of the classroom.  

As I continue with student-teaching, I will want to try group work with my students using strategies and techniques posed by Cohen particularly in the Read 180 class. It is interesting because the Read 180 class is also team taught. There is a resource and a general education teacher in the class, but I feel as though students are not receiving relevant instruction, let alone meaningful tasks to help improve their reading. For example, a group of students listen to the teacher read a section of a text and then are directed to silently read. Students are not held accountable, let alone following what the teacher is reading. Unfortunately, there are students in the class that get stuck on reading the word “the.” Thus, once I begin full-time student teaching, I plan to try implementing some cooperative activities in which students work in groups to accomplish group and individual tasks based on their role, and see how it works. I don’t expect that it will be a grand success the first couple of attempts, but I do want kids to do more and me do less. I want to encourage more interaction from students in discussion and let them work around grasping the content or theme in the readings with support of their peers. In sum, I see the value of group work as a collaborative and effective tool for all students learning when implemented right. I believe the training of roles and cooperative skills among students’ is equally important to teachers’ being trained in implementing group work.