Standards for Teaching Special Education

I am in the graduate Special Education program here at fairfield U and work at an elementary school with children with autism, so I will direct my focus for this class towards broadening my knowledge and skills for helping special education classes.  The standard principles of special education are to work collaboratively to achieve individual students' unique goals and objectives, to design lessons and strategies that will work best for each student, and differentiate teaching styles to meet different students needs.

According to the Common Core of Teaching, Special Education teachers should have knowledge of "instructional materials including adaptive equipment and technological resources.  I find this to be key to this class.  So, I will focus my projects, and research for this class on how I can help students with special needs access different materials and find ways for them to use adaptive technology.  A lot of the students I work with have trouble communicating in the sense of expressive language.  I will try to find technologies in the class that will help enhance that skill for them.  As a future special education teacher I will have students with difficulties in organization of thought and hope to have a standard for technologies that will help students to gather thoughts and easily and smoothly put them together. I will have students with various different learning styles from auditory, visual, kinesthetic, ect. and I want to be able to have knowledge of technologies that will be able to meet all of those different styles of learning needs.