Just wondering if there is anyone out there teaching special education and incorporating WBT. I teach 3rd and 4th grade learning support in Western PA. I began incorporating the method in September. In my 3rd grade class, I have a few students with emotional needs. The ideas have worked really well. The difficult part is that first of all, my students have regular education teachers that do not use the same methods I do. Sometimes the schedules are different and we are not all in the room at the same time. My fourth grade class only consists of 4 students that makes grouping them difficult because there aren't enough kids to mix them up. The other challenge that I face is that I often have to have kids do different activities because of their various levels. I am not always teaching in front of the classroom.

If anyone has any ideas that you would like to share about teaching special ed the WBI way, please feel free to post! Thanks!

I feel your pain! I have a self-contained class for middle schoolers with ED, but I did my student teaching doing Resource for K-4, so a lot of the same issues: weird scheduling, other teachers, etc. One of the things that really helped me for having lots of kids in different places doing different things was changing up the way I use the Scoreboard. I carry around one of those clipboards that opens up for papers. On the back every morning I tape a fresh 8.5x11 sheet of paper, and draw the scoreboard on it. Now the scoreboard travels with me instead of being in one location that I have to walk to to make marks. That helped immensely. I could also carry it to other rooms when I was doing inclusion and continue it.

We also had pretty small classes where the kids were all at different levels of low. Just because you can't mix them up doesn't mean they're not getting something out of working together! What I found helped was doing a lot of extra modeling at the beginning of an activity, since I couldn't depend on one of the students to teach the other.

Hope some of that helps! I'll post more as I think of it.

WBT Intern 2011-2012

Thanks for sharing. I have a much larger group this year. I will have 20 to start. I also have 5 students coming with personal care aids. I don't have to carry around scoreboards because I never leave my room. We do not do inclusion. Since the kids have to travel between their reg. Rooms and mine, I made small rule sheets for the aids to carry around to remind students as necessary. The will also use sticky notes to award oh yeahs/ mighty groans. They will also be assisting me with small groups using WBT. I should not have as much of the behavior issues that I had last year. The kids start Wednesday, so we will see how it goes!

How did things go 3 days in?

My first three days went well. The hardest part is having so many adults in my room. It is hard to be my wacky WBT self when you have major eye rolling going on. However, they can keep rolling because I believe in this method and am not changing. Most of the students love it though so that is what will make the difference. Thanks for asking. How has yours been.

Having been in special ed for 1/2 my teaching, aides and shawdow facilitators are hard to deal with. They don't always focus on the hidden signals they give off when they don't agree with anything going on. My suggestion is have them model with you, when you want an "oh' yeah" from the kids they need to give you an "oh, yeah"....I have a funny story about one autistic child and his aide but it would take up too much room. I hear you though stick to your guns.
Annette.

My para has been working 1-on-1 with one of my students for the last two weeks, so he's been fully participating like a student as a good model for the actual student. Now, I have two sixth graders starting with me next week which means two grade levels worth of content to teach, so I'm splitting him off to run the lessons for them. It was a good experience for him to use the system as a student so he should hopefully be pretty confident now using it to lead the students.

Right now, I am not sure if I am teaching WBT methods to my students or to the aids. LOL. I will be using all of them to conduct a small group lesson at some point during our day. I am just not confident yet that they get the important aspects. At the end of the day yesterday, I found out that the one was rewarding the two students she was working with with M&M's. I thought I had emphasized before school started that I would not use candy as rewards. I was administering district assessments to the rest of the students and did not realize this was going on. Sometimes it is really difficult to get people to think differently than what they have always done! I will keep plugging away though.

That's all you can do. Convince them through demonstration.

WBT Intern
2011-2012