On 17th December 2019, we discussed about the special needs education. The special needs education refers to the educational environment that are designed to meet the needs of students with disabilities in learning. During today’s discussion we covered the following three topics.
- Special needs education: supporting the students
- Students welfare
- Special education (inclusion, accessibility, and learning environment)
What happened during lesson planning, what went good, what went bad, and what did I learned?
Like previous session we had clear plan for preparing the teaching materials. Every group member came up with own findings but as usual only few members were active in preparing the teaching materials. Me and one of the other team member did not agreed with the quality of the materials, I suggested slightly different materials (but including each team members materials) with proper referencing to my part and asked other team members to do go through the PowerPoint slides and ask them to add reference to their part. I also asked them to make changes, if they feel that there is need for change. Till then everything was fine. The final slides that were suggested by other members had few issues like, plagiarism, also the content of the few slides were not relevant. Me and one of the team member raised this issue in front of the other team members. There was strong comment from one of the team member saying that if anybody does not agree with the final slides can go for their own. This was the reason me and one of the other team member decided to come up with slightly different teaching materials than rest of the group.
I noticed that our cultural background and the personal circumstances have significant impact in the quality of work we do. Besides few bad experiences, I enjoyed the lesson planning. During the lesson planning I learned the following things:
- I had as assumption that inclusion means being included in a group or environment. When it comes with education the meaning of inclusion goes wider. In education inclusion means structuring of the school, classroom and lessons so that different set (including students with learning disabilities) of students can learn and participate together. This was new information to me.
- True inclusion means removal of all barriers, discrimination and intolerance. There should be a feeling of welcome to students.
- I knew from before that the Finnish education is one of the best education system in the world, but did not had the idea of how well inclusion has been implemented and practiced in Finnish education system. It was really great to know students are provided with special support, if needed students can have access to special educational task, special education and training, and even special education plan.
- I understood the actual meaning of pedagogy i.e. pedagogy refers to all the activities that a teacher does in order to enhance the learning experience of a student. All activities carried by a teacher needs to be justified in terms of what to do, how to do, why to do, and when to do.
- Most importantly, I learned the strategies to develop pedagogically accessible learning environment, which are described in following five points:
- First, strategy to create accessible learning environment is to develop and maintain proper channel of communication with the students. This allows a teacher three key benefits, first the communication helps a teacher to listen the voice of the students i.e. what actually they want. Second it helps a teacher to consider students perspectives in teaching and learning, and finally proper communication helps to increase student’s participation in learning. The communication can be maintained by using different tools and means, for example, face to face communication or virtual communication.
- Second, strategy is to maintain physical spaces that is accessible to different set of students, for example the students set could be children, young, adult or physically handicapped. As a teacher, we should respect the students psychology and should be able to development some sort of attachment, so that both students and teacher feel comfortable to the learning environment. Here, student’s psychology refers to the individual students learning ability (disability), outcomes, how a student react to new set of information and so on. All these factors needs to take into consideration while teaching and learning.
- Third, strategy is to use appropriate course materials compatible for different learning styles, for example reading, listening, and visual. This is simply because of the fact that each and every students have different approach for learning. Some prefer reading materials, some prefer audio materials i.e. to listening, and others prefer visual materials for learning.
- Fourth, strategy is to maintain the classroom environment in such a way that every students could have the feeling of welcoming to the class.
- Finally, the fifth strategy is to encourage outdoor learning. Here, outdoor learning refers to extended learning that goes beyond the scope of classroom learning. For example, experiments, excursion, company visit, internships, discussing with friends and family, and so on.
What happened during online teaching session, what went good, what went bad, and what did I learned?
In-spite of some bad experience during lesson planning, I was excited for the teaching session. Maybe the excitement was because this was the last teaching session before Christmas and New Year holidays, also the last session before we go for teaching practices. Me and Sanna started the teaching session. Sanna was leading the first part of the session which contained a bit more information than usual, with almost non interactive question. I was leading the second part which had interactive questions after almost every slides. While preparing the teaching materials we did not noticed but while practicing the lecture I felt that we would have made the balance between theoretical information and the interactive question right from the beginning. Otherwise, the session was OK, the session might have been different. After the session I feel like I get a bit more excited and forget to mention important information that I had planned originally. Maybe in the future I need to go for practicing lesion before the actual session, not only planning.
The second session was led by a Davies, he was talking about how can we support or meet the needs of students who are in need of special support.
During this session I learned two specific things, first, I learned to identify person with special need we need to notice personal behavior of the students, for example, illness, disability, potential risk in learning (there is no problem at the moment but there might be in the future), and so on. Second, I learned to address the special needs of the students, to support the students with special support, we need to interact with them, consider proper pedagogical approach in teaching and learning considering each and every student, we should consider the students’ abilities for learning from lesson planning to assessment.
Also, there was few videos from YouTube that we went through, those videos were very sentimental, heart touching, could not talk and think for few moments. After seeing the video, I feel like teacher have very strong role in shaping peoples life and the future. I don’t remember in which video but the sentence “A single moment of time can change people’s life” was very powerful and the message was clearly towards the role of the teacher.
The third session was led by Imran, he was talking about student’s welfare in school and universities in general. This session was also very interesting, during this session I learned how to deal if is a problem with the students. First, we need to understand the context i.e. why there is a problem, once we know the problem we can direct the students to student social welfare. Students and parents of small children can contact the student social welfare unit at the school and university to discuss about the problem, even without knowing the reason behind the problem.
During, the discussion Imran shared his own experience how one of his student changed his behavior just with simple behavior shown by him i.e. patience. From this story I learned that as a teacher we should always give student proper reactive time, let them think, let them to take time, this could be a good motivation for many students to speak something.
During the entire session, I did not noticed anything bad. In my opinion everything went fine.
What were the key findings in your group’s discussion? What observations did you make comparing your results to the other groups’ discussion?
Key findings:
- Identification of problems in earl stage could be a milestone in enhancing the student’s ability in learning.
- The context is very important in understanding and overcoming the student’s problem.
- There is nothing wrong to use the facility from student welfare office. We should not feel shy, as a teacher we should always encourage our students to speak out their problems.
- A teacher can change a student’s life within a second, if reacted to the student problem wisely.
- Patience is very important characteristics for a teacher.
Comparing your results to the other groups’ discussion:
Each and every teams had a different topic, but within the same theme i.e. special needs education. Therefore, there was bot similarities and difference in the context and the overall discussion. However, I noticed that in each of the session we were discussing that it’s good to consider individual characteristics of every student, but I wonder how it might be possible within one group when there is huge diversity within the members of the group. Even it was difficult for us to co-operate within our group members several times, maybe it’s because of cultural difference.
My Journey to Vocational Teacher Education 2019-20 