Blog 22

Prompt: What is your most stressful part of the IEP for you to deal with or work on? Do you have someone on your campus that you can go to for assistance and support in writing the IEP?

For me, the most stressful part of the IEP has been supporting individual students during guided practice. Even though I pull students into small groups, the varying levels of understanding can be difficult to navigate. When I work with students individually, there usually is very little time left from the 47 minute periods to give much support and monitoring. I do work with the special education teacher and discuss vocabulary, objectives, and assessment data on occasion. We try to align our work so that students are getting similar instruction in both their general and special education classes. The special education teacher often comments on the difficulty of the situation in the special education classroom as well. It seems like the students in the special education classrooms are also at varying levels of mastery and have very different needs. Having such variance in a room of 20 students does seem challenging, so I empathize with her.

I also go to her for assistance and support regarding all IEP matters. She organizes and invites me to IEP meetings, which I attend regularly. She also makes any adjustments to the IEPs as requested by parents or the student in these meetings. In my opinion, our district needs to hire more staff for our special education program to meet our student needs effectively. Having paraprofessionals in the general classroom would be beneficial, and providing additional support for the special education classrooms would maximize the support time in those periods as well. I have seen our special education teacher take on so many responsibilities in her role, and it seems very impractical. We are all isolated to our own classrooms and left to our own devices on how to differentiate and support different student needs all at once with terribly short instructional periods. In the end, our students suffer the most.