Field Observation

Doriane Zorio-Ricardo

EDU 203

Dr. Dale Warby

 I spent my ten hours of observations with Ms. Jen Robbins a special education teacher

who specializes in the resource field at Goldfarb Elementary School. Ms. Robbins’ primary

reason for becoming a teacher was because she had worked with children with special needs

before and really enjoyed it. This career also gives her more time to spend with her daughter,

being that she is a single mom. One of the main challenges that she has faced so far is the

administration does not seem to value the special education department. Ms. Robbins uses the

KTEA test with her children when writing their Individualized Education Programs. She also

modifies the general education tests and makes her own tests for her students. She reports

progress to the parents via quarterly progress reports on the student’s Individualized Education

Program goals and these accompany the quarterly report cards. Ms. Robbins meets with the

parents of each student annually for the Individualized Education Program meeting. This is

where she reviews the students’ progress on their goals over the last year and what special

education looks like for the next year. She also will make phone calls to the students’ parents to

inform them of behavior issues or to give an update on their child’s progress. There is no grading

involved in Ms. Robbins position. Her time is spend gathering data for Individualized Education

Programs. The only thing that she has to spend time scoring is standardized tests. Ms. Robbin’s

favorite positive reinforcement technique is the monetary system. The monetary system is where

a student earns money for each period of the day that they were successful and at the end of the

day they receive one minute of IPad time for every dollar that they have earned. She also

believes that planned ignoring, redirection, and praise are great techniques to use with the

students. Ms. Robbins is evaluated by the administration four times a year because she is still in

a probationary period. This ends up being three observations and one evaluation. After that she

has a post observation conference where the administration reviews the quality of her lessons and
asks her specific questions about what they observed. If the evaluation turns out to be

unfavorable, she will receive closer supervision and have frequent meetings with the

administration. Ms. Robbins receives support from many different places. She can contact her

facilitator or the other special education teachers for help. She also gets paid professional

development days from the school district, and her Master’s Degree in special education was

also paid for by the school district.

Ms. Robbins goes to three different classrooms with her job as the resource teacher. She

is the intermediate resource teacher for third through fifth grade. I followed her to all of the

inclusion classrooms that she services each day. The first class that I observed was Mrs. Wolf’s

third grade inclusion classroom. The desks were organized in three islands with eight desks in

each island. The teacher and the projector are in the middle of the room and she can see all of her

students from this area. The smart board is located directly in front of the students and the

teacher. Mrs. Wolf uses this to teach all of her lessons via power point. The classroom is large

and is arranged so the students have a lot of space to walk around. This is great for safety reasons

because if there was a fire drill, the students can walk out safely without tripping and falling. The

class is comprised of ten girls and eight boys with approximately eight ELL students. The class

rules are written clearly on the wall for the students to see:

1. Follow directions quickly.

2. Raise your hands for permission to speak.

3. Raise your hands for permission to leave your seat.

4. Make smart choices!

5. Keep your dear teacher happy.

The class schedule was clearly posted in the front of the room. The students have bell work at

7:45am to 8:05am, math at 8:05am to 9:15am, writing from 9:15am to 10:10am, specials from

10:10am to 11:00am, recess and lunch from 11am to 12pm, reading from 12pm to 1:45pm, drills

from 1:45pm to 2:11pm, and dismissal is at 2:11. Mrs. Wolf uses whole brain teaching with the

children so the students are always repeating gestures and sounds during the lesson. While Mrs.

Wolf teaches the lesson, Ms. Robbins goes around the classroom to give support to all the

students who require it. She will also handle any behavior problems while Mrs. Wolfe is

teaching. Ms. Robbins also pulls small groups containing general education students and students

with Individualized Education Programs. This gives more support to students in need and lets

Ms. Robbins work on her special education students’ goals.

The next classroom that I followed Ms. Robbins to was Mrs. Iverson’s fourth grade

inclusion room. Ms. Robbins only joins this classroom during their math lesson because her

instructional assistant does the reading and writing minutes. This class was the quietest

classroom that I have ever observed. The teacher has a calm and quiet voice and she uses her

speaker to address the children and teach lessons. This ensures every student can hear her. Mrs.

Iverson has a student with behavioral problems in her class. He has a hard time focusing and

disrupted her lesson several times while I was there. Mrs Iverson attempted to get the student to

participate and do the work that was given. Eventually, the student was given a check on his

behavior chart that is located on his desk. This chart tells the student what the teachers

expectations are of him. The behavior chart gets signed by the teacher at the end of each week

and informs the parents of the child’s behavior in class. It then gets sent back with a parent

signature. I liked that this method keeps the parents involved in their child’s school day and

perhaps they will be able to help stop some of the child’s reoccurring behaviors that persist in the
classroom. Ms. Robbins did a similar job in this class as in Mrs. Wolf’s classroom except this

time she spent some time modifying an upcoming math exam for her special education students.

Modifying the exam allows the special education students to be able to partake in an exam in the

general education curriculum. A couple examples of how Ms. Robbins modified the exam was;

she made the problems shorter and she re-worded the word problems.

The next classroom that I visited with Ms. Robbins was the fifth grade inclusion. This

classroom has had a substitute teacher named Mrs. Malichy since the beginning of the year

because the inclusion teacher was injured over the summer. I observed that the students were

more off task and the substitute teacher used yelling as a behavior strategy. I noticed that when

the substitute yelled a lot of the students blocked her out and continued the same behaviors. I will

not be using yelling to control behavior problems when I am a teacher because it does not seem

to fix the problems. Ms. Robbins walked around the class and squashed a lot of behaviors be re-

direction the students. Then, Ms. Malichy continued her writing lesson. Ms. Robbins pulled a

small group of students to the back of the classroom for writing help. She let the students write

while she gave them tips and edited the students’ papers. She used some whole brain teaching to

help the students to remember the correct sentence structure with capitals and punctuation. This

group was also comprised on general and special education students. While Ms. Robbins helped

this group, Ms. Malichy walked around and helped the rest of the class.

I also spent some time talking to the vice principal, Mr. Aaron Walker. He described to

me what the most important qualities were for a new hire teacher. He likes the teachers to be

moldable, learn from their mistakes, be self-reflective, and have tons of energy. He stated that

most classrooms have behavior issues because their teacher can be boring. Teachers with a lot of

energy deal with less of these problems. When Mr. Walker enters the inclusion classrooms, he
expects to see the special education students included to the fullest. He wants them working on

what everyone else is working on and it the general education work can be modified. He does not

want the special education students singled out in any way. He expects to see the special

education teacher in the inclusion room working with everyone. He does not want them to only

work with the special education students. He also would like that the special education teacher

taught the lesson a couple times a week so that the inclusion teacher could walk around and be

the support. In Mr. Walker’s opinion, the best qualities of a special education teacher are

initiative, building relationships with co-teachers and students, keep in mind what’s best for the

students, and adapt what they are doing to the students’ needs.

That was my experience observing the special education resource field. I liked how the

teacher was able to visit different classrooms and help a diverse group of children.