RUNNING HEAD: Success for All

Success For All

Vanessa McMahon
McGill University

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Stage One: Background

I am currently student teaching secondary one, two and three ELA classes at James Lyng
high school. James Lyng is an inner-city public school that serves a small, culturally and
academically diverse population of less than two-hundred students. Over half of the students
have coded learning difficulties and disorders, which results in classrooms that display a wide
range of academic and behavioural needs and abilities. Given the diversity of the classes, with
sizes ranging between eighteen to twenty-eight students, I have had the unique opportunity to
encounter many different types of students and learner profiles in one space. I have selected
Jeremy*, a secondary two student, to be the focus of my study. Though I could have selected any
number of students, I chose Jeremy because he poses challenges unique to any other student in
his class. Socially, he is awkward and oppositional. He chooses to sit near the back of the class,
is largely alienated from his classmates, and he frequently disrupts and provokes the students
sitting around him; he does so in ways that are difficult to detect when teaching a lesson.
Academically, he requires a lot of extra support, I believe that he would benefit from a dedicated
childcare worker, but given the resources of the school, it is currently impossible for anyone to
work with him beyond the weekly sessions that he is scheduled for with the resource teacher.
*Students name has been changed to protect his identity.
Stage Two: Student Profile
Jeremys main strengths stem from his willingness to seek guidance. He is never shy to
raise his hand, to ask questions during individual seat-work, and he will make sure he knows
what he has to do before he begins his work. That said, given the overall demands of the
classroom, I sometimes find it difficult to focus attention on him as he requires it. He is only able

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to process a single instruction at a time and needs continual verbal reinforcement during lessons.
He has difficulty understanding certain abstract concepts (metaphor/ allusions), and needs very
clearly articulated instructions in order to work.
Jeremy has a below average literacy rate. He has some difficulty spelling (dropped letters
like hauted for haunted; vowel confusion bresh for brush; or instead of are), but he
copes with his difficulty by scanning printed materials for the word he needs and then copying it,
which is a practice I try to encourage. He also mixes verb tenses, often in the same sentences: I
drive slow to the houseI called more police officer. The pace at which he works is slow when
compared to the overall class, but he is able to work independently when given clear instructions
and extra time to complete tasks. His personal writing/ journal entries reveal that he is able to
produce a sequential narrative and that he is highly sensitive. For example, in a journal piece
with the prompt The Face in the Mirror he wrote:
I look in the mirror I see myself and I think to myself what a wonder world we live in
I am so beautiful so or (are) you the mirror is like two of us (sic; parenthetical note
added for clarity).
Jeremy is coded with a mild intellectual delay (21). Socially, he has difficulty relating to
his peers. Though he remains verbally quiet in class, he often disrupts his fellow classmates. He
will throw things (pencils, erasers) when my back is turned, and I have caught him deliberately
knocking things off of other students desks when heading to the pencil sharpener. His
demeanour is often sullen and he never seems to smile or to engage positively with anyone. He is
often the target of bullying behaviours and hostile treatment from his peers. Physically, he is
much smaller than the rest of his peers and he has an older brother in the school who is very

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outgoing and is nearly twice his size. As far as I can tell, his brother does not interact with him
during recess or lunch.
Stage Three: Updates/ Strategies Tried to Date
1) Seating. During the initial days of class Jeremy always sat toward the back of the class. I
think that he did so in an effort to remain anonymous to the teacher and also to project a
certain image to his classmates. I moved him closer to the front so that I was better able
to address his distracting behaviour, and to more directly involve him in the lesson.
Previous to the switch, I found that I had to repeat instructions too often to him because
he was unable to focus sitting where he was. While the shift toward the center of the
room improved his focus but it had the unintended effect of placing him in the centre of
taunting classmates. However, I find it much easier to manage the behaviours of the
taunting students than to reteach concepts to Jeremy, so overall the seat change had a
positive effect on his work.
2) List making. In an effort to keep Jeremy on task during seat-work, I began making stepby-step lists for him to follow. I modeled the process using self-talk while I wrote out a
three to four step process for completing the assigned work. This drastically reduced the
number of times he would raise his hand with the question, What am I supposed to do
now? I am currently in the process of teaching Jeremy to create his own lists. As I
dictate the instruction he now writes the list for himself. Eventually I will give him cues
while explaining the task to the entire class so that he can independently write his own
lists and keep himself on track.
3) Self-Regulated Behaviour/ Impulse Control. This is perhaps the most challenging
aspect among his areas of concern. While I recognise that he is the target of bullying
behaviour, he also has a tendency to engage in aggressive conduct. I have attempted to

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speak with Jeremy about his behaviour in class and in private in an effort to minimize the
reactionary impulses he has toward other students, but he seems more interested in telling
me what he thinks I want to hear (apologies, promises to try to behave better) rather than
having a genuine dialogue. Aside from brief verbal prompts and in class reminders about
appropriate behaviour, I have yet to find a viable solution to this particular area of
concern. I have alerted the behavioural technicians in the school to the problem and I
hope that progress will be made during the course of the year.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Jeremy would benefit from attending the after school homework club/ attending at lunch
tutoring sessions that I provide to the students during the week. I have repeatedly suggested that
he take advantage of the extra help available to him, but he chooses not to attend. Given his
reluctance to seek out extra help outside of class time and his tendency to engage in undesirable
behaviour, I would also recommend that he be put on a school tracer. It would be better if he has
a childcare worker assigned to him, but for now that is not a realistic possibility. If we kept a
record of his performance and regularly communicated it to the administration and to his parents,
the accountability would contribute to his further success.
Happily, Jeremy passed his first term, but he needs to have detailed instructions provided
to him and extra time to complete his work. We have adapted the curriculum expectations in
order to give him a sense of success, but he will need to be incrementally challenged to perform
independently as the year progresses. I would also like to see him paired with a buddy so that he
may begin to build solid peer relationships and integrate himself more fully into the social
aspects of school.