Morgan Logan

SPEC_ED 420
9/20/17

Reflection: Meeting with special education teacher

There are no students with IEPs in our classroom so I sat down and met with the special

education teacher and asked her a few questions. I was really excited for this meeting because

this is all new information to me and it will apply to me in my future. The first topic we

discussed was how they keep track of progress of students with disabilities. She mentioned that

this year they are doing something a little different, they keep track of the progress within their

new curriculum. The curriculum has special areas for the teacher to keep track of students

progress. She has a personal classroom checklist for literacy that identifies areas such as fluency

and accuracy to keep track of students progress, which she does once a week. She also keeps

track of student progress with writing samples that she does three times a week. This surprised

me because I didnt realize how vital this is to students, teachers, and parents.

Another topic we discussed was the process in which you can refer a student who you

suspect may have a disability. For a teacher to refer a student, they would first need to fill out a

SAT (student assistant team) form. This form would state your concerns and basically request a

meeting with the teacher, principal, sped teacher, speech specialist, and whoever else is on the

team. At this meeting the team will decide if this student needs a special academic placement.

Then the child gets put on a list to meet with the academic team to discuss the concerns and the

team will decide on moving forward with the testing or request a better alternative for the

student. I also asked her about assessments they use for evaluations and progress monitoring. For

progress monitoring they use curriculum based assessments. They use Woodcock-Johnson for

cognitive assessments, WIAT III (Wechsler Individual Achievement Test), and the Brigance test

that is used more commonly on kindergarten.