Matt Lindner

EDU280
02/19/2020

Midterm
Teacher Interview and Classroom Observation
Part 1

Mr. Villegas is an intermediate autism teacher at Vegas Verdes Elementary School here

in Las Vegas. He has taught in this position for five years and started out as a special education

teacher due to his affinity for exceptional children. Being an intermediate autism teacher, he is

required to service children from grades three to five in a self-contained classroom which sits in

an open campus setting.

Upon entering the room, you are greeted with an abundance of posters on the wall,

mostly superhero oriented and almost all with either a behavior or a classroom rule associated

with it. Turning to the left after entering the room is the teacher’s desk situated in the far corner

with the usual desktop computer and printer placed on top. Directly to the right of the entrance

is a shelf with hooks where the students’ backpacks and jackets are hung.

Moving further into the class you notice eight desks lined up in a two-by-four format

going left to right with chairs accompanying them. The West wall has a bookshelf completely

overflowing with books, another with commonly used learning materials and manipulatives, and
in between them is the Smartboard. Finally, in the far-right corner lies the sink, soap dispenser,

paper towel dispenser, and drinking fountain.

The far back wall has two large woodgrain wardrobe style cabinets, one of which is used

to store more learning materials and the other to store the students’ reinforcers. Continuing to

the other back corner lining the East wall is a table with three desktop computers with

headphones for the students to use. There are also two smaller tables, one next to the computers,

and another directly to your left as you enter the room. These are used for small group or

individualized instruction. Lastly, there is a Captain America rug on the floor in the Southeast

corner in front of the computers used to designate the student’s “play” area during their break.

There are seven students in his class grades three to five. Their ages range from eight to

twelve and they are all boys. There are several cultures and ethnicities present in this class.

They include three Caucasian, a Salvadorian, a Mexican, an African-Latino, and finally one who

is Native American. They were all born here in the United States, and only one of them speaks a

second language which is Spanish. This classroom is in a Title 1 school, so it isn’t uncommon

for there to be many children who come from low-income homes. This is the case here where

several of the students live in severe poverty and only two of them come from what most would

consider middle-class homes.

The students were placed here because they exhibit some form of behavior consistent

with autism spectrum disorder. Even though this classroom is labeled as self-contained, three of

the students leave for several hours of their day and go to the resource room in order to learn in a

less restrictive environment among their typical peers while working on the subjects they need
the most help with. There is one student who is completely non-verbal, and two others who have

very limited language, while the other four can carry a conversation but still need speech

services. The severity of their disorder varies quite a lot from the severely impaired student who

cannot talk, write, or be left alone, to others who are very high on the spectrum and can be

trusted to leave the classroom on their own and are self-sufficient.

I found the children to be completely fascinating. While a child may not even be able to

write his or her name, they do possess other abilities that most of us do not. I saw a severely

autistic, non-verbal, student put a 500-piece puzzle together without needing the picture in a

matter of an hour. Another can’t remember what you just instructed him to do yet comes to

school everyday with the entire lunch menu memorized verbatim. Their skill sets are

super-specialized and can be quite impressive to observe.

Going into this observation, I made very few assumptions on what I would see, but there

were a few that were confirmed and a few that were proven incorrect. I did expect to see a little

more diversity in the classroom decorations. Understanding that the class has no girls it then

made sense why all the posters where aimed at boys, but as for any multiculturalism being

visible, I was unable to find much of anything. There was a map, but only showing the United

States, and your standard American flag hanging above the whiteboard, but that was about it. As

I looked over the technology present in the room such as desktop computers, headphones, etc., I

wasn’t surprised to see that most of it was outdated or damaged. This was something that I had

already been prepared for, but I was pleased to see that there were several tablets in the

classroom with learning applications installed on them as well as games the students could play

during their break time. As for the instruction itself, it was very direct and to the point due to the
structure needed to maintain classroom management in an autism class and didn’t include the

purposeful addition of other cultures to the lesson. Finally, when looking through the books

available for use on the bookshelf, I did see a wide variety of cultures represented in the

selection.

Part 2

Vegas Verdes Elementary School has a vast array of students from all cultures attending.

As Hispanic or Latino being the most prevalent at about 78%, African American, Caucasian,

Pacific Islander, Native American, and others are represented. They have students from

countries such as Afghanistan, Ukraine, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and India as well.

Because of this, teachers need to be especially sensitive to all cultures whereas their class could

have students from many different places. By integrating aspects of multiculturalism into the

curriculum is helps these children associate better with the content and gives them a better sense

of belonging.

Mr. Villegas was born in Mexico and brought to the United States as a young child.

Growing up in El Paso, Texas, having two parents who only spoke Spanish, and not knowing

English himself made it very hard to fit in at first. He was placed in a bi-lingual classroom to

help him learn English until he was in the fifth grade so he understands how hard it can be to

assimilate and knows the value of such programs that help second language learners enter the

school system here in the United States.

 In the intermediate autism setting he admits that it’s hard to incorporate multiculturalism

into his lessons. Having students from so many different backgrounds and vastly different

intellectual levels makes it almost impossible to differentiate his lessons to include all cultures.

The most effective ways that he includes other cultures is by reading books containing subject

matter from around the world and those of famous people from other ethnicities. He also makes

it a point to present and explain holidays of other cultures even if they aren’t celebrated.

Diversity in and of itself plays a role in almost every teachers’ style of educating, the

only difference is to what degree. Coming from an immigrant family he is very understanding of

the difficulties that minorities face even at a young age and does his best to alleviate these

roadblocks as best as possible. Because he and his parents are both from another country, it

helps him relate to the parents of his students and attend to their needs and concerns with greater

sympathy than someone who has never experience these issues. As for cultural activities taking

place in the classroom, things such as videos, worksheets and books are all meant to represent

and equal amount of culturalism. Holidays are celebrated with respect to all students and those

who have cultures who don’t partake in certain ones are given the opportunity to do another

activity or join if they like.

Question 1: What is the hardest part of communicating with your students and their parents?

Answer: Luckily Mr. Villegas is fluent in Spanish, which is the most popular of the second

language learners in his school. Many of the problems that other teachers face when

communicating with the parents of their students when they don’t speak the same language

doesn’t apply. The hardest part of communicating with the students doesn’t come with the
language barrier but one created by their disability causing them speech and language

difficulties, making it hard to understand their needs and wants.

Question 2: Are their usually more boys than girls in your autism classes?

Answer: Yes, in fact he hasn’t has a girl in this class in three years. From what he can see, boys

that have autism spectrum disorder outnumber the girls about four to one.

Question 3: What is the most challenging thing about having children from such diverse

backgrounds?

Answer: The hardest part comes to having celebrations at school for all the different holidays

and occasions. You never know, unless you ask upfront, which holidays certain families

celebrate and what the various belief systems are throughout your class until it’s usually too late.

If there’s no communication between the parents and teachers on this subject, teachers just

assume that every student is included when many parents strictly prohibit such celebrations such

as Halloween and Christmas which can cause a rift in the teacher-parent relationship.

Question 4: In what way are children from different cultures most alike?

Answer: The easiest answer is that they all like to have fun. When it comes down to it, kids are

kids no matter where they come from. Children in elementary school, especially the younger

ones, live in a sort of ignorant bliss without any knowledge of the problems going on in their

environment. They play together as if they are all from the same place. It’s only when they get

older that they start to notice the differences between themselves and start to form stereotypes

and prejudices which further impact their social and educational lives.
Question 5: What are your feelings about having or not having an assimilation process for

students from different countries or who speak different languages?

Answer: From his own experience he can see the enormous value in programs such as bilingual

classrooms or temporary transitional classrooms. They take students who don’t know a word of

English and who only arrived in the United States a week ago and throw them into classrooms.

The teachers can’t communicate with them, nor them with the teachers, so who is really gaining

anything from this current style of integration we’re using. A short-term school environment

where children from other cultures and languages can learn the common practices of school here

in the United States would no doubt set these at-risk students up for success by giving them that

extra time to absorb some of the culture they are now a part of.