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Self-Reflection: Role of Special Educator/EBD

Sean Laughlin

University of Kansas

SPED 898

Dr. Brasseur-Hock

June 29, 2020

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Self-Reflection: Role of Special Educator/EBD

Introduction

To begin SPED 843, we were assigned to write a short, two-paragraph self-

reflection over how we are as educators as well as the use of Emotional Behavior

Disorder (EBD) students in our school. The first paragraph, I focused solely on how I am

as an educator and my strengths with working with EBD students. The second paragraph

is where I talked about how EBD students are being handled at my school and where

there needs to be a significant change to help the students.

Purpose

The purpose of this assignment was to reflect on how we are as educators,

understand the things that we do well and maybe the things that we need to improve on.

Understanding that EBD students are a large part of special education departments, so

taking the time to see the difficulties that students with EBD have can bring to a

classroom. Landrum talks about how vague EBD is which leads to the challenges for the

students and educators.

Revisions

I chose to redo this assignment because this was my worst assignment I did in my

two years in this program and I wanted to show that my original product that was turned

in for a 63/100 was not a good representation of me as a student. I started this assignment

from scratch like it was just assigned to me besides the fact that I decided to use the same

two references because I felt like both references were still relevant in the message I was

trying to portray in this second draft.

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What was learned

What I learned in redoing this assignment was how kind of broken the EBD

system is and Landrum nailed it on the head that it is because of the vague definition of

what is a an Emotional Behavior Disorder student. I work with these students daily and

the school system is doing them a disservice because of their diagnosis. We as educators

needs to put more emphasis on the correct placement for these students to create the best

learning environment as possible for them.