Students With Special Needs or Exceptionalities Background Profile/Reflections

For my Students with Special Needs or Exceptionalities reflection I chose to observe a

student with an intellectual disability that has an IEP. This student is a 6th grader in Beginning

Band that plays clarinet. Student A struggles with educational performance but that does not

stop them from being alert and attentive in class. The student enjoys school and talking to their

peers, but struggles keeping up with the content due to low educational performance. The

student was tested in all subjects that focus on core class performance and intelligence

performance. Student A scored very low in all of the categories and was diagnosed with Autism

through private testing that the student’s parents chose to do. Some things that my teacher does

to accommodate this student is provide them with preferential seating in the front row. This

helps limit distractions so that the student can be attentive and focused during instruction.

Student A benefits from listed directions and a class outline. My cooperating teacher provides

this by having a google slide up every class with instructions for students when they first arrive

to class and a brief outline of the schedule for the period.

I plan to modify my teaching by providing this student with extra resources if necessary

to help them keep up with the current curriculum. Whether this is on paper or through the

internet, having a little help outside of class will help this student be able to participate with the

group more frequently. Another thing that I plan to do that will help this student is to reinforce the

beginning of class procedures and go over the class schedule outline verbally. Visual cues help

this student greatly. I plan to provide this student with visual cues such as reinforcing the

measure in the music or the counts with my hands/fingers. This student receives speech

therapy and has been improving since. I plan to modify my teaching by giving this student

different opportunities to work on their speech such as initiating conversations about the music

we are working on, or asking the student questions about the content to work on the process of

thinking through the question and formulating a response.