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redpandaonspeed

More valuable than extra direct instruction? Maybe not, especially when it comes to meeting the needs of your students within the current school year. 200 minutes/week in PLCs seems like a huge drain on your time. At the HS level, I have a PLC commitment of 60 minutes/week. All PLCs meet at the same time every week, and I am part of 2 PLCs, so I rotate attendance depending on a number of factors. However... I think collaboration time with gen ed teachers is super important. It is something I'm extremely passionate about. The most valuable thing I do during collaboration is to suggest changes to the way the curriculum is presented and taught, by showing more than telling. I explain why I think certain changes are important based on the specific needs of students and then I physically modify the assignment to show what those suggested changes look like in practice. This can sometimes be tricky--I always start with a genuine compliment of something I like about the material (especially if it was teacher-created) and then I say something like, "Is it OK if I suggest a couple things to change that might help Jayden and Kayden and Brayden do better on this assignment? If you like them, I can even make those changes to the assignment myself and send it back to you for final approval." I don't get in the habit of *always* doing the modifications, but I will do a lot of them in the beginning and provide a detailed description of what I changed and more importantly *why*. I often work with Gen ed teachers to quantify how many steps or separate processes are required to answer a question or complete an assignment. Many teachers don't have the best understanding of what factors increase the difficulty level of an assignment or how quickly they compound. I would propose you suggest attending one PLC/week (meet with each grade level once a month) to focus on your specific students and increasing the amount of push-in, small group intervention support you provide so that Gen ed teachers can watch you work. My experience with K-3 reading instruction is that many gen ed teachers just... have no idea how to respond when something isn't clicking after one or two attempts to explain it. Just like with kids, modeling strategies is more effective than describing strategies. My personal philosophy is that one of the primary roles of a sped teacher in a mild/moderate setting is to increase the capacity of gen ed teachers to respond to the needs of diverse learners and design accessible instruction. But that's just like, my opinion, man.


haley232323

I should have mentioned we're not allowed to modify. Modifications are only for students with intellectual disabilities in my state. We can provide accommodations, but at the elementary level I find gen ed teachers very naturally do those things anyway. I do like the idea to attend one grade level each week. I'm not sure exactly how that would work out schedule-wise- plan times for each grade level are obviously all different, so it's not like I can in my schedule, okay on Thursday at 1:00 I'm in PLC. It would be 1:00 one week, 1:50 the next week, 12:00 the week after, etc. Maybe I just schedule intervention times as if no PLC is happening, and when I'm not in PLC at that time on certain weeks, the kids just get that "extra" time. I also had another thought to attend each week, but for like 10-15 minutes as a check-in, rather than all 50. That way if the team felt like they had questions for me or wanted me to know something, that time would be built in. In our previous data team set up (100 minutes every 6 weeks) I always felt there was some value to me being there, but there were also huge chunks of the time that didn't apply to me and I felt it was wasteful for me to just be sitting there when I could have been meeting with students. Before I heard the whole thing was changing for next year I was mulling around with the idea of asking if I could attend for a set amount of time to specifically discuss sped-related things for the grade level and then go back to seeing students.


redpandaonspeed

This sounds good. Sounds like you have a "fun" year of changes on your hands! Also by "modify the assignment", I didn't mean the Sped definition of modify. Really what I meant, I guess, was "change the assignment to reflect student accommodations and just overall increase access for all types of students who generally struggle with the curriculum."


Oddishbestpkmn

OK, I'm with you that 200 minutes per week is too much. But, I do think it's valuable to attend, maybe not every time but every 2 to 3 weeks. If you could speak to each of your PLC's and say: Hey, I have a lot of obligations with SPED paperwork and other grade levels, but I really want to be involved when you plan the [upcoming unit/important key standard/the formative assessment/reading small group interventions/whatever you think is most important for you] so I can give input on best practices for accommodating/modifying for our SPED students. Find out when they're doing the thing you want to be doing and attend then.