Inclusion and Teaching in Chicago

I spent my first four or five years of co-teaching and supporting students in the inclusive classroom by reading grade level nonfiction texts and then slowly rewriting the texts at a lower level. I have entire social studies and science books modified to meet the different needs of students. It was nuts! During my fifth or sixth year, I discovered online reading passages and I've never looked back! Here are my top five favorites. 5. The website: www.manythings.org/voa/history/     The pros: It's free, free, free!  There is an audio for everything! The audio is done by people and not robots and some of them are GREAT! There are so many nonfiction resources and topics The American History for English Learners is perfect for social studies      The Cons: The text is not differentiated so the audio component is important There are no comprehension questions built in but the texts are so rich that it makes it easy to come up with your own It would be great to h

People First Language matters so much to me both as a teacher and as a person. This way of talking and thinking is so important to me that sometimes I have a difficult time speaking about it eloquently or meaningfully. This blog is my best shot of doing just that. People First Language is important because it puts the person BEFORE the disability. In an article about People First Language, Kathy Snow writes, "A disability is, first and foremost, a medical diagnosis,  and when we define people by their diagnoses, we devalue and disrespect them as individuals ( www.disabilityisnatural.com/ )." One of the best (and easiest) ways to combat prejudice surrounding disabilities and people with disabilities is to focus on the language that we use. When we put the person before the disability, we are describing what the person  has  and not what the person  is . From a teaching standpoint, this is important because the way we talk about students ends up- subconsciously or

This is really a dream come true! Sandy and Jenn- two middle school co-teachers- agreed to give math centers a try for their 6/7 grade math class. I became obsessed! I trolled the internet for good explanations and organization around math rotations or math centers. I found the perfect resource at one of my all time favorite sites  right here.  Stephanie from Teaching in Room 6 does a great job of breaking down how to set up math rotations. I used her blog and worksheets as a guideline to make this work for the 6th/7th grade split. So, here's how I broke it down: 1. Structure: The 6th/7th split has two co-teachers and 16 students. There are also two different tutors that come in once a week each. This means that on 2 out of every 5 days there are three adults to every 16 students. A dream scenario for small group instruction. We have 60 minutes of math class time. Math time looks like: 9:05- 9:10     Do Now (entrance slip) 9:10- 9:30     Rotation 1 9:30- 9:50     Rotat

Yesterday after school I met with the middle school team in the school library. It was a Thursday- the day the general education lesson plans are due- and everybody was busy. Even so, everyone made the time and commitment to spend what ended up being around an hour of time to talk about the nitty gritty day to day expectations and procedures of co-teaching. We are five weeks into this school year. We had already had a co-teaching PD. Schedules were made for both the general education teachers and learning specialists. Small group instruction, team teaching, and alternative teaching had already started to take place. Now was time to reflect on those last five weeks and put some true norms in place. Attached is the chart we made as well as the typed up version given to every middle school teacher. I came up with the norms surrounding IEPs but the team came up with the rest. Honestly, some of these norms are different than what I have done in the past. But that's kind of the