Prompt # 3: What are you doing to meet the needs of your special education students? If you do not have special education students, how are you meeting the needs of your low students? Have you met with your school's pre-referral group about these students?

As mentioned in prior discussions, most of the students in the high school I instruct in are deficient in some core subject and it will most likely be either reading and writing English. While I have cater my classes to individuals that lack reading comprehension and have evidenced success, I find it very difficult to assist students that have verbal communication problems. Firstly, while they know I can understand them when they speak to me in Spanish, I legally cannot respond to them in their most proficient language and thus speak to them in English. Secondly, stopping instruction and focusing too much time on the few students these circumstance would take an enormous amount of instruction time. As a remedy, I allow students to work in groups so that they can use their partner as a resource to solve simple issues, and always attempt to explain normal words, used casually in conversation, and explain them so English deficient students know what was said.

When I do sense a students has a problem that is not typical of other students, communication with the school's SPED instructor is started and eventually observations begin to identify if the students does need special instruction. Unfortunately, I am new to teaching so the few conversations I've had with the SPED instructor have only mentioned testing after observations are finished; after that I have no clue of what the next steps.