What Does it Take to Become a Special Educator?
Deciding Whether or Not to Teach Special Education
Dec 5, 2008
Considering whether or not to become a special educator? There are several things to keep in mind before making the decision to teach children with special needs. Patience, creativity, knowledge and time are all necessary for becoming the best special educator you can be.
Patience Required
Students with special needs require a special kind of patience. It may take much more repetition for a child with a disability to learn a simple task than it would take a typical child with no disability. Given this, the teachers who work in the special education realm, must patiently continue to repeat lessons, reword statements, and not give up.
Creativity Necessary to Teach
Teaching in a special education classroom or an inclusion classroom takes great creativity. Creating modified assignments that will enable all students to learn, even those with the greatest challenges, takes teaching that is outside the box. There is no curriculum for teaching students with special needs. Teachers cannot develop one set of lesson plans and reuse them year after year. Each child takes a new and creative look at each skill. The lessons and ideas developed by special education teachers go in a virtual "tool box" that the teacher can pull from as needed, even as the teacher continually adds new tools to the box.
Knowledge and Learning
Knowledge about each disability is of tantamount importance for the special educator. Students with ADHD learn very differently and take different modifications than students who have mental retardation or a writing disability. Many times students with one learning disability have another, so a student with a math disability may also have a writing disability. New research comes out all the time and new strategies are being developed for how to more effectively teach students with disabilities. Continuous learning is part of the job of the special educator.
Time and Computer Savvy
It requires more time to teach special education students than it does to teach regular education teachers. You have to do all the normal teacher jobs of grading, lesson planning, teaching, and parent conferences. Along with these things, you must also prepare data sheets to keep track of both formal and many informal assessments for the IEP, modify lessons and tests from other teachers, participate in the IEP meetings with parents, and test students who are being referred for special needs services.
Computer savvy, although not required, is very helpful to the special educator. Being able to use the computer for the creation of lesson plans, data sheets, grades and assignment modifications will save you the time of doing all of this by hand. If you do not already possess this computer knowledge, there are classes and possibly in-service opportunities through your school to help you learn.
If you have a passion for helping students with disabilities, that is more than half of the battle. The rest of what is required of a special educator will fall into place as pursue a teaching career. These students need an educator to stand up for them, and defend their right to learn.
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