Educational Blogging

 Before I created my own educational blog, I hadn't considered the amount of learning opportunities it could provide to both me as a teacher and my students. As a teacher, blogging is a great way to express your teaching beliefs to your students and families and keep them updated on important aspects of the world of education that might impact them. As a student who created this blog as an assignment, I see how many benefits blogging to learn can bring to students. Vanderbilt University elaborates, "Blogs can be spaces for informal or formal writing by students, and the capacity of blogs to support multiple forms of media (images, videos, links, and so on) can help students bring their creativity to their communication". Furthermore, knowing that you are writing to an audien

Woman typing on a laptop.

ce greater than just your teacher, can make writing feel more rewarding.

Reading other educational professionals' blogs can help create a learning community of teachers wanting to continue to grow and listen to new ideas. Reading my peers' blogs was a great way for me to learn different perspectives and new great ideas that I will bring into my own classroom one day. For example, in a peer's blog about classroom management, she writes about how we can help our students feel emotionally secure in our classroom by creating explicit classroom expectations that value open communication, respect, and consistent routines. Another peer's blog about the whole-child approach was a great reminder to value each and every student as an individual and honor their individual needs. Furthermore, I had the opportunity to hear about my peers' own experiences with these educational topics. One of my peer's wrote about their own experiences with English Language Learners and how passionate they are about helping this population of students.

I really enjoyed my own experiences blogging and I think it is a great way to share information about my teaching styles, important events in the classroom, and other information with my students and their families. I also have learned the value of blogging from a student's perspective. It allowed me to participate in my own learning creatively and in a more flexible form. It felt nice knowing that the work I was putting into researching and writing was going to be more worthwhile since more people than just my professor have access to reading my work. 

Family Factors/Home Environment

There is considerable research done in the field of education that studies the impact that family factors and home environments can effect academic success for students. In Dr. James Muthee Muola's research paper titled A Study of the Relationship Between Academic Achievement Motivation and Home Environment Among Standard Eight Pupils, he explains his findings that many home environmental factors contribute to student's academic motivation. For example, his findings showed that students that come from small families rather than large families have greater academic success and motivation because parents of smaller families can take time to help each child and praise them individually while parents of large families are busier meeting each family members' basic needs. He also explains that his findings show low correlation between parental encouragement and academic achievement motivation which could imply that too much parental encouragement could cause the student to become anxious and fearful of failure which could lead to a decrease in academic motivation. Further than academic motivation, family factors and home environment can also effect how mentally present and open to learning the child is during the school day. This can also impact how socially accepted they are by their peers.

A family who is standing in a yard in front of their house 

From the time I have spent in the classroom, I have bene able to see the effects a students home life can have on their educational career. Whether it be on their academic performance, or their social experiences at school, the effects of their lives outside of school on their lives inside of school is substantial. I once had a student in a class I was shadowing that was completely mentally absent each Friday because she was dreading going home for the weekend. This student came from a very large family and had very significant mental and physical disabilities. Although it was sad to see, my heart was warmed that the teacher I was shadowing was able to create a safe place for this student where she felt happy and seen. I have also seen the effects of too much parental pressure being put on students' and the effects that this has on their education. It is understandable that the child would feel fear of failure and begin to withdraw from academic content. Although there can be some negative effects the student's home lives have on their education, there is just as much good. Parents are superheroes; they work tirelessly during the day to provide for their families, and then tirelessly at night to be there for their kids and their needs. It is important as a teacher to keep in mind that each parent is doing the very best they can in their given position, and that it is not our place to judge what is going on at home. 

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act

Judge gavel and puzzle
pieces with blue background.

The 1960s and 1970s was a time period full of reform for minority groups in the United States. Most people recognize this time period for making great strides for females and people of different ethnicities, but there was also a great amount of progress made for people with disabilities. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was signed into effect by President Gerald Ford in 1975. The IDEA website defines this law as, "a law that makes available a free appropriate public education to eligible children with disabilities throughout the nation and ensures special education and related services to those children" (IDEA). The IDEA tells states and public agencies how to provide over 7.5 million eligible children with special education, related services, and early intervention. Furthermore, the IDEA authorizes formula grants to support special education, early intervention, and related services as well as discretionary grants to support various other resources to help people with disabilities.

The IDEA is something that I am very passionate about as a special educator. I am proud of the people who advocated for their rights and pushed for change. Before the IDEA, students with disabilities were left behind and were not given a fair chance at the success they were always capable of achieving. Now, the public school system is held accountable to doing right by each child, with or without a disability. I see the wonderful effects of IDEA each day, whether in what I am learning in my special education acts or what I am seeing in the classrooms I visit each week. The IDEA provides funding to educators and parents to provide the tools necessary to improve educational outcomes for each student. It also provides funding to research being done to advance and validate best teaching practices for this group of students. The impacts that the IDEA have had on people with disabilities is never ending.

Standardized Testing and Students with Disabilities

Standardized tests are a controversial topic in the education field. Some argue that they are a great way to gauge where students are performing compared to their peers, and others argue that a standardized test is not a sufficient way to collect reliable and meaningful data. Students with disabilities must participate in taking most standardized tests, even though these types of exams are not appropriate for this group of students. Findings from documents from the National Center on Educational Outcomes (NEO) and the National Center of Systemic Improvement (NCSI) show that students with disabilities continually fail standardized tests because they are not receiving instruction that would prepare them to pass this type of exam. Furthermore, this group of students could know the material, but need a different way of expressing their knowledge. However, multiple choice and writing essays is not conducive to these needs.

A hand holding a pencil and filling in bubbles
on a multiple choice exam.

Personally, I do not believe that standardized tests are a good measure of knowledge for any student, whether they have a disability or not. These kinds of high-stakes exams put a lot of pressure on students to perform well, as well as putting a great deal of pressure on teachers to prepare their students for the exam. Teachers should be teaching their students to answer correctly on a standardized test, rather than teaching them and assessing them in ways that suite their needs best. However, it is common to see teachers delivering exams in the format standardized exams are delivered in so that their students become used to taking those tests. For students with high-incidence disabilities, standardized tests are even less appropriate. The state mandates that appropriate accommodations be allowed for those students, but these accommodations barely scratch the surface of leveling the playing field. For students with moderate to significant disabilities, standardized tests are absolutely not appropriate. As the NEO and NCSI found, this group of students is not engaging in the same academic content as their peers, and therefore will not be familiar with the items on the standardized exams. Furthermore, many of these students have experiential deficits where they have not had the life experiences that would give them the background knowledge needed to be successful on the exam.