Struggling Readers in The Math Classroom
Deficits and Disabilities in the Special Education Math Classroom
By law, American public schools have to provide specific types of resources and accommodations for children with disabilities. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) states that a “child with a disability” means a child:
with intellectual disabilities, hearing impairments (including deafness), speech or language impairments, visual impairments (including blindness), serious emotional disturbance (referred to in this chapter as “emotional disturbance”), orthopedic impairments, autism, traumatic brain injury, other health impairments, or specific learning disabilities3.
Whether you are a licensed Special Education teacher or a General Education teacher, Individualized Education Plans (IEP) and 504 plans should be very familiar. The IEPs and 504 plans provide pertinent information, especially to the use of word problems in the mathematics classroom. Careful and strategic planning should be devoted to instruction, assignments, and activities in the special education and co-taught classrooms. Many times teachers are faced with designing lesson plans with students who have reading and math disabilities in mind. It presents a challenge, but that is a task for the Special Education teacher to figure out.
As with other school districts, Richmond is guided by pacing charts that suggest the amount of time a teacher should spend on certain objectives. Of course, there is hardly enough time to cover what you want to address. Many urban school districts have transient populations, attendance problems, behavioral issues, and lack of parental involvement or parental accountability for students with disabilities. These issues are a recipe for constantly playing make-up or ‘fix-up,’ which is essentially covering just enough material to move on to the next objective. In the long run, the students are the major stakeholders who lose. We are not doing them any justice. I developed this unit for those students. The math word problem sets in this unit should be easily adaptable in the special education daily routine as a warm-up, exit ticket, or remediation exercise.
Deficits in the General Education setting with Word Problems
My experiences in the general education and special education classrooms have afforded me unique perspectives on student personalities: strengths and weakness, motivation, effective/ineffective strategies—to name a few relevant traits. The deficits in the students with IEPs and without IEPs in the co-taught general education classroom are sometimes similar. It is not uncommon to have ‘general education’ students with deficits comparable or sometimes even worse than some of their peers with IEPs. Why is this? Students who “fly under the radar” or go unnoticed can, over time, develop deficiencies in math and reading. I want this unit to be a valuable resource to help them. Again, the math word problem sets can be easily adaptable in the co-taught setting as a warm-up, exit ticket, or remediation exercise.
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