Sped kids in general ed.

I'm a resource room teacher.

I take pride in what I do. I am good at delivering specially designed instruction and I like providing a safe and friendly learning environment for my students.

More and more the idea of co-teaching has come up.

According to one of my professors, there is a lot of research to support kids not doing pull out instruction. The research says that kids pick up on the skills they need faster when they are immerced in it. That is why there is not such emphasis on life skills in high schools anymore as well.

That is great, but I can't help but worry about the kids I have who fall through the cracks in the general education classroom environment.

They are always the nice kids. Really, they are the kids who do nothing. They don't raise there hands for help, they don't talk to the other kids in class, they don't do more then the bare minimum of the assignment. Most of them wait for the teacher to put the answers on the board and then just copy it. When the teacher is giving whole group instruction, there minds are a million miles away.

They are not immerced in their environment. They are hiding in it.

The nice thing about pull out is: there is no where to hide when there are only 3 - 5 kids in a group. They have to talk. And they do talk. They have to work. And they do work.

I have a boy who goes through periods of doing nothing in his general education class when things are not going well at home. He just shuts down. But he comes into my room and he works consistently everyday. He is getting to the point where he is at grade level in math and getting closer to it in reading. But what will happen to his math when I don't pull him for instruction anymore? How will his skills stay up when he goes through several weeks of not doing anything at all?

It's a scary thought to me. 

At my school all the kids do core math and core reading instruction, with supplimental math and reading at different times of the day. it works. 

Sometimes in sped it feels like we break things for the sake of fixing them. We wait for a student's scores to be low before teaching them. We restructure for the sake of restructing, and when that doesn't work, we move on to something else.

I want to do my job well. I know how to deliver high quality specially designed instruction. Let me teach.