Special education teacher for grades skills for your resume and career

Empathy, patience, and a fearless capacity to critically examine the nature of our education practices (both as an individual practitioner and as an active member of a field that is in constant evolution). Education priorities have prioritized job placement, skills demanded by industry, and individual attainment. Despite warnings regarding impending climate change, increased social disparity, and a reemergence of authoritarian government systems globally, our education priorities have shifted with minimal effort to meet these challenges since I entered the field over two decades ago.

COVID has shined a spotlight on flaws and opportunities teachers might seize. Our field is uniquely positioned to address these challenges by influencing measurable shifts in human behavior so that our children are poised to adjust social behavior, governmental policy, and economic trends. We have an opportunity to celebrate communal success over individual gain, critical examination over immediate and convenient answers, and global mindedness over xenophobia. Many say there is no going back to the way it was before COVID. In the case of education, that might not be such a bad thing.

It would be important for a special education teacher applicant to have experience administering standardized assessments and to be able to list specific examples of names of those assessments. These could include state assessments administered for NCLB purposes or norm-referenced assessments administered to students who are undergoing the child study or eligibility (or re-evaluation) process. Additionally, successful candidates can articulate not only standard classroom technology hardware and software systems in which they may be proficient but can also specifically name examples of adaptive and assistive technology equipment and programs they have used with students for IEP accommodations. Finally, special education teachers must also have skills in data collection and analysis, as they are responsible for setting measurable individualized targets for student performance, gathering regular data to assess growth toward those targets as skills are taught, and then analyzing those data to make instructional decisions. They also need to be able to use and interpret these data and other assessment data for stakeholders (such as parents) and work with the IEP team to plan appropriate services, accommodations, and placements for students based on measurable outcomes.

I think that learning is on a continuum. By advancing their degrees and graduate credit, teachers can move up the district’s salary schedule while continuing to perfect their craft.

New faculty will have to demonstrate an increased ability to differentiate instruction and work with the general education faculty to meet students where they are and implement techniques to accelerate the learning of all students who may have experienced COVID-related gaps in knowledge. Specifically, these skills would be related to explicit instruction and Direct Instruction, as well as other evidence-based techniques. Applications of instructional technologies mediated through computers and tablets, peers, and teachers will need to be used. An example would be related to questioning, having students respond to teacher questions in various ways. The most basic of these responses would be a binary response, such as right false questions next to a provided set of choices for students to select. Then, the most difficult of reactions - a production response, would show students' in-depth understanding. All of the above would be driven by the new faculty's experience with assessment and assessment practices. The outcomes of assessment, both formal and informal, will drive instruction.

Another skill or activity to be undertaken will be an intimate knowledge of the standards students must meet and resource materials available in their respective schools to help meet those standards. The textbook is not the curriculum or the standards but a vehicle to achieve those standards. By familiarizing the curriculum, educators will better handle those prerequisite skills needed to perform at the highest levels.

School districts are seeking resilient teachers. These teachers can teach using a variety of different instructional delivery systems (traditional face to face, remote or hybrid instruction). ALL of these formats will be desired after the health pandemic. Districts will continue to use a variety of instructional formats for a variety of reasons (e.g. health-related needs, weather related, natural disasters).