Special Education for Beginners | Managing Paraprofessionals, Special Education Strategies, First Year Sped Teachers, Special Ed Overwhelm, Paperwork for Special Education Teachers

Episode 93: What Parents Want Special Education Teachers to Know Supporting our parents should be high up on your priority list. One way to do this is to provide parents with a Parent Handbook . This handbook is the perfect introduction into the confusing world of Special Education and will show your parents that you want to work together with them to give their child the best possible education....

Episode 92: 3 Ways to Prep for the School Year Before You Step Foot in the Classroom Today's show talks about next school year. I know...I know...but hear me out! I'm not trying to stress you out by making you think about next school year when you just finished last school year. The purpose of this episode is just the opposite. If you are anything like me, the last thing you want to thin...

Ep: 91 Teacher to Teacher Leader: Providing Special Educators with a Middleman On today’s show, we have our first guest repeat. I’m excited to have Heather Cacioppo from Full Sped Ahead back with us to talk about all things Teacher Leadership.  As I stated on an episode or 2 ago, I will be making the change this fall to move into a leadership role within my district to be an instructional coach fo...

Episode 90: How to Lead Without Micromanaging Your Staff On today’s show, I’m going to be sharing about a very important role you have as a special education teacher…that of a leader...leading your staff in the day to day operations of a special education department. But as a leader, it's important you aren't implementing a micromanaging style of leadership. In this episode, we break dow...

Episode 89: The Importance of Being Coachable Today’s show is all about the importance of being coachable. The best teachers are those who are constantly questioning their practice and reflecting on how to improve. But just like individuals in other fields, teachers need personal and professional coaching. We need someone in our corner who “gets” us… someone who speaks our language and asks us the...

Episode 88: 5 Skills Good Special Educators Have So by recording this episode, I hope that I’m able to reach those individuals who are ready to go the extra miles that it takes to be a good special educator. After doing this job for almost 3 decades, I feel there are some essential skills that special education teachers need to either have, or learn quickly so that they can set themselves up for s...

Episode 87: 3 End-of-the-Year Organizational Tips for Special Educators As we are wrapping up yet another school year, I know better than anyone how easy and how tempting it is to just want to be done.  There is so much going on at the end of a school year…field days, parties, assemblies, yearbook signings, finishing up reports and paperwork and you get to the point that you are exhausted and read...

Episode 86: End of School Year Stress: 5 Ways to Calm the Chaos Are you about to pull your hair out with the end of school year chaos? It's a crazy time of the year for special education teachers. We are having to wrap up paperwork and report on progress. We are finishing up testing, communicating with parents and planning for Extended School Year. But it’s very important to take intentional...

Episode 85: Post secondary success for students with special needs This week's guest is Fiona Gonzalez from Sped Adulting. Fiona is a mod/severe high school transition teacher who is in charge of vocational curriculum for the high school and transition students and organizes and runs the on and off campus work experience programs.  During her first year of teaching, she discovered that it was...

Episode 84: Supporting Parents Outside of the Classroom with Autism Consultant Molly Johnson When you hear the words special educator does your brain immediately go to a teacher within a classroom setting who is managing a caseload of students, providing individualized instruction and supporting student’s cognitive, behavioral and physical needs? Yep…mine does too. But being in the classroom isn’t...

Episode 83: The Benefits of Implementing a Therapy Dog at School Today’s episode is all about the benefits of having a therapy dog at a school. You might be thinking… if you are doing the pros, shouldn’t you also do the cons?   So, yes I’ll talk a little bit about the downside but really, the cons are so minimal and so easily fixable that they aren’t really cons at all and do not tip the scale in...

Episode 82: The Benefits of Sensory Fidgets Did you know that a very high percentage of all humans fidget.  I challenge you to think of someone...a colleague, a spouse, a friend, or maybe even yourself.. and you will probably see people bouncing their legs up and down, turning pens over and over in their hands, chewing on things, doodling, picking at their lower lips, pulling at their beard, twist...

Episode 81: How to Write Better PLAAFP Statements for Your IEPs I'm just going to say it...If you are writing "No concerns" as the only 2 words in a statement on a Present Level of Performance section, it's time to step up your game. The PLAAFP (Present Levels of Academic and Functional Performance) is the starting point for the whole IEP and it holds the GOLD! These statements...

Episode #80: 3 Things I Wish I'd Had as a New Teacher I am an avid podcast listener myself and the other day I heard a fellow entrepreneur talking about Teachers Pay Teachers and how if you have a store and you don’t promote your store or you don’t let other people know about your products then you are doing a disservice to them. For me, I’ve always tried to intentionally keep this podcast an...

Episode 79: Help Your Students & Families Get a Good Night's Sleep Did you know that 80% of autistic children have difficulty sleeping? How many times as a special educator have you heard “He just isn’t sleeping well” or “He goes to sleep and then wakes up in the middle of the night” or "It’s going to be a rough day today because she didn’t sleep well.” Often, Autistic children find...

Episode 78: How to Explain Achievement Test Results to Parents Have you been in this situation at an IEP table? It's your turn to explain testing results to parents and you don't know where to begin or how much to include. Your face is red, your neck is splotchy, your pits and palms are sweating and you're positive you're going to be fired on the spot as soon as the meeting is...

Episode 77: How to Plan for a Resource Room This is part 3 of a 3 part series on how to run a resource room. Today is all about how to make plans for working with students as a resource teacher.  As a resource teacher for 27 years, I have changed and modified the way I've done this more times than I can count but the method I currently use works very well and allows  Inclusion: Collaborate wi...

Episode 76: How to Schedule for a Resource Room This week’s episode is part 2 of a 3 part series on how to run a resource room and today we're talking about the HOW  when it comes to planning for and developing a schedule that works for you. Scheduling for a resource room, when you have so many different moving pieces, can be one of the most frustrating aspects of being a sped teacher. You ha...

Episode 75: This week's episode is to follow up on last chat with Amanda Wilp from The Primary Gal where she and I talked about the tips for running a resource room. There was so much that we didn't have a chance to talk about so I'm continuing this conversation for 3 more episodes. Today is part 1 of a 3 part series on how to run a resource program. We are going to talk about how t...

Episode 74: Tips to Running a Resource Room We have a special guest on the show today and she’s so special, I actually recorded her episode not once…but twice! 😂 Amanda Wilp and I talked one evening for over an hour and it was just the best conversation because we have so much in common and chatting with her came easy and natural…but once we were done we realized I had not pressed record. I was s...

Episode 73: How to Support Students with CVI Have you ever heard of the acronym CVI? I hadn't! Even after over 2 decades of teaching, I got to learn something new from today's guest. Today’s guest is Melissa Chalme from Special Achievers and she is joining us to chat about a topic I had absolutely no knowledge about before our talk. And for me, when that happens, I’m like a kid in a cand...

Episode 72: How to Teach Literacy using Story Based Instruction Mentioned in the Show: 10-Step Guide to Begin Creating a TEAM Culture With Your Staff Today’s guest on the show is Laura Hackwell but you might know her as Miss Lulu Special Ed.  Laura is a former middle school self contained special education teacher who has just recently moved into a coaching role for other special education teacher...

Episode 71: Including ALL Students Through Modified Play & Leisure Skills Get the 10 Steps to Creating a Team Culture with Your Paraprofessionals [For Free!] Today’s guest on the show is the face behind ABA Speech with Rose.  Rose and I sat down for a chat about play.  Okay…it’s not that simple but it is a topic that was a lot of fun to talk about because it’s something that gets taken for gra...

Episode 70: The Steps to Take Before & After an IEP Meeting As special educators, we all most likely have a good understanding of the importance of the IEP meeting but today we’re going to back up to help teachers understand that there is a lot of work to put in BEFORE the meeting and there are even things to do AFTER the meeting that you may not be aware of. In today's episode, we are ch...

Episode 69: How to Welcome a New Student and Their Family to Your Classroom Today’s episode is dedicated to something I imagine a lot of special educators take for granted because it's something that occurs often but not so often to really think about the procedures you have in place when it does happen.. And that is what to do when you get a new student on your caseload. Now, it could be tha...