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Student Placement

  Special Education has many ways of servicing students. One size does not fit all. You will have students in resource every day, students in coteaching, and kids who may need only one or two days within the classroom. Some students need intensive intervention and then coteaching or resource becomes appropriate for them. 

  Inclusion and coteaching can be a great thing. But you also can not just become an “inclusion only school”. That disrupts the continuum of placement options and therefore can potentially deny a student FAPE. Coteaching works if the other teacher works with you, you do all your planning together. When you must work with more than one teacher, it becomes a struggle in becoming true coteaching. You then fall into the area of becoming a glorified para and sometimes the general education teachers treat you that way. 

  Coteaching is a great model but it’s hard to do effectively. I personally do not believe that anyone can correctly coteach in 11 classrooms with 11 different general education teachers. We do not have enough time for planning and / or documenting service minute for each individual student during the school day as it is. 

  What ends up happening is you won’t be co-teaching because you’ll be going into the classes blind every day. Teachers should be planning together and splitting the instruction 50/50. This cannot happen when you do not have the time to plan with multiple teachers. You go into the classroom and just try and make sure your students are picking up on something, or spend time managing students’ behaviors and get absolutely no teaching in. Students are still required to take the general education unit tests (with accommodations) to assess the standards. They also take the district wide benchmark assessment three times a year without accommodations.