I learned something important today....

I learned something I felt was very imporatnt today in my junior field placement. As I've said before there are no ELL students in the entire school but we do have Special Ed kids. The class that I'm in is half Special Ed and half low performing. Today I was doing the vocabulary words for the book we are reading. There were only 8 words so I dint think it would take that long. OMG was I wrong! The students were supposed to read the sentence with the word in it and then write down their guess as to what the word could mean. The idea was that they would use the sentence to figure this out. We read sentence one together and then I gave the students a few minutes to write down their answers. Well what I had was 18 faces looking back blankly at me. The teacher came over and bailed me out. Thats when I immediatly recognized my mistakes. Most of the students weren't even looking at question #1, being Special ED students the teacher has to make a point to check if everyone is on the right question. I just figured they were following along. I also only explained the directions one time. The teacher usually explains them twice and then puts them in words the kids will be familiar with. The teacher also gave them additional sentences using the same word so they could find one that they understood. Then the students gave some suggestions out loud so if you didn't know one yourself you could pick one of the suggestions you thought went best. I tried to continue the lesson on my own and then I realized I was also going to fast, we were on #3 but the Special ED students were still on #1. Those 8 vocabulary words took about 30 minutes. I was terribly embarrased at first but then I realized that it was more important that I recognized my mistakes, corrected them, and remember them for the future lessons.
I learned that I need to be extra aware of the Special Ed students and their different needs. To explain the directions multiple times in many different ways. To ensure that students are following along at the correct point on the paper and to slow down so that students on different levels can keep up. I think that this was valuable information to learn not only for teaching Special Ed students, but even for regular ed students and imagine how that information I now know will help me when teaching ELL learners!