Special Education

The educator must believe in the potential power of his pupil, and he must employ all his art in seeking to bring his pupil to experience this power.

Alfred Adler

What is really the secret of being well or well-being in the classroom? In my opinion the answer is simple. It’s the same as in life in general. It’s the feeling of belonging. You feel that you belong somewhere when you love being there, you get positive experiences from there, you feel connected to everything you do and everyone you do it with, you feel appreciated for your effort and you get acclaimed for it, your abilities and talents are recognised and you have the freedom of expression,  and you are offered help any time you need it from people who care and help you. Every teacher must work towards making it possible that every student feels like he belongs in the classroom. Even, and especially, when it requires special effort.
 
The topic of special education is rather close to my heart as my experience in assisting students with certain special needs was one of the reasons I became so resolute on pursuing my teaching career here in Finland and making stronger my belief that this is something I want to dedicate my life to. I have never worked with children with disabilities or developmental disorders, but I spent nearly 6 months teaching and helping teach adult immigrant students in primary education in Oulu. I taught English and I was an assistant teacher in Finnish language and math classes. It’s hard to even start to describe my initial thoughts and feelings in that school. I was fascinated, shocked, excited, sad, angry. Fascinated, because I have never taught in such a multicultural surrounding, with students coming from so many countries, each bearing his story. Shocked as I had never in my life seen such a different world: groups of grown up people who could not write, read, calculate, read schedules and calendars, maps, things that are so natural for many of us to know are complete mystery for others. I realised ,that it’s one thing to know by reading articles and watching films that in Africa, for instance, many are illiterate, and that its a completely different thing to actually be there with the people and try to teach them, and observe how they want to learn and how they struggle and can’t, because of not having been schooled previously in their lives, not having read, calculated, written, not developed any of the cognitive skills. Excited from the feeling I got when I showed or explained something and the student understood and reproduced it, excited from the feeling that I can do something to help a student who wants to understand and learn. Sad and angry for the world where human rights as we know them are not existent, and people do not get opportunities to get any education. Angry when hearing their stories and learning about the psychological traumas they have which were caused by war and immigration, which just as much affect their learning capabilities.
In the classes of around 20 students per class, every student needed personal support. Teachers did and do their best to help each and every student in class and sometimes won’t stop at anything to make the learning happen, including cutting a sheet of paper into 3 “ pizza slices” and eating 1 piece of paper pizza to explain what 1/3rd means in math.

A couple days a week teacher requested me to work separately in a different classroom with students who were seriously lagging behind and needed special support in training reading and writing skills. The top number of students in my ‘special classroom’ was 4 at a time. Usually 2 or 3 students. The task at hand was challenging, but rewarding when we got small, but consistent victories. What I learnt from that experience, is that the key qualities the teacher needs are:

– patience is the key. When you’ve explained and showed one thing over and over again, and a student can’t still tackle it, a teacher can get anxious, nervous, frustrated with the situation and with himself, as if my student doesn’t get it, I’m a failure as a teacher, I can’t teach properly. No. Sometimes it’s just a longer road than initially thought to be, and the student will eventually get there, be patient and wait for it.
– believing in the student and showing it to the student, making this belief contagious.
– praise and encouragement, cheerleading.
– being there all the time with full attention.

Every teacher’s responsibility is to make learning accessible for all students in their classroom and develop the teaching and choose the methods and materials that will meet the needs of all students in the classroom. Teacher should know what a better way is to approach the learning requirements of one student and choose the better way to assess the learning.  In Finland every student has an individual education plan which specifies educational content (subjects, contents), special support needed and measures to be taken to provide it, various methods to demonstrate skills and pedagogical methods used to achieve the objectives and assess the outcomes. 

PREPARATION AND GROUP WORK
Our group presentation was on student welfare in Finnish schools. We analysed the Finnish law on the provision of the student welfare (Oppilas- ja opiskelijahuoltolaki 30.12.2013), and a number of sources provided by our tutors and researched and found by us. My input was in analysing the Student welfare act, the ministry of education web pages as well as special education vocational schools (Luovi as an example) programs and Oulu UAS student welfare web pages and making the presentation. We met online two times with my group members to discuss the work division and what we could do in order to make the session more interactive and interesting as the material to be covered, the law part is quite theoretical and dry. We decided to go with presentation and make it more personalised by asking students questions as the presentation progressed encouraging the students’ feedback on the topic, as the topic of special needs education is such as it is full of human emotion and personal response and experience. I suggested to include videos in the presentation as the videos bring theoretical material more to life with visual representations of the real school experiences and practices.

SESSION
Our teaching objectives were to acquaint students with regulations in student welfare in Finland and what are the student welfare services students have access to in vocational and higher education. In our presentations students learned about the main objectives of the Student welfare act  1287/2013 which are:
– promote student learning, health and well-being and safety
–  promote inclusion
– prevent problems by providing early support
– ensure equal access to and quality of student support services
Students are provided with student health services, psychological and social services in student care. The school is responsible for making these services available to students and providing information on how to use them. Confidentiality of student information when using student welfare services is ensured by law. Minors in Finland can prevent their parents or guardians from knowing that they have been using social welfare services and the information in the student’s personal record cannot be released to anyone without student’s consent. We also talked that there are special education vocational schools that provide vocational education programs to students with special needs, for example Luovi.  In our presentation we also touched upon the topic of inclusion in Finnish education, which means that students with special needs attend mainstream education. Its stems from the democratic principle in education that provides equal opportunities for education for people regardless disabilities. 
Team Bastu expanded on the topic of inclusion. They defined inclusion as ‘being about diversity and involvement of everyone through pedagogical methodology and operation culture named as design for all or universal design’. 

Inclusion means that

• All students learn and progress together
• Diversity among all learners 
• Equal education opportunities for all 
• Special support as a part of the learning environment.

They also touched upon the negative aspects of inclusion in education such as affected students’ progress, no individualized attention to students, lack of teacher training and lack of financial resources associated with it. Bastu also talked about what we should do as teachers in order to meet the needs of the students in our classroom including, but not limited to monitoring each students’ progress, providing personal guidance, designing good personalised study plans, choosing best teaching methods, providing assessment options for students.
Bastus went with presentation as their main form of delivery of the material with discussion questions as the means of interaction. The presentation was delivered smoothly, however, I noticed that the teacher always regarded to how much time it was on the clock and that we don’t have enough time for discussions here and there, and as a student being constantly reminded of time I felt that the presentation was rather rushed. I feel that the teacher, knowing he is out of time to deliver every point in there, could have made the choices in his head on how to proceed in order to make the experience more whole for the students, without announcing the lack of time and the discussions we need to skip.

Bastus completed their presentation with the video they made themselves on the topic. The video featured the pictures of how student’s special needs are met in schools all around the world. Again the visuals had a power to bring the topic to life and it was a nice and powerful touch to sum up the topic.

Team Owl also talked about the aforementioned methods and ways used to address special needs in the classrooms. Owls also explained how to identify people with special support needs, including students with disabilities, students with need of social and psychological support. They used statistics in their presentation to show that the need in special education in Finland is growing and the students with special needs studying in vocational education number is also growing year by year. Owls also drew examples from 2 real schools and how special education is implemented there, which was a good connection to the real practice. The Owl teacher seemed to be confident and knowledgeable on the topic, and even though we study online without being together in physical space, this teacher manages to create somehow with her intonation and a manner of speech a very comfortable and welcoming classroom atmosphere, where a student can feel that his opinions and input are welcome and highly valued. I really appreciate her teaching style.
Owls chose to use many videos in their presentation, which in my opinion was lively and brought freshness to the theoretical and statistical data. I especially loved the fact that some of the videos were made from special needs student perspectives and what these students need from their teachers and how a teacher can really influence and change someone’s lives. That was a truly powerful message, after which some of our colleagues admitted that after this session, they had new motives and insights into the teacher’s profession. Well done, Owls for inspiring us to be better teachers! Owls also mentioned how to get qualified in special education. Getting 60 credits in special education is really an option for the future career aspiration since the need for special education teachers is only growing.

ANALYSIS OF OWN TEACHING
I was rather calm and confident in teaching this session. I believe the confidence came mostly from the fact that it was the last teaching session in the program, and I was rather familiar with my “student” room members. In general, when you get to know your students and you work together for certain period of time the initial stress and anxiety of the new classroom environment fades and you feel rather at ease and confident in front of your students. The topic as well was such in which I had experiences both as a teacher and as a student. I examined and analysed the law closely and made the presentation, so I knew the class procedure and content well.  My students were as usually ready and willing to participate in the discussions and exchange points of view.
The tip for myself for the future: one student noted that one question was a bit confusing, and I understood immediately, that I made it too long, including many facets to consider in the question. I should have made the question shorter, explicit, worded it better.
In my opinion, it was one of the nicest teaching sessions we’ve had on the program and I believe me and everyone in the group did a very good job there.

In my group during the presentations we addressed personal experiences and concerns. I shared my own experience of being a special need student for a short time I spent in a vocational school here in Oulu. My special need was the Finnish language support. I was a student of foreign background and all the instruction in the program was carried out in Finnish and most of the students in the group were Finnish. There were 6 more students of foreign background. In the beginning the teachers tried to make groups for group work mixing the Finnish and foreign students, however, for the foreign students it was usually rather hard to participate in a group work as Finnish students usually processed the reading/ theoretical material assigned significantly faster and were already in the process of discussion and performing tasks while it took a much more considerable period of time for foreign students to go through the readings, due to the language unfamiliarity and frequent translation need, and processing the information in the text. The tasks required not only fast reading skills, but critical analysis of the authentic academic and legal texts, for which the language level must be at the higher levels, which none of the foreign students possessed. It made their participation in the group work weak and noticeably not as active as the Finnish students. The language barrier was a true issue, as many students were not open to participate, being simply scared to speak and sound silly in Finnish due to the lack of necessary linguistic resources, as they admitted. For me it was very interesting to observe how the teachers would handle this obvious pickle in the classroom. One teacher addressed the problem in the way that she would distribute the reading materials to be discussed and worked on in the following class beforehand, so that the foreign students could have a chance to go through them beforehand at home, which would increase their chances of participation in the group work. And it did help significantly. However, the later tendency was for the foreign students to form the groups of their own where they worked at their own pace, and the teachers didn’t mind them doing so. Analysing this from the point of inclusion in Finnish schools, I’d say that the learning experience of the group of students with the special need in the classroom was rather different than for the rest of the class. The foreign students knew they could not do as much as their Finnish classmates, participate in work in the same way. It brought a sense of frustration in many ‘special’ students. Is ‘inclusion’ a successful practice then? Wouldn’t it be more effective if the instruction for foreign students with a special need was separate from the main group? Would they learn better when the materials and teaching was designed to make their learning more effective and comfortable, without the anxiety of not being able to keep up with the rest of the class and being anxious to express the ideas with the fear of being misunderstood and making many mistakes in speech and sounding silly? In my opinion it indeed would be more effective to study in a separate “special” group. But that comes down to the resources available to schools to create and run programs aimed at special, in this case immigrant, groups.

Every teacher in every classroom is a special needs teacher in some way as the students in the classroom have very different needs in their learning and every teacher’s responsibility is to recognise these needs and try to meet them. When a teacher realises that addressing a certain need is outside of their area expertise it’s their duty to guide and direct a student to seek help in meeting needs with people who will know what to do, be it psychologist, social worker, doctor, etc. At the end of the day it comes down to one thing: caring, which is the cornerstone in my belief of the teaching profession. If you care about your students, you care about their success and you care of how to help them rise after their small or bigger failures here and there, how to get confidence that they are good, really good, no matter the way they are learning, you care how to make them feel like they belong in your classroom, you are a good teacher who can make all students in the class feel equal among themselves and equally special to you and the community.