Andrea Maier Dr.

Muir ELA Interview December 5, 2013 Interview One The first teacher that I interviewed was the ELA teacher, she has been teaching at Prairie Middle School for 19 years. The 19 years that she has been at Prairie she taught ELA student in her own classroom. She enjoyed this very much and said "that you can work more closely with the students this way", but as of the year she was asked if she would join in on co-teaching with five other general education teacher. The ELA teacher that I observed is Elizabeth Ellingson. She attend Metro and received her bachelor's in english and went on to Masters in ELA at the University of Colorado Denver. This year was something new to Mrs. Ellingson, she had never co-taught before. This was a new and exciting challenge to take on, she and the other general education teacher were offered classes. This was for the training, so that they would have a good idea of how to collaborate in the class setting. She was the only teacher to take on this training. This was a good experience for her, so she could see how you should collaborate with your partners. The only thing she wishes was that the other four teacher would of came to the training. She feels that this would help here with working with the teachers and creating better lesson plans that incorporate her ELA knowledge with the general education teacher. The second question was how many classes do you teach in every day? On blue days she only works with two teachers Mrs. Yost and Ms. Rice and on green days she works with Mrs. Yost, Mr. Eggert, and Ms. Smith. The dynamic with these four teacher varies with how

they interact with Mrs. Ellingson. She had a really great teaching moments in Ms. Smith's class and Mrs. Yost classroom. She said "that they just play the lesson off each other very well" and this was awesome to see since I have never saw what a co-taught class looks like. The thing that Mrs. Ellingson does not like is the planning time is nonexistent, and the other teacher never have time. Their planning periods are at different times and this can make it hard. She said "it is normal to plan right before you start the lesson for the day" and this can be easy or difficult. The third question what are your teaching scenario? This is her first year teaching cotaught classes, but she use to teach pull out ELA students in her own classroom. The majority of her students are in the co-taught classrooms, but she does teach once a week on the ELA classroom to beginning ELA students. She share 250 students between two other ELA teacher, but they are in pull out classes. The school has 350 ELA students total in the school. The fourth question is what does the special education mean for this population? Almost 50/50 students are special education if they were born in the United States. This goes with the population that is in my class the ILC classroom. The thing that is different is our students first language is English, but at home the family speaks their native language. The thing that Mrs. Ellingson said "that they do receive a few students that after receiving RtI and ELA that they are referred to the special education teachers." This made sense when we were talking about the 50/50 percent that are in special education. The fifth question was from who do you receive referrals from? The referrals come from the general education teachers. The home survey goes home with enrolling students at

the beginning of the year. This is when they get a good handle on new ELA students. The general education catch the students that enroll during the school year. They help Mrs. Ellingson with identifying ELA students, so that she can test them and find out if they do need to be placed in an ELA class. The sixth question was how do you typically work with your family and student upon receiving a referral? Normally she test the student without the parents consent. She said" it is different from special education in that you can test without having the parents consent." They have to ask if they want their students to receive ELA services. She said "that no parent has ever turned down the services for their child, and they are glad that their child was tested. Most of the parents do not know how to get their child help, so it is a huge relief for the parents. The seventh question was how do you communicate with teachers and family? She talks the teachers about students that are new to the school and show them their needs. The families are normally easy to work with. The thing that I found neat was that she will give the parents information ,so that they can learn how to speak English. She said "that all the ELA teacher including her ask for the parents to speak English at home." This ties in with what we have learned in class and they better we can educate the family the better of an outcome the student will get with learning English. The eighth question was how do you help ELA students in the classroom. I wrote this down in my notes that is was neat that I could see this first hand in Mrs. Yost classroom. The students were given some information and it had cliff notes on the side. This helped the ELA

students plus the other students learn words and what they mean. This just gave them a different way of learning. This was great in the way was that Mrs. Yost would teach for fifteen minutes and then Mrs. Ellingson would take over and work with the students and ask them questions in a different way from what Mrs. Yost asked. Both of these teachers played off each other in very neat way and I saw a co-taught classroom for the first time. The ninth question was do you ever think ELA will fade away? She compares ELA to special education it will always be needed, because we will always have students coming from other countries and not knowing English. She believes that ELA will fade away and Emerson will take its place instead. This is only a guess on her part which anything can happen with any teaching position. The last and final question is will training be required in the future for co-teaching? She thinks that it will not be required, but it would be helpful. The experience with working with this teacher was great she was full of knowledge and knows what works for her students. I only hope her co-teaching staff sees that. Mrs. Yost and Ms. Smith were the best paired teachers that worked with Mrs. Ellingson. I would love to come back and observe these two teachers again and I thanked them for letting me into their rooms. This is always a delight because you can see what works and what does not with different teaching styles.