Thoughts on the Future

I was once a middle and high school English teacher but for the past 7 years I have been a grade 7-12 Learning Assistance teacher. It is a great job because you never know what you are going to help kids learn:French, chemical equations, fractions, civilizations.  Each day is different in a great way. Unfortunately though, we tend to be on the back end of learning. We often support, reteach, or re-explain someone else's content. 

Learning Assistance is very similar to library in that we are supposed to be and would love to be collaborating, co-planning and co-teaching all the time.  In a perfect world we would be co-planning with teachers so that the material was always differentiated before the student sees it. 

I teach at a great school with passionate, dynamic teachers but we are all plagued by a lack of time that makes collaborating, co-planning, and co-teaching really challenging. This lack of time has been on both sides - LAT time had been cut drastically in many schools prior to last year's court ruling (though our school has been very fortunate with block allocation compared to other local high schools). In my district there now has to be one LAT for approximately 450 students which means we have 3 more blocks of LA time for the next school year. We are really excited about this increase in time for next year but worry that we might not be able to make significant change because even though our time went up, our teachers are still swamped with responsibilities. I am hoping technology could help us bridge this time gap. 

Because I am an LAT and will be for a few more years, I would like to focus on this because I think it has tremendous cross over for when I become a librarian as they too have a mandate to collaborate.

• How can we embed the practice of collaborating and co-planning with the LAT to help differentiate learning for students?
• How can we encourage and maintain collaborating with the LAT as a "best practice"?
• What technology can help us with this?

Another broad area I am quite interested in is assistive technologies for students with learning disabilities. There is a big push in the LAT world to have students learn the assistive technology so that they can be independent within a classroom and the world. However, many of our students are not happy with the computerized voices or accuracy of voice to text software.  Often the battle with technology takes longer than the assignment which leaves the student frustrated and behind. From parents, teachers and students, there are always the questions of:

• How much technology should be used for students with learning disabilities and when should it be used? 
• Is it hampering the development of their skills to use an audiobook or voice to text software? 

Topics I am interested in:

• differentiation
• collaborating
• co-planning
• motivation 
• G-suite - using G-suite to encourage and maintain collaboration between teachers
• Google Read and Write for students with learning disabilities
• assistive technologies for students with learning disabilities