It's been an incredibly busy year and I love my job! I have the privilege of working with some talented educational assistants, teachers and leaders. As our school develops a vision for learning in the 21st century, my colleagues and I are trying to figure out how our roles as resource teachers will change. How do we help our students develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes that will help them become engaged learners?
Since September, our resource team has developed a unified (Kindergarten to Grade 12) noncategorical resource model - based on the work of Faye Brownlie. With this model, resource teachers work with classroom teachers to meet the needs of all students in their classroom. The opportunity to work as a team is what really inspired us to build upon our current practices. So far, by incorporating this new model we have learned a few lessons:
1. Educational assistants and resource teachers are assigned to work with fewer teachers. This gave us a more manageable workload.
2. As a member of a teaching team, we have opportunities to help all students in a classroom, not just specific referrals. We try to work closely with our colleagues to differentiate instruction. This may seem easier to do in the primary and intermediate levels. However, we are supporting our Senior School colleagues by team teaching and working with small groups of students while the subject teacher works with other groups of students.
3. We still provide individualized support; however, there seems to be less need for pull-out programs. Students have scheduled study blocks and can receive individualized support as needed.
I suppose our biggest lesson this year is that quality of planning and instruction matters most. This is a big change from our previous model where we would focus on placement of students as the key to success. A great deal of time would be spent on when to pull students and then develop individualized education plans based on needs.
We are now at a point in the year where we want to invite our colleagues to give us feedback on the resource model. We want to look at the effectiveness of our school-based teams and where we can improve.
Stay tuned.
