Marie is a Special Education Teacher with the Montgomery County Public School system. She walks us through a busy day at school, either in private one-on-one sessions or a group learning environment. Marie found her passion in special education after changing careers and discovering that all three of her children had some form of a learning disability.
Transcript
>> Hi, I'm Marie Franklin, and I am a special educator with Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. So a student who may be very anxious, who has difficulty, school phobias, has a lot of different factors that would make it difficult for them to attend a classroom regularly, we would work with them. There are students who have acting-out behaviors who are disruptive to the learning environment, who have many, maybe, external factors that would preclude them from working their way into a regular classroom until we get them to where they can do that comfortably and succeed. You know, I like to come here early to prepare myself for the day because working with the type of students that I work with sometimes it can be very challenging based on how their day is going. So I come in early and make sure that I have everything lined up for what I feel I'm projecting for that particular day, and I'm in three different subjects as far as the content area. I'm in Social Studies, but I work in three different subjects. For instance, I work in U.S. History, I work with students in Government classes and in Modern World History, as well as teaching resource classes. So the resource classes are specifically only those children who are in -- or students that are in the cluster program, and I -- they're typically on my caseload, so I have a certain group of students that are assigned to me that I make sure that I work with and have that rapport. I make sure that I understand what I'm teaching in each class, what my co-teachers, if I'm working with a co-teacher, what we're going over, what subject matter we're going over, what lesson, what unit, so that I'm prepared to walk in to help all students, because as a role, as a co-teacher when I'm in the mainstream, I'm also responsible for the academic success for all students in there, so if I know the material, then I know I can confidently help the students succeed, and so I prepare myself for the lessons for the day to make sure that I'm ready.
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