Personal reflection on special education

Developing a Professional Identity
Pursuing an education specialist degree has solidified my professional identity, as I build confidence in my skill set and level of competency. I have already established myself within the field of education but have shifted focus to special education. This course has helped me to develop a professional identity as a special education teacher and one who eventually hopes to advocate and inform public policy.
Personal Philosophy and Ethics
My personal philosophy of education is based on ethical principles like equality and social justice, which is also what drove me to learn more about how I can contribute to the field of special education. As Krek & Zabel (2016) point out, educators need to be driven by overarching principles that inform their curricula and pedagogical practices. Otherwise, educators have no way of gauging their contributions to the profession or even of assessing the impact they make on the lives of students. When educators take their role and responsibility seriously, they can see how their actions and words have a strong influence on everything from social norms and values to the integrity of communities. As hard as it is to overcome our fear of being reprimanded for challenging the status quo, I need to remember that it is now my professional duty to speak up on behalf of underserved populations and call out injustice when I see it.
Perceptions of the Education Profession
I have always been drawn to the education profession because of the impact that teachers had in my life. Therefore, I feel generally positive about the future of the profession and look forward to contributing to it in a meaningful way. While there are many things I would like to change about the nature of education in America, I have also been surrounded by caring teachers in a professional community dedicated to helping students achieve their goals. I believe that more students need access to a diverse range of tools they can use to maximize their strengths and improve upon areas of weakness. Teachers play an instrumental role in reaching out to students who are not well-served by the educational environment or prevailing models of classroom design or instruction.
Goal Setting and Purposefulness
This course has helped me to cultivate a more purposeful, future-oriented mindset. Rather than only think about the next five years, I am now thinking ten and twenty years down the line to imagine how I can leave a legacy in the field of special education. Driven more now by a sense of greater purpose, I feel more energized and inspired, willing to take risks. One day I hope to be a leader, and until then I will develop the professional acumen and gain experience necessary to inspire others to recognize how they can also contribute to improving the future of special education.
Theory, Research, and Practice
Theory informs research, which in turn informs both theory and practice. The cyclical and interdependent relationship between theory, research, and practice is especially evident in the field of education. I have learned how educational policy and practice depend on a solid body of evidence showing what students respond to and why. Some leaders in the field of education take a resource-based approach, understanding that educational policy and practice need to be cost-effective due to limited resources. Others know that pedagogical practices and instructional design are more dependent on educator attitudes, organizational culture, ethics, and a guiding philosophy than on budgets.
Skills Recently Mastered
The Importance of Time Management
Without effective time management skills, I never would have been able to get this far in my career. This course has helped me to improve my time management methods even more. As my course load became increasingly more challenging, I needed to reconsider how I was allocating time to different tasks. For example, I am not yet fully adept at library research using scholarly databases. The time it takes for me to complete a search is longer than I would like, and in the beginning of this course I was not giving myself enough time. Now I know that I need more time to research, which pays off in the quality of my work. Effective time management comes down to prioritizing: deciding for myself which tasks are most critical and which steps I need to take now in order to complete those tasks. As Barrett (n.d.) points out, it is extremely helpful to make to-do lists on days when I am feeling overwhelmed. According to Kirillov, Tanatova, Vinichenko, et al. (2015), the most important time management principles include goal setting, prioritizing, being timely, verification and self-assessment, and also balance. When I keep my goals in mind, it is easier to prioritize. When I take care of longer and more odious tasks first, I can work through all the items on my list more quickly and more accurately too. Finally, time management means finding balance—building into my schedule self-care activities like exercise or relaxation.
APA Style
No one can succeed in any social science profession without having mastered the professional formatting style and communications guidelines used in their academic publications. This includes writing tone, style, and grammar, but also the ways our research is formatted. The importance of using style guidelines is to maintain consistency within the profession, especially as the field expands and becomes more multidisciplinary and global in scope. In addition to having mastered the basic elements of American Psychological Association (APA) formatting, I have also written enough research papers and annotated bibliographies related to special education to feel comfortable creating professional documents and contributing to the scholarly literature.
Academic Integrity
Academic integrity refers to a cluster of ethical behaviors and attitudes, which I need to adopt in order to develop my professional identity. Some of the main elements of academic integrity include honesty in reporting the results of research, correctly attributing all new ideas or intellectual property to its rightful author, and being willing also to challenge unethical or unjust practices in education. Research on academic integrity is burgeoning because of the variability in ethical frameworks within the teaching profession (Macfarlane, Zhang & Pun, 2012). With ongoing instructions on how to maintain our integrity, I believe that teachers can avoid some of the pitfalls they encounter when under pressure or mindless of their actions.
Areas Needing Improvement
Library Research
Although I have tremendously improved my skills in academic library research, I believe that I can still become faster and more efficient at database searches. Each database works slightly differently, and I am not as familiar with all of the databases as I would like to be. As a result, it can be frustrating and time consuming to conduct research. To improve my library research skills, I intend to take a weekend seminar that helps me better understand how the searches work and how to streamline my results.
Goal Setting
I believe I do have strong goals for myself as an educator, but taking this course has shown me that I need more detailed and actionable goals. In other words, I do well with the big picture planning but less well on the incremental steps I need to take to reach those goals. To improve my goal setting capabilities, I need to think each day about what I will do specifically in order to advance my career or to learn about new areas of emerging research in special education.
Analyzing Complex Research
I am generally good with reading and analyzing the vast array of scholarly literature in the field of education generally and specifically related to how to help students with special needs. My research in this class has prepared me well to analyze complex qualitative research, the foundations of which form the basis for much educational practice (Lewis, 2015). However, I do struggle sometimes with quantitative data analysis and statistics. When quantitative studies are integral to my research or to my understanding of some issue related to special education policy, I tend to become frustrated and gloss over the details. Yet it is important to gain skills in the interpretation of data, so that I can recognize flaws in research design. In the future, I hope to become more adept at quantitative data analysis so that I can participate in original research that can be used to inform public policy that helps students with special needs.
Moving Forward
Because I am almost finished with my degree program, my future looks bright and I am thrilled to be on the brink of becoming a special education teacher, program director, advocate, and eventually perhaps a policy analyst. I am passionate about applying theory and research to the practice environment: to classroom design and teaching methods, or to educational policy and leadership. Applying what I learned in this course means continually upgrading my skills, honing my professional identity as a specialist in special education, and improving the overall delivery of services to stakeholders in the community.





References
Barrett, K. (n.d.). Establishing effective time management practices for coursework.
Lewis, S. (2015). Qualitative inquiry and research design. Health Promotion Practice 16(4): 473-475.
Kirillov, A.V., Tanatova, D.K., Vinichenko, M.V., et al. (2015). Theory and practice of time management in education. Asian Social Science 11(19): DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ass.v11n19p193
Krek, J. & Zabel, B. (2016). Why there is no education ethics without principles. Educational Philosophy and Theory 49(3): 284-293.
MacFarlane, B., Zhang, J. & Pun, A. (2012). Academic integrity: a review of the literature. Studies in Higher Education 39(2): 339-358.