Fieldwork Paper and Fieldwork Form The purpose of the fieldwork is to observe the two certified special education teachers and make connections to course content within real world classroom settings. One of the schools where the observation was conducted is P.S. / I.S. 266 whose address is 74-10 Commonwealth Blvd, Jamaica, NY 11426 (P.S. / I.S. 266, 2018). The school, which falls under New York City Public Schools district, is a pre-kindergarten to eighth grade learning institution that was established in September 2003 and has a student population of nearly 700 students. The second school is CLASP, which is located at 80 Grace Avenue, Great Neck NY, 11021 (CLASP Children’s Center, n.d.). This pre-kindergarten setting seeks to provide quality childcare for working parents and has existed for more than 35 years. This paper provides a summary of observations made in each of these schools as part of this fieldwork.

Summary of Observations

P.S. / I.S. 266

The teacher under observation at P.S. / I.S. 266 is Paul Murphy who provides special education in a sixth grade class comprising 25 students. I interviewed this certified special education teacher for 1.5 hours and conducted observation of the classroom for 6 hours. The interview provided significant insights regarding the nature of the classroom environment and teaching strategies utilized in this co-taught general education classroom. The observation was made during an English class that incorporated different learning activities to help meet the diverse learning needs of the students. These students have different types of disabilities including visual impairment, intellectual disability, speech impairment, and emotional disturbance. Students exhibited behaviors that reflect the symptoms of each of these disabilities. This English class was a co-taught general education class since the students with special needs were not pulled out from the rest of the classroom to undertake the class in a different location. Different learning activities were utilized by...

Some of these activities included reading and writing exercises, color coding, and breaking down different tasks.
The subject matter taught in this classroom was Vocabulary, which would help enhance students mastery in reading and writing in English. Lesson objectives included to promote students’ understanding of advanced vocabulary words, to enable students identify advanced vocabulary words in literature, and to enable students understand the meanings of vocabulary words. To achieve these objectives, the teacher utilized graphic organizers and musical pieces with advanced vocabulary words. Student responses was measured through examining his/her involvement in the classroom and using a test that was completed at the end of the lesson.

Through incorporating musical pieces and graphic organizers in the classroom, the teacher utilized multisensory instructional approach. Students color coded text to identify advanced vocabulary words. They also listened to musical pieces and discussed advanced vocabulary words used in the music. They also engaged in reading and writing exercises geared toward identifying these words and created clay sculptures of individual vocabulary words. Some of the instructional accommodations used in this classroom include allowing students to record their work in different ways, using flexible time schedules for students to complete learning activities like creation of clay sculptures, and reducing assignments depending on the student’s learning needs and abilities.

Paul Murphy utilized the students’ individualized education plans (IEPs) to develop Behavior Intervention Plan (BIP), which was used as the behavior management system in the classroom. IEPs were utilized to identify and list the students’ problem behavior. As part of the behavior management system, the teacher created a Behavior Improvement Plan that comprised different aspects of behavior management. The improvement plan stipulated…