IDEA! and laws

        These past two weeks have taught me a lot about behind the scenes of special education. I honestly never realized how many different components and rules that there are to special education. This has caused me to really reflect on what I need to do as a teacher to make sure that I learn all that I can and stay current with the happenings. Law for special education is changing constantly so as an educator I need to make sure that I follow this law. I need to follow it to protect myself and more importantly I need to follow it so that I can be sure to help my students fully and completely.
        As I learned about the principles of IDEA I realized how involved I need to allow the parents of all of my students to be. They deserve to and by law need to know what is happening with their child. I think that it is important to make them know that they are involved so that they want to be involved as well. My favorite principle of IDEA that we learned about was LRE which is known as least restrictive environment. I thought that it was interesting that the classroom was where we should always be working to as the LRE. I also think that it is interesting that as a teacher we should always have the regular classroom as the end goal for our students. I think often times children get classified as one thing and then are never moved from that classification. They can be moved if we have an open mind and help them to move.
        One last thing that I learned was IEP and the process of IEP. By sitting in the classroom and collaborating with people of different majors I realize that we all play such an important part in and IEP. We all work together to help one student. We don't individually have all of the knowledge but when we work together we do have all of the knowledge that is needed. This gives me more drive to do all that I can to help learn the things needed for making IEPs successful. Honestly I didn't know about them till this week and to be perfectly honest I didn't really think that a regular teacher had much to do with special needs. I am excited for the opportunity that I will have to be involved in this process.