Desire To Serve

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Pages: 6

Students I Desire to Serve

I plan on finishing my elementary education degree to teach in a general education classroom setting. Though I will be working in a general education classroom, I know there will be a large and increasing population of varying students with different needs and abilities. The group of students that I would like to most work with in my classroom will be students with deafness and hearing loss disabilities. This is near and dear to me as I have a profound hearing loss and only fully hear from one ear. I understand the frustration of not being able to “hear” correctly, to rely on patient people who are willing to repeat themselves, and to be able to see the people who are speaking to me to watch their mouths and
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(Heward, 2012). Since D/HH students approach reading and writing tasks with less background knowledge and vocabulary, it is necessary to offer strategies that can help these students succeed. A way to do this is to make content and thinking “visible”. Educators can do this by supporting visual cues for word learning. D/HH students benefit from ways in which word learning links visual patterns to meaning and sounds rather than relying on sounds alone. One example of this that has shown to benefit D/HH students is to use a word study/sort program. Using such a program will encourage students to learn families of words by reading, writing, and sorting . This not only gives students a lot of exposure to the written representation of words, but it additionally allows the students the opportunity to learn and apply patterns to solve unknown future words. (Dostal,Gabriel & Weir, …show more content…
I have wanted to do this for some time, but learning about the benefits of ASL for educational approaches in a general education classroom has proven to have many advantages. Speech reading is something I have personally relied on myself growing up, but it is a flawed approach. People forget to face you, are too far away, or they tend to talk too quickly or over annunciate words, making it even harder to decode what they are saying. The ideas of cued speech and total communication seem to have greater benefits. During this semester I plan on using online resources to teach myself ASL. Another extended professional skill that I plan on completing is an online course through Gallaudet University, Educating Students Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing: A Guide for Professionals in General Education Settings. This course is self-paced and covers a myriad of topics. I plan on completing this in my three weeks off from classes in August. This will prepare me for having deaf and hard of hearing students in my classroom and it includes the principles behind educational planning and use within the classroom. It will teach me how to understand laws governing educational services for deaf and hard of hearing students to support my work and planning. This training also incorporates evidence-based practices to prepare and work with deaf and hard of hearing students in my classroom. Lastly, this