I have always known the importance of personal experience in the classroom. For a long time, for me, that personal experience usually related to passion for the content area that you are teaching. The more you experience and learn about the subject you are teaching, the more passionate you become about that subject area, the more passionate your teaching of that subject will be.
As true as that is, there is so much more to teaching than just that. There is the fact that every student who ever enters your classroom will be different, will learn differently, and teaching cannot be just purely passionate. It needs to reach every student.
The legal side of it is highly important, too. There are a lot of different ways to run a classroom. Some are legal. Some are illegal. Some are legal, but the morality of those practices are questionable – such as corporal punishment. In Vermont, these practices are banned, but they are not banned across the country. Knowing where the lines are in every state, school system, and individual school is highly important – particularly for those sub-districts that you work in.
The importance of those laws as far as they pertain to special education is something to be considered as well. While I myself am working toward licensure for the general education classroom, I know how important it is to reach every learner. Special education laws make sure that every student learns at a pace that works for them, and the push towards co-taught classrooms mean that those services are available to every student – including those that would normally be somewhere in the middle and might not qualify for additional help.
The discussion of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and getting a chance to design a lesson plan for this type of classroom was highly beneficial. UDL is a great way to reach every learner and give helpful, technological-based assistance to those students who need it. It makes learning every subject area available for every student. The UDL lesson planning was a lot of fun, and it was great to find so many resources in so many different mediums for our project.
UDL also helps bring into existence the idea of an equal learning environment. If a UDL classroom is co-taught and children with different learning abilities can coexist in the same classroom, then some of the obvious differences that separate out the different level of learning ability can be amended. Children are more likely to pick on one another for easily noticeable differences. UDL gives them a chance to have those differences realized as simple differences and not something that makes them fodder for peer jokes.
Learning is something that should be available for everyone, no matter what their best learning abilities are. Everyone should have the capacity to learn at their own pace.