Field Experience Report

Introduction For my field experience, I visited one school that was in the general vicinity of where I live. The school is named Taft elementary school which is located in Joliet. The principal is a Ms. Joy Hopkins and their school hours are nine to three-ten. The district the school is a part of is Joliet district 86. The school grades include kindergarten through fifth as well as two autism classrooms, which is where I spent the majority of my time. I observed for four full days at Taft school during the college’s spring break. In that time, I observed four different teacher’s classrooms, and they were all different levels of disability classrooms. Including two self-contain specialized for autism rooms and then two general inclusion

The first classroom was for the grades pre-1st grades and the second classroom was grades 2-5. The autism program at Taft, or the ABC program, is classified as a self-contained classroom in which everyone had autism. I spent a half day in the pre-1st-grade classroom and then the other day and a half in the 2-5th classroom. The other two days I observed in two general education classrooms which included students with disabilities. In the inclusion classrooms, it was not very evident sometimes about who had the disability. In some instances, I could see quirks that might have been stims, but for the rest a lot was academic. Learning disabilities are not evident unless the teacher told me about them. Or I could see that some students had teacher intervention with smaller groups of students, this led me to believe that they had some disability in the classroom. Besides an occasional redirection, the teachers did not treat any of the students

These students are a little behind in development because usually a stipulation to starting school is that the student is potty trained before enrolled in kindergarten. In the younger grades, the majority of the students were also nonverbal, so they could not verbalize what they needed yet. Many just made noises instead of talking. In the higher grades, only a couple of students were nonverbal, and they communicated through the tablets or typing. In all of the grades, I noticed that many of the students exhibited the typical symptom of autism, the most apparent is Stimming. The definition of stimming is short for self-stimulatory behavior that includes hand-flapping, rocking, spinning, or repetition of words and phrases. I saw a variety of stimming behaviors in both autism rooms and in the general class that incorporated ABC students into general education. In the younger room, the stimming was more physical like touching things or rocking back and forth and hitting. One student had to be put under a pressurized blanket because that calmed him down after a meltdown. The teachers had a variety of tools to use for the students stimming behaviors. In the older classroom, the students