Paraeducators Into The Classroom: Article Analysis

SUMMARY OF ARTICLE:

This article provides advice to teachers for supervising and incorporating paraeducators into the classroom. The authors’ systematic approach describes, in detail, what teachers should do to overcome the challenges that arise when supervising paraeducators and spells out specific procedures to implement to ensure a productive classroom. The article points out issues that may arise and ties a solution to the issue. In the authors’ research they discovered that an “effective paraeducator plan starts with a collaborative or shared philosophy and effective communication.” Consequently, the article states that with an effective plan in place appropriate supervision will lead to a high quality learning environment for the

For the supervisor’s plan to be successful, the authors recommend that their communication should be nonemotional. Therefore, to accomplish a nonemotional approach the article highlights the following features of communication be implemented, including being written using explicit language with examples and nonexamples visually displayed. Modeling by the teacher and checks for understanding are also recommended. The authors suggest that the paraeducators background and experience level be taken into consideration when communicating with

My only experience is one semester, in one class, in which she did not attend my class regularly due to other needs in the building. Consequently, I did not plan for her do anything except pull students to catch up on their assignments. Therefore, I found this article to be very informative on how to plan for and manage paraeducators. The roles of paraeducators is easily noticed, well laid out, and easy to read and remember with their bullet list. With my lack of experience working with paraeducators, the authors foresight to define the paraeducators role in a place that draws attention is a great way to establish basic knowledge for the reader and is easy to reference when necessary. I have had a supervisor’s role in other occupations and managing adults is a difficult balancing act. Therefore, managing adults while you have to manage a room full of students has to be quite challenging. The article points out this fact with a reference of two experienced teachers acknowledging that supervising paraeducators was their