In the Fall of 2012 I entered my first semester of Clinical Practice. The class that I was placed in was a special education class. The students had various disabilities, such as ADHD, learning disabilities, behavior disorders, and autism. In order to effectively teach lessons that catered to all of the students and their individual needs, I had to first know what their disabilities were and then I needed to know what strategies were best for them. As evidence for this standard, I am explaining my conceptualizing essay for a math lesson. This conceptualizing essay meets CEC Standard 4: Instructional Strategies, ACEI Standard 2.3: Mathematics and MEC Education Standard 5.7 Professionalism.

          CEC Standard 4 says "Special educators posses a repertoire of evidence-based instructional strategies to individualize instruction for individuals with ELN" and this was met by my explanations on why I modified certain aspects of my math lesson to fit each students' needs. I used evidence from the text I used in a previous special education class, Exceptional Learners: An Introduction to Special Education by Daniel P. Hallahan and James M. Kauffman, where they talk about individual disabilities and different strategies to use for each disability. I also spoke about theorists and their theories and why I used those methods to teach the students with disabilities.

          ACEI Standard 2.3 says "Evidence must reflect that you know, understand, and use the major concepts and procedures that define number and operations... that you consistently engage solving,  communication, connections and representation." In my conceptualizing essay, I explained why math is so important for children to learn. I explained that my lesson was based off of what they were previously learning so I connected my lesson to what they knew. My essay explains that there was accountable talk in the lesson so that the students were able to communicate to each other, as well as to myself.

          MEC Standard 5.7 says candidates should "design and apply various means of assessing students’ learning and knowledge." I explained the different kinds of assessments I used, formative and summative, and explained how each assessment helped me understand who was grasping the information and who wasn't.