This may be a little off topic, but seriously, does anyone know what sped. college programs are teaching lately? I teach in CT; we have an opening for a half-time sped. teacher. Earlier this summer we were going through the interview process, myself and the other sped. teacher, our principal, and sped. director. All of the applicants, both newly graduated and those with experience, had trouble answering some of the most basic questions! Almost none of them had experience in giving the Woodcock-Johnson, for various reasons. Some had heard of it but never used it, some had given it in a college course, some were professionals in the field but had no experience in giving it, and couldn’t explain it to us!! Another one of our questions was how to diagnose LD ~ almost no one could answer this! We had several people come right out and say they didn’t know, they hadn’t learned that in their college courses!! About a week later I participated in the interviews for a 5th grade teaching position we have open, and those applicants, experienced and new graduates, all knew more about how to modify lessons then our sped. applicants did! I would love to hear from any sped. professors out there on what your programs are like! By the way, the half-time opening is still available for anyone interested in eastern CT :)
Welp, I got my sped degree in 1986… and I think we did get at least a cursory introduction to tests like the Woodcock-Johnson… I’m not sure there wasn’t a course in it that I didn’t take (since hey, I was interested in the teaching part, not the testing which seemed administrative. What did I know?)
I had some good courses in teaching strategies and classroom management, though the reading courses were overviews of assorted methods and definitely nothing in the “how to teach reading to kids who can’t.” There was a very good “secondary reading strategies” course by a community college teacher, though it was all comprehension strategies (based on the utterly groundless assumption taht ‘they can decode, they just need structure for comprehending’ that’s only true for some of them).
My course of study was a little weird, though - it was hatched by a coupla guys who started a school. So, I applied for the teaching job, which came with housing, a stipend, and tuition for the graduate school program. They weren’t too organized and we had to switch colleges in midstream (from Johns HOpkins to Loyola in Baltimore), but you really do learn a lot more from courses taught by the people you work with, so it all ties in just a little better to the real act of teaching :-)
Unfortunately, in my field experience in public schools, there really are people who went into education because other subjects were too rigorous; and then even those regular ed courses were too hard so they went into special ed. And those of us who have an idea how it *should* and *can* be done… well, generally schools aren’t set up for it to be possible, so we find other situations where we can actually *do* what we were trained to do.