Rachel Crosswhite

V-

Rachel is a general education math teacher with teaching responsibilities at both the middle and high schools.  She teaches one math class at the middle school each morning and then travels to the high school.  Rachel teaches a total of 65 students daily.  She has previous experience at grades 1 (one year) and grades 4 and 5.   She is the co-president of her local teacher union and has many responsibilities in contract negotiations at this time.

E –

Challenges and Problems of Practice

Rachel notes several challenges.

• Currently there are significant student behavioral issues; several teachers’ houses have been targeted for destructive crimes, but the school, and police still don’t know who is involved.
• Rachel is denied access to student IEP goals and data, as math instruction is seen as separate form literacy instruction. She indicates that the district blames that on whoever assigns access, but it is an issue every school year.  This creates instructional challenges and challenges in completing the Quadrant assignment for the course.   She does receive information on accommodations that need to be addressed in content classes “because they don’t get services in math.”
• Although there is a co-teacher in her class, that special educator sits in the back of the room for the entire class period. That same teacher has been assigned for the past three years. Rachel has no background training in co-teaching.  RT will send her co-teaching information and provide a short PD during our next session.
• For students in general education who appear to require further intervention, there is no process for referral since she indicates that “they don’t do universal screening.”

Course Progress:

Rachel has completed Module 1 and is the Knowledge section of Module 2.  She plans to move to Module 3 this week.

C –

Coaching expectations:

Rachel would like to focus on literacy instruction in math.  We will discuss the content and application as we move through each module.  Currently, the school assigned the Carnegie math program which has a heavy reading load.

Goal attainment:

Rachel will develop a draft goal that focuses on tier 3 math vocabulary development.  We also discussed tier 2 academic vocabulary development that she might incorporate into her goal.