Welcome to student teaching

I am in a really new place, having started my student teaching officially this week at another high school. Not so different in some ways, it is another suburban school. In other ways it's a different world.

There are two big differences I'm starting with. Today I learned that every Wednesday they have a homeroom-type schedule, called Advisory. All the kids go to a homeroom and watch a weekly, student produced video. I was pretty impressed. Then, for this month, we worked through a powerpoint to practice MCA questions. The group I was with were sophomores, so they were doing reading. They got all the questions easily. This was the first mention of MCA's, now four weeks away, that I have seen at this school so far.

The second new paradigm was a meeting I attended yesterday. It is called SWIM, an acronym for Special Education Weekly Information Meeting. Seems simple, right? But really, the idea of 3 social workers, the school psychologist, and a rotating crew of special ed staff meeting weekly was earth shaking. They had an agenda, 5 kids, 15 minutes each. This meeting took place during the last hour of the day. My room has prep, but I was told that people who are teaching get someone to cover for them in order to attend. Mostly it amounted to a "who needs to do what" on due process stuff but there also was a concern, and a group check on the level of "Are we doing well for this child at this time?"