Monday, March 9, 2015

Amy Gregory's Thoughts on the EC-SEBRIS Certificate Program

My experience seven months into the EC-SEBRIS has continued to be positive, eye opening, and very rewarding. I have learned so much about myself through our reflective supervision class. This has helped me become not only a better teacher, but also a better person overall by being mindful of others in everything I do. I constantly catch myself thinking about how others might be feeling in any given moment, how my tone of voice and facial expressions are going to be taken into account when I speak to children, how can I best help serve the children in my care, and the list goes on and on. Also, throughout my reflective supervision class I have become more confident in advocating for children and families by not only having the necessary tools to do so, but also by having the support and guidance of my reflective supervision group. We have been able to remain in the same small reflective supervision groups we begin the school year with in August, which has made us a tight knit group of people. It is a special attribute this program is able to offer students in which I feel I now have a contact list of other professionals in the child development field to contact for support, questions, and guidance in my future, even after this program ends.

In our SPED 676 class, applied behavior analysis, we are learning how to conduct functional behavioral assessments. I have learned how to collect data on challenging behaviors that my students exhibit in order to find out the function causing the behavior. This has helped me begin to work on providing replacement behaviors in order to help my students challenging behavior decrease over time. In our CFD 671 class, positive behavior support and early interventions, we are learning about making behavior support plans. We will be taking the data collection from our functional behavior assessment in SPED 676 and using it to come up with a behavior support plan in CFD 671. The behavior support plan will include interventions that will directly address the problem behavior being worked on. I really like how the EC-SEBRIS is comprehensive in the sense that these two classes we are taking go hand in hand with each other. We are able to directly correlate and use the information learned in one class and apply that knowledge further into another class, which makes this program rather unique as well!

- Amy Gregory

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