(Following is a cross-post from our sister blog, The Demanding Classroom. If you haven’t already done so, please take a look. There are several other posts of mine there on paraeducators, plus a wide variety of articles by Sara, on maintaining rigor across the curricula in a special education classroom.)
By Richard Finegan
You may call me a paraeducator, a paraprofessional, a one-on-one aide, a classroom assistant, a special education technician, even a teacher’s aide (though I am there for the student, not the teacher) but please don’t call me a shadow or describe what I do as shadowing.
The term shadow suggests that the aide never leaves the side of the child. That describes a bodyguard, not a paraeducator. I would not be doing my job if I hovered as close to my student as Malia Obama’s Secret Service agent.
True, I am what used to be called (and I still call) a one-on-one aide, and I do move from classroom to classroom with the same child. But my job is to help that student become more independent, more self-regulated and self-sufficient. I’ve never heard anyone explain how this can happen if I am constantly elbow-to-elbow with my kid.
A better analogy to what we do might be a sheepdog: Constantly alert and watching his or her charges but only moving in and out again as circumstances require. Yes, this analogy works better; shepherding is an improvement over shadowing. Even so, I don’t think I’m quite ready to be called a sheepdog either. Smile.
This is more than just a semantic issue. When others refer to me as a shadow or to what I do as shadowing, they consciously or unconsciously suggest that I should be sticking like glue to my student and that I am perhaps not doing my job properly if I am halfway across the classroom taking notes or, more often, walking around interacting with other students.
Worse even is what it suggests to new paraeducators trying to learn to do what we do. What they should be hearing is: Get up. Step back. Give your student some room to grow!
I am a Special Education Tech in a large Southern California school district where I have worked for several years, usually assigned in general education classrooms working one-on-one with students on the autism spectrum. My assignments have included one elementary, two middle, and two high schools and even the school to which they remove students for zero-tolerance violations.
Tip: I rarely sit next to “my” student. Though I may be in a particular class only because Brandon, or Susie, or Juan is there, I do not want the other kids to know that unless it seems necessary that they know that. I watch my student from a distance, take notes, move in with advice or assistance and move back out again. Meanwhile, I’m helping other students all around the classroom. No student in the classes where I am assigned feels any stigma because I step over and talk to or assist them. Most of them couldn’t tell you why I’m there.
I worked with a sixth grader who was fascinated by Alfred Hitchcock (they often have intense interests) and wrote an essay about the filmmaker discussing several of his movies. An eighth-grade student on the spectrum was a math whiz who read ahead in his algebra book for fun (and also composed on the piano). A ninth-grader who rarely spoke required almost no help in completing earth science worksheets, finding answers from the textbook.
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One related tip: Many kids with autism will NOT choose a partner or a group they are not assigned to. When asked to form groups of a particular size, or to choose a partner, they will stand up and wander around aimlessly until an adult asks if they have a partner or have joined a group and then assign them to it.