Tag Archives: paraeducators

Paraeducator Central: Our New Blog

     All aboard!  We now host a new blog by, for, and about paraeducators:  Paraeducator Central.      We only slowly came to recognize the amount of interest there has been on posts about topics relating to those non-teacher personnel who serve our special needs kids, whether we call them special education assistants, paraprofessionals, classroom aides, educational [...]

Paraeducators need to speak for ourselves

By Richard Finegan. We contribute to this acceptance of us as professionals when we stop letting the conversation, both in the schools and on the web, be ABOUT us and start being WITH us. We need to speak for ourselves.

First…Then: A kindergartner with autism, Part II

By Richard Finegan Experiencing some success with the rule cards I devised for Jacob, and taking further advantage of his desire and willingness to read, I took another step this week. Jacob (not his real name) is a kindergartner with autism  who decodes well, better than most of his peers, but is easily distracted, especially by [...]

Writing rules for a kindergartner with autism

By Richard Finegan Just when I thought I knew what I was doing after years as a paraprofessional working one-on-one with children with autism, life teaches me a hard lesson:  it is a different world in kindergarten! I mean, kindergartners are barely socialized!  And I’m not talking about the ones with autism.  They have to [...]

Why I object to the term shadow

You may call me a paraeducator, a paraprofessional, a one-on-one aide, a special education technician, even a teacher’s aide…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.

FAQs about anaphoric cuing and reading comprehension

Q: What, briefly, is anaphoric cuing?
A: Anaphoric cuing involves teaching the child to identify the anaphora and to pause to relate them to their reference words while reading. In this way, the student begins to connect the parts of the text to one another.