7A Corey Creamer-- Response to Kelly Semple; New Transitions

Kelly,

I really enjoyed reading your paper on New Transitions. I think it is very important as educators we not only teach the children in our classroom’s but focus on teaching them skills that will translate and be successful after the classroom learning is over. I enjoyed learning about the three transitional ideas considered to be extremely important…….

1.      Coordinated Set of activities

2.      Outcome-oriented process

3.      The student’s preferences and interests

I found it interesting in your resource that Ohio has exceeded the requirements of the Federal government on the issue of transition and is requiring more detailed programs that will better provide the transition support and skills needed by our special education students. Are other states exceeding the transition requirements set forth by the Federal government? A quality idea you provided is the use of “self-checking” by the student, which means he/she will check their own behavior/attitude in specific situations in and out of the classroom environment. Would you regard “self-checking” and effective strategy?

I found the section of your paper discussing developing “21^st” century skills very innovative. Special education students must develop what are known as the four C’s to be successful from transitioning from high school to post secondary education and the workforce.  Besides these four C’s, is there any other terms that you would coin important for better preparing our special education students for transition?

1. Commute

2. Collaborate

3. Critical Thinking

4. Creativity

I was unaware of the monumental tasks that are faced by many area transitional coordinators.  What suggestions do you have for limiting the workload of these coordinators? Although the state of Ohio currently requires transitions be implemented from age 14 and on…. Do you think that teachers should begin implementing post secondary transitions before the age of 14? Could an extra year or so of transition make a big difference in preparing the children for life after high school?

Outside of a few spelling/grammar/alignment issues your paper was very interesting and very research oriented. I like that you were very thorough with your sources, and had plenty of recent resources to back up the research that was provided. I thought your discussion questions were also answered very thoroughly in your paper as well. Stellar work!