Special – The Big Words Blog Site

Two of the focuses of my blog are Career Discussions and General Education. In important part of the education sector is Special Education. There will always be a need for Special Education teachers and their valuable skills. The following contributed post is entitled, How To Gain A Career In Special Education Teaching.

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Special education teachers play an essential role in the education system. They help and support children with a wide variety of different mental and physical needs to ensure that they get the maximum benefit from their education.

Special education teachers support children with differing needs including dyslexia, hearing and visual impairments, autism, and emotional disturbance. It can be a very challenging role, however, if you are interested in this career, it can also be very rewarding in many respects.

This type of teacher can often be found in the classroom supporting children on a one-to-one basis, however, they may sometimes teach whole classes.

In this article, we’ll discuss the role of a special education teacher and how you can get a career in this area.

What Skills Are Required

First and foremost, when looking for a career as a special educator you will need to demonstrate excellent communication skills. This is so that educators are able to interact effectively with students, parents, and other educators. Being able to communicate with students with very specific needs is essential. That means that they must be patient listeners who are able to get the message across as required.

In addition to communication skills, you will also need good IT skills and the ability to keep accurate records of each and every student’s progress. Technology will also come into play when it comes to helping students access the technology required within their education as well as any study support aids that they may need.

You will need to have a good understanding of the specific special needs of the students that you are teaching. Knowing specifically how to communicate in a positive way can be learned, but having the patience to deliver education in this way takes the right personal skills.

For teachers working with hearing impaired, they will need to know how to communicate using sign language.

Above all else, special education teachers need to have a positive and encouraging demeanor. They need to be creative thinkers with flexibility and the ability to motivate and inspire all of their students while helping build confidence and encourage learning. They also need to be resilient. There may be times when teaching special needs students can be challenging.

What Training Will Be Required

The type of qualifications will vary depending on where you are applying to become a special education teacher. In the United States, special educators are required to hold a license in addition to their qualifications.

You will need to at least have a bachelor’s level degree in special education in order to be considered for licensing. You may need a master’s degree in some areas.

In addition to a degree, you may need a qualification such as Dyslexia Professional Development and Dyslexia Training or other specific additional courses relating to a certain aspect of special needs education. This might be additional training delivering education to visually impaired students, or managing and teaching students with behavioral issues.

Because there are always developments in this field, training is often ongoing and you may be encouraged to keep engaging in your personal and professional development throughout your career. This may mean regular training days, or it could mean taking a part-time course alongside your work.

What Are The Alternative Career Options?

If the classroom setting is not for you, there are other options for helping others while making use of the skills and qualifications that you might have gained for working in the special education sector.

Because the special educator role can be very mentally and physically demanding, it is not uncommon for people to change lanes in their careers as they progress so that they can continue putting their hard-earned skills to good use in a different setting.

The types of jobs that are available with this skillset might include management level roles in special educational needs schools, recreational therapists, or occupational therapist.

A recreational therapist will have obtained a degree in recreational therapy or something very similar. This type of therapist will work with people who have cognitive, emotional, and physical disabilities. As part of their job roles, they will assess those that they work with and create and implement training plans and programs. They may use activities such as art, music, sport, and theater in beneficial and therapeutic ways.

An occupational therapist will have obtained a master’s level qualification in a related subject. Occupational therapists will treat those who are disabled or injured through the use of various different types of therapy.

Three of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. Not all businesses are the same and thus not all rules apply across the board. If you’re running a special type of business, you have considerations that other entrepreneurs don’t. The following contributed post is thus entitled, Helming A Business Involved In Sensitive Specialisms.

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There are some types of business advice that could be considered universal, from top to bottom. This is usually the type of advice focused on those that sell products and services of some kind. For example, the fundamental tenets of opening a restaurant are likely considered similar, no matter what cuisine is on sale. Of course, sometimes there will be outliers, such as how to organize a successful line of food trucks, or considering just how wacky a three michelin star restaurant can afford to be.

But there are some businesses that might not be that open to the fundamental business advice required. For example, research and development initiatives, innovative incubators and a range of other investment-led propositions. Helming a business involved in sensitive specialisms can be truly difficult, and no matter your level of technical expertise could be considered overwhelming. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. While keen business sense is a universal principle, sometimes excellence is required as a fundamental standard.

This is fine, because if you’re hoping to begin or maintain an operation like this, you are likely excellent already.

Consider:

Recruitment

When stocking any form of business with good staff, you need to understand your requirements to the T. Odds are that if you’re running your own business, you have a technical level of proficiency in this area already. However, that isn’t always guaranteed, and in fact can sometimes lead a once-innovative business to ruin if not handled well. This means that if you do not have the level of specialist expertise, you must craft a board of individuals that include some who are. These will act as your technical advisors, helping you make the best decisions from the offset, especially where matters of working policy come in. They might advise you the delivery times expected as you manufacture new products, help you optimize and make your manufacturing line more efficient, among a range of other positive helpers that can truly make all the difference.

Recruitment hardly stops here. You also need to stock your company with high-intelligence, accredited professionals. But you must also reach out to those places that could potentially help you continue to bring in the intelligence your company needs for success. A brain drain can cripple a company involved in high-spec ambitions. Recruit at science universities or even begin a sponsorship program to allow high-achieving students with their scholarships. Develop youth training links as far as you can to potentially help build brand loyalty in your employees of tomorrow. This is how you can ensure the average skillset of your staff stays high, but you can also benefit from new, fresh ideas, develop comfortable and confident understandings surrounding

Your Vision

Your vision is important to get right. If you fail to do this, you’ll unfortunately fall behind. A business that is aimless is one that tries everything, but never the right thing. A business without targeted goals and deadlines for those goals has no measure of success. Simply ‘breaking even’ might be all you need to survive, but is that success? Unless you’re running a non-profit, most business leaders wouldn’t. To innovate you need to reinvest, to stay on the cutting edge, and have the versatility to experiment with new ideas. Without this added flexibility, it can be very easy to fall to the wayside.

Refining a vision is important. Changing it over time is possible of course, so don’t feel you’re limited to one direction. But you need to know why you’re here, and why your specialist product matters. How can you help explain it in an accessible manner to those who might not understand? What countries do you hope to sell in? Is this a specialist item for the use of knowledged professionals or is it going to be part of the consumer market?

What pedigree do you want to set for yourself? Will you have the longest-lasting item, the item with the most versatility, or perhaps the most refined and complex of all the products in that industry? What problems with your current industry and the products within it do you wish to solve and overcome given the time?

Feedback & Creativity

It’s important to blossom creativity as much as you can within your business. Part of doing so will help you continually understand what current expectations are, and how you might improve upon them. Never use customer expectations and understandings as a means to base your current method of innovation from. Always look to improve upon it, because you are the ones who should be presenting the new standard.

However, with this kind of interfacing with professionals in your field, with the customers you hope to sell to and perhaps with consultants from many different highly-refined specialisms, you will be able to better gauge the patterns of the industry. But it is always important to keep that window open. This is because even in innovation, you need to understand the purpose of why you’re innovating. Any competent firm with the ability to can get lost in its own hubris, developing and refining products that might not have much practical use in the industry. That is what your sideline experimental products are for, but there must always be a balance between feedback and creativity, from top to bottom.

Directed Aims

As we explained before, directed aims are important. But how do they manifest in your product or service development? Well, of course the aims are to provide a product or service that is capable and competitive with others on the market. But what format might this process take? Do you hope to have the most energy efficient production capacity compared to anyone in the industry? Do you pride yourself on your vetted supplies, on the in-house ingredients generated for each development? How about helping initiatives flourish such as those trying to mitigate the damage your industry is known for?

There’s always something positive to try and achieve, and while this is always worthwhile for its own sake, it doesn’t hurt your PR to engage in this either.

Equipment & Expectations

It’s important to ensure that you measure your equipment correctly. Your staff need to have cutting edge gear, especially in your R&D lab. A temperature and climate-controlled area with excellent sanitizing procedures before and after, extremely worthwhile health and safety equipment, important alarms to sounds if an issue occurs, protective and regularly maintained apparel, stocking yourself with an excellent chip kit collection, and ensuring your storage capacities are all extremely well-maintained is essential to helping your lab staff simply start with the fundamentals. Equipment changes depending on the type of research and experimentation is being conducted is essential. Finding the space necessary for this, sometimes in warehouse units, sometimes in office buildings or even underground could be incredibly important. This leads us onto our next point:

Security

When you’re involved in a highly innovative and specialized field, competition is stiff. Half a document of findings could be the smoking gun that allows another firm to try and innovate on your products before your patent is accepted, and could prevent you from taking the competitive edge you would have done. Security needs to be tight, because corporate espionage can be a real, definitive problem in these industries. Vet employees through and through before giving them any sort of clearance, and be sure to tailor your security access in layers, allowing only the most trusted and proven to reach the higher echelons.

Gate document access, secure and encrypt your internet traffic, and ensure devices are restricted from certain areas. Have your staff sign non-disclosure agreements and be sure to keep a competent legal team by your side to execute any lawsuits you have correctly. Lock your building well, and ensure that full security systems are installed. When a single piece of research could potentially gain you or lose you millions of dollars, you need to construct your business correctly from the beginning, to avoid any and all suspicious behavior from reaching its end-point.

Constant Market Research

While it’s essential to conduct your own research and to try to shape the trends of the industry, you must also research the industry through and through. This can be well achieved if you know what you’re doing. Not only must you research customer opinion as we have explained prior in this article, but you must try to understand every move your competition makes. For example, if a rival phone manufacturer releases a model that seems innovative, purchase some in bulk and deconstruct them. Try to get to the heart of the OS, or the design philosophy, or how it was marketed despite the apparent flaws. Learn from those around you, because they’ll almost certainly be learning from you. It’s in this way that you can stay on top of any and every element of the industry that might have otherwise evaded your understanding.

With these tidbits of advice, helming a business involved in sensitive specialisms is sure to be worthwhile.