MCCS Standard 1: The teacher understands how learners grow and develop, recognizing that patterns of learning and development vary individually within across the cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional, and physical areas, and designs and implements developmentally appropriate and challenging learning experiences.

CEC Standard 1: Beginning special education professionals understand how exceptionalities may interact with development and learning and use this knowledge to provide meaningful and challenging learning experiences for individuals with exceptionalities.

The artifact I chose for standard 1 and standard 1 was my character analysis assignment. For this assignment we had to observe someone from a TV show or movie who has autism and take notes on how they acted and what were specific actions, sayings, or obsessions they had in the movie and TV show. We basically had to explain what they were doing and how that related to them having autism. I think it connects to MCC standard 1 because we have to understand how learners ‘grow and develop, recognizing that patterns of learning and development vary individually’ and students with autism aren’t all going to act the same. They all have different sayings, interests, struggles, strengths, etc. and recognizing those are going to help me when I am a teacher and allowing me to differentiate to keep students motivated and engaged. I think it connects to CEC standard 1 because the standard says ‘understand how exceptionalities may interact with development …. uses this knowledge to provide meaningful and challenging learning experiences.’ Understanding how students act in social situations, how they move between different tasks is helpful to know when creating lesson plans.

This will help me when I am a teacher because identifying repetitive patterns that the student does – sayings, movements, interests – will help me when trying to create meaningful units and assignments for students. I can use my background knowledge of what the patterns can look like and what to look out for and how to use them to keep students motivated and engaged when learning. It will help me be a metacognitive teacher by allowing me to use the data I see in class and try to understand their own thought processes to aid their learning. Differentiation is important and for students with disabilities finding ways to alter assignments to their strengths and interests yet having them reach their goals is really important. This assignment is the beginning step of doing that.