Teaching Session: Supporting Numeracy for Students with Disabilities

Running head: TEACHING SESSION
TEACHING SESSION
Name of the student
Name of the university
Author note

TEACHING SESSION1
Introduction:
Teaching assistance is an important part of the classroom since who make a significant
difference in the classroom environment while working in collaboration with educator teacher.
As discussed by Foulkes and Wallis (2015), they are significant contributors to education since
they often offer assistance to the main educator by supporting the students with learning
disabilities such as autism, ADHD or other physical disabilities such as blindness and deafness.
There is a sizable workforce in Australia of teaching assistants and in every school average 10
teaching students are present (Azad et al. 2015). In 2017, 928000 teaching assistants were
employed in Australian schools which are predicted to increase up to 114700 by 2022 (Kang,
Rubin and Lindemann 2015). The employees who were recruited 25.8 % are full time worker
with an average week of 35.1 hours (Azad et al. 2015). The purpose of this essay is to provide
an overview of the experience after teaching supporting numeracy session to the pupils with
disabilities with the assistance of the principle of learning support and reflective theory. This
paper will discuss the benefit and limitation of teaching assistants, impact on learning; evaluate a
way in which the best support can be provided to the student with disabilities.
Discussion:
During my research on supporting numeracy session, I was appointed as the teaching
assistant in order to assist the main educator to provide support to students with disabilities such
as autism where the focus group is the 15 autistic student of 4 to 6 years. The teaching session
period was 1 month long where the location was an elementary school and every day 2 to 3 hours
of the session was undertaken. Other staffs who were involved in the teaching session to
provide support were educator teacher, other supporting staffs as a supporting team and

TEACHING SESSION2
sometimes parents of the students who only felt comfortable in the presence of their parents. I
was appointed to support the main educator for supporting numeracy session for the children
with numeracy which provided me an opportunity to evaluate my skills as a teaching assistant.
The supporting numeracy session is a teaching session where teachers use, interprets and
communicate mathematical information with the students with the intention of engaging them in
the learning process (Root et al. 2017). This session is effective in facilitating critical thinking,
problem-solving skills which students would apply in real life. This discussion will focus on the
benefit and limitation I have observed while providing support to the pupils with a disability.
Using Lesson Study: benefits and limitations:
While I was appointed as the teaching assistant to support my educator teacher to
provide 15 autistic students of 4 to 6years, I have observed a few difficulties the students have
which made them impaired to understand numerical. As discussed by Huisman-van Dijk et al.
(2017), the children with autism frequently have difficulties with the numeric words and
problem-solving issue. However, because of the unique nature of the disease, some students
present with no learning disabilities and some students may have a high level of disabilities. The
student I have encountered during 1 month of the teaching session, the majority of them had a
high level of learning difficulties such as learning issues in reading and problem solving which
involves mathematics.
The benefit of this lesson study is that a teaching assistant gain an opportunity to apply
the principle of learning support. As discussed by Butt (2016), learning support use principles
such as supporting teachers in identifying additional requirements of the students, facilitates
learning the procedure in order to improve learning, coordinates planning process with the
educators and develop the collaborative partnership. The benefit of this session is that a

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teaching assistant is able to identify the additional need to the students with the autism which
were not addressed by educator teacher since it is not possible for one educator to focus on every
child. A teaching assistant is able to provide additional support to autistic students with
cognitive difficulties (Radford et al. 2017). For example, few students had poor motor skills, in
that case, I understood that they had a problem with learning to write numerical and manipulates
into the paper. I supported educator teacher to provide extra care to these students such as
assisting them in writing in the paper and communicating with parents regarding these issues.
This learning session provided an opportunity to create a safe learning environment where
children would be interested to solve new numerical problems. Moreover, the benefit of learning
session was that teaching assistants were provided with the opportunity to take part in the
assessments of the children with disabilities by working collaboratively with parents and other
supporting staffs of the teaching session (Clarke and Abbott 2016). Majority of the students in
the teaching session required additional support of physician or parents. Therefore, during the
teaching session, I was able to assess the difficulties of students such as taking time to respond in
numerical problems, difficulty in reasoning. This opportunity helped me to work in collaboration
with the parents, providing education to the parents of the autistic children according to the
unique need of each child. Another benefit of this teaching session were that teachers and TA
both helped students to facilities their learning by taking literacy approach and allowing the
student to attempt the task independently and experience the healthy mixture of success and
challenge. However, this process had some limitations which hindered effective practice.
Considering the limitation of the teaching assistants, the first limitation is that teaching
assistant work in collaboration with teaching educator requires more time and energy because of
difference in knowledge, skills, and perspectives (Mulholland and O'Connor 2016). The lack of