Looking for support

An elementary special education teacher talks about finding support in challenging situations.

By Kathleen Casson

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Kira Martin has had more different experiences in her six years of teaching than some people have in a whole career. She taught Language Arts for the Peace Corps in Granada for two years. On returning to the United States, she taught “cross-categorical special education” in first through third grades both as a resource teacher and in a self-contained classroom. The following year she taught sixth-grade students with learning disabilities, then math and social studies to academically gifted sixth graders. After taking a year off to get her master’s degree, she moved to “a straight fourth grade classroom,” and finally to fourth grade AIG Academically and Intellectually Gifted math.”

Not all of these situations have been ideal, but in every school she was able to build a support network that helped her to grow professionally and personally.

Finding professional support in challenging circumstances

Martin now teaches at a school with a very supportive administration, but her first experience in the U.S. after returning from the Peace Corps was in a very different kind of school. “I had a principal who I did not see eye-to-eye with. I just didn’t feel like she was a sincere person. So I didn’t feel supported by her…in fact, she never even came into my room for the first six months I was in that school.”

Although her principal was not supportive, she did find support in other places. When some of her students’ challenging lives caused them to challenge her in the classroom, Martin went to other teachers at her school for support. ” We had a couple of other self-contained special education classes in the school and I kind of went to those teachers for help. ‘All right, this is what the situation is, how do I deal with it?’ They were really supportive and very helpful.” When she felt lost with the curriculum, she turned to a teacher at the high school. “One other woman had the same job I did, so she and I a lot of times exchanged ideas…she was doing the upper grade kids in another school and I was doing the lower grades. So we could share stuff…She was really, really helpful, as far as getting organized.”

Personal support

The stress of such a challenging teaching position meant that Martin, like many new teachers, needed personal support as well as classroom support. “I was totally flailing. And I was spending a good twelve–thirteen hours a day on my job because I was differentiating for every child and…I had no idea what I was doing and I had no materials, being a first year teacher, so I spent a ton of money. I was giving plasma because I had no money. It was my first year back in the States. I was still trying to re-adjust to the culture, because I had just gotten back a month before I started teaching.” She found some support from a group of Peace Corps volunteers who were teaching in her area, but she found more support from friends. “It was a really tough year. I had made some friends out there and…that really helped me through it, as far as being able to talk things out and be able to deal with things.”

Working with another teacher

When she came to work at a middle school in Durham, Martin had a very different kind of job. “Since I was an inclusion teacher, I really had to take the lead of what the team wanted. I had an assistant, but we worked it out so that that assistant would work as a support to the math teacher and I would work as a support to the Language Arts teacher.”

Working in a team gave Martin new opportunities to find and give support. The Language Arts teacher was initially nervous about having to include children with disabilities in his classroom, not to mention about having another teacher in the room. But in the end, they were very supportive of one another, despite the fact that they had very different teaching styles. “We got along really well — he’s just a really great guy. His methods were a little bit different than mine and I was okay telling him that and he was okay hearing it. There were just things that I would have never done that he did. That was just how it was. It was good because we balanced each other out a lot of times in the classroom. I think it was good for the kids to see…and hear different perspectives.”

Finding a supportive principal

The following year, Martin again did not feel supported by her principal. When she interviewed for teaching jobs after completing her master’s degree, she decided to do some interviewing of her own. “I was not going to take a job where I didn’t feel like I was supported,” she says.

Her list of questions included general questions such as “What do you view as an effective school?” and “What do you feel the morale is in your school?” as well as specific ones such as “Can you give me an example of a situation where you were supportive of a staff member?” More than anything, Martin wanted a school mission she could buy into and a principal who was open to a variety of teaching methods. She wanted to make sure that “the school supported my beliefs and I could support the school’s beliefs.”

Forest View Elementary in Durham was the school she was looking for. “I feel like as a school, we’re very supportive of one another.” Because the school provides such a supportive atmosphere, only one teacher is leaving this year.

There is support wherever you are

The key to Martin’s success has been finding colleagues with teaching philosophies similar to her own. “The thing that’s the most helpful for me is to get with teachers who have a similar teaching style and just sit down and plan with them,” she says.” It’s completely worthless to talk about teaching to someone who doesn’t have a similar philosophy. Teaching is completely overwhelming. And the advice from some people I got last year was ‘Open up a text book and give them these pages and have them do these pages.’” — advice that “totally goes against my philosophy.” Martin tries instead to find teachers who “do things that I believe are good for kids, “learn what they do differently, and incorporate what she learns into her own teaching.

Despite her experiences with unsupportive administrators, Martin is clear that she could always find colleagues to support her. “There are always teachers that I would steer clear of, but there are always teachers that you can connect with. No matter what building you’re in, you’re going to find people that teach like you, that will support your style of teaching and what you believe in education.” Martin found them in school after school. Because of them, she has always been able to find ways of growing as a teacher.