Teacher fosters independence and confidence in the classroom and beyond.
With the school year in full swing, teachers across the country are hard at work nurturing the talents and dreams of young people. Theirs is an inspiring and rewarding profession. Just ask Tesia Nasehi, who teaches social studies at the Colorado School for the Blind.
"There are just so many things about my students that inspire me," Nasehi says. "They are always impressing me and surprising me, and they have so many high hopes for where their lives will go."
Her classes are not segmented by grade, but by academic performance level. In a single class, some students are blind and use braille, while others have low vision and are still visual learners. Some students have multiple disabilities that require additional, special accommodations.
That's presented some challenges for Nasehi, who had never worked with a group of students with such diverse needs until she started teaching last year.
With support from her fellow teachers, her own ingenuity, and invaluable insights from her college textbooks and online resources from AFB, Nasehi has quickly developed smart strategies for addressing the unique needs of her students.
"I try to have a lot of independent projects, so students are always doing something and not just listening to me lecturing," she says. "When students have something in front of them that they're working on, with goals in mind, it allows me to split my time and go from student to student and work with them as needed, or split them into smaller groups or even incorporate some peer-to-peer instruction."
Making sure teachers like Nasehi and her students have the resources and support that they need is a key component of the Alice Cogswell and Anne Sullivan Macy Act, a bill that AFB has championed.
Nasehi's creativity makes her classroom a fun place, and she particularly enjoys taking students on eld trips. She says field trips provide an opportunity to use social skills that students don't necessarily get a chance to exercise in the safe environment of their school.
"I love seeing the way they advocate for themselves in public, the way they use the skills they learn at school," she says. "It's awesome to see the safety net pulled out from underneath them and see them thriving — to see how happy they are when they see themselves succeed."
