D740: Student Teaching II in Special Education

D740 Student Teaching II in Special Education is the second and final student teaching course at Western Governors University. It gives you a supervised placement, a final evaluation and a set of required synchronous sessions on professional development.

Where Student Teaching I asks you to demonstrate, this course asks you to implement and to look ahead. You are expected to teach with increasing independence, work well with colleagues and turn your experience into a plan for your first years as a professional.

The Professional Growth Strand

The session themes, professional growth opportunities, ethical decision making and self-care, are the most distinctive part of this course. They line up with three of the five competencies.

The other two competencies cover instruction and assessment, and knowledge of learning and developmental patterns, and these are tested mainly in the classroom.

Ethical Decisions in Special Education

Special education brings regular ethical questions: confidentiality of records, honest communication with families, fair treatment of learners with very different needs. Evaluators prefer concrete cases to slogans.

A Growth Plan with a Timeline

Your plan should look beyond the course. Think about your first year of teaching: which skills do you want to deepen, who will support you and how will you check progress? One goal in instruction, one in collaboration and one in wellbeing makes a balanced plan.

Typical Work and Approaches

Using Data in a Special Education Placement

Data keeps reflection honest. In a special education setting it can be simple: how many prompts a learner needed, how long a task took, how many correct responses out of five. Whatever you collect should be permitted by your placement and recorded without identifying the learner in your written work.

Choose one or two measures that connect to a lesson objective and track them across several sessions. A short table of dates and results, with a sentence on what changed in your teaching in between, is stronger evidence than a long narrative.

A Sensible Rhythm for the Placement

WGU does not publish a week-by-week calendar, so agree one with your mentor. A common sense rhythm is to start by observing and co-teaching, move to leading single lessons, then plan and teach whole sequences.

Reflection notes run through every stage, and the development plan is drafted well before the final evaluation so that you can refine it with your mentor's input.

Keep your session dates and your evaluation date at the top of your calendar, and write backwards from them. Two weeks of slack before any deadline is cheap insurance.

Where Students Get Stuck

• Treating self-care as filler. It is a named session topic, so give it a thoughtful, realistic answer.
• Abstract ethics. Use a real, anonymized case.
• Overlong plans. Three well-chosen goals beat ten vague ones.
• Burnout near the end. Protect rest and keep notes brief but regular.

Study Tips for D740

• Write the ethical case study early, while the details are fresh.
• Ask your mentor how they handled their own first year.
• Link every development goal to feedback you received.
• Keep one folder of evidence for each competency.

How We Help with D740

Send your prompt, rubric and any drafts. We provide model examples, editing feedback and explanations of the competencies. Our reflective essay help guide offers more on structure.

GradeEssays is independent of Western Governors University. We do not teach in your placement, attend your sessions or access your WGU account. Our work is study support within WGU's academic integrity rules, with free revisions and a full refund if late.