Unique Learning System - A Teachers Perspective

I am a K-2 Full Time Autistic Support Teacher at a cyber charter school in Pennsylvania. We use Unique Learning System for our replacement curriculum for our learners, to track and analyze student data and create/plan for new goals, provide valuable information regarding student skill levels, needs, and strengths for our IEPs, and for our local assessments through utilizing their benchmark assessments. I utilize Unique Learning System every day in my whole group, small group, and individual sessions with learners. I utilize it on a weekly basis to monitor and analyze data and on a monthly basis with my supervisor to track my progress towards my SPMs.

Instead of worrying about what I am teaching every month, or even HOW to teach it, I instead get to spend my time creating engaging materials and hands on activities that are individualized to the needs of my learners. I feel confident in what I am teaching and know that the content I am giving to my learners is standards aligned. Additionally, having everything in one spot has transformed my organizational skills and has pushed me to be more efficient and on top of my paperwork. Because I can so easily track data and have a visual graph that shows me how my specific learner is doing, I am able to tell much more quickly if an intervention is needed, if more benchmarking needs to be done, and if a goal needs revised.

One of my favorite teaching moments came during an initial benchmark assessment of a learner. This learner was a kindergarten student, brand new to CCA and myself. His caretaker let me know before beginning the assessment session that he was nonspeaking and likely was not going to engage with me. I decided to give him a few of the more simple benchmarks, starting with Listening Comprehension 1. He did not want anything to do with the assessment and would just click all three options. I pivoted, easily thanks to how things are structured in Unique Learning System, to a vocab assessment that targeted sorting. The first had a matching component, and he FLEW through it. I realized that he had really great visual discrimination skills and seemed to enjoy using those skills and gave him the math assessment that targeted one to one correspondence and the color assessment, which he did great with. I then made an assumption that because he has strong visual discrimination, he might have great pattern recognition skills as well, and he did! At the end of the assessment, I was really excited with the data I was able to collect and the student was relaxed and engaged still. I looked at his parent, and she was crying. I asked if she was alright and she just looked at me and told me that so many people have told her that her son has no skills and that it was incredible to watch him prove them all wrong.