1. The Teacher
and the
Paraeducator
Role Perceptions and
Communication Between
the Elementary Team

2. Paraeducator:
 Para- “by the side of”
A paraeducator is any individual who works
by the side of an educator. This could mean
a teacher assistant, a volunteer, or a
member of support services.

3.  With class size
beginning to
rise again and
pressure to
achieve
increasingly
higher results,
teachers need
help!

4. So your school
has supplied
you with a
paraeducator
…What now??

5. Although teachers are trained to
manage the behavior of their students,
and create instructional plans, few
teacher education programs offer
preparation for supervising other adults
(Carnahan, Williamson, Clarke, &
Sorensen, 2009).

6. Teachers say:
 They are unsure what roles a paraeducator
can fill
 There is no time to communicate plans with
the paraeducator
 Paraeducators need more training to work
with students
 They need more training in managing the
paraeducators

7. Role Perceptions

8. What can a paraeducator
do?
• Tutoring individual students
• Reinforcing lessons with small groups
• Preparing materials
• Assessing and scoring assessments
• Record keeping
• Collecting behavior data
• Implementing behavior plans

9. What the rest of the world
thinks they do…

10. Because the role of a
paraeducator is different from
school to school and district to
district, it is important that
ADMINISTRATION clearly inform
both teachers and
paraeducators of the
distinctions of their roles
according to policy.

11. The researcher…
is seeking to
determine
what roles her
school feels are
acceptable for
paraeducators
to fill.

12. No matter what duties are
assigned to paraeducators,
it is the teacher who has the
ultimate responsibility
(Pickett, Vasa, &
Steckelberg,1993).

13. A good activity to
use in role
clarification is listing
But doesn’t
activities that take that require
time to
place in the class communicate
and discussing which ???
ones are the
responsibility of the
teacher and those
that could be done
by the
paraeducator.

14. Communication