When Jordan Raymond was pondering ways to meet her high school’s service requirement, her mother, a special education teacher in the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District, suggested that Raymond could volunteer at her school. The experience proved pivotal.
“I absolutely loved it,” says Raymond, who will graduate from SOE on Sunday, May 12, 2019 with her MA in Educational Studies, just a year after earning her BA in Liberal Studies from LMU with a dual credential in Elementary Education and Special Education. “I worked one-on-one with students who needed extra support, and I realized this was something I was good at, and wanted to pursue.”
Through SOE’s Center for Undergraduate Teacher Preparation, Raymond took courses that demystified what it meant to be a special education teacher and gave her the tools she would need to succeed. As a junior, Raymond spent her spring break in Ireland on a trip led by SOE professor Victoria Graf to learn more about the special education system there. Through a course taught by Diana Limon, an SOE lecturer, she learned how to write an Individualized Education Program, a critical document designed to meet a child’s individual learning needs.
The clincher for Raymond was her semester student teaching. As a resource teacher for pre-K, kindergarten and first-grade students with moderate-to-severe disabilities, she formed a close bond with one student in particular. “At first she was upset that this new person had been assigned to her,” Raymond says. “But over time she started smiling whenever she saw me, and wanted to learn to say and write my name.”
Raymond was so anxious to get started with her teaching career that she went through SOE’s master’s program at an accelerated pace, finishing in just one year while serving as president of LMU’s Chi Lambda Chapter of Kappa Delta Pi, an international honor society in education. “It’s been such a great experience to learn in the classroom as an SOE student and then put that into practice and see the progress of my students,” she says. In the future Raymond hopes to pursue her doctorate, but for now she looks forward to her next chapter, as a full-time special education teacher.
