- Hey, y'all, it's Ayo here with some tips and strategies to help you survive and thrive in SPED. And today we're talking about student confidentiality. (upbeat music) So picture this, it's your conference period and you have 30 minutes to run to the copying machine, get some copies for your next class, grab something for lunch and use the bathroom. So you grab up all your stuff and you run down to the lounge.
You get there and you see someone is making 500 copies during lunch break, but you have to get these done. So you grab something out of the vending machine you hop on the copier and you see a friend you haven't seen for a while. And they're all like, "Hey." And you're like, "Hey."
And they ask you, "How have things been going with that special student of yours?" And you're like, "No, things are so much better. He's not hitting you or any of the students nearly as much as he used to." And they're all like, "Yay."
And you're all like, "Yay." But then you realize that somebody else is cheering for this in the room. There's a sub in the lounge who happens to have the fastest Twitter thumbs in the West. And she's just heard all of this information, which really is about her neighbor's dog walker's sister's cousin.
And now she's taken it upon herself to hit social media about the student who's hurting others in the classroom. Student confidentiality is hard these days because everybody's got a computer in their pocket. They can record audio, video, take pictures, really, they can capture you at any moment. So it becomes critical that you remember some essential things about student confidentiality.
Number one is don't talk about students in public. You never know who's listening, ever. So keep the conversations to the decision makers in a private setting, which brings us to number two. Don't have conversations with students, with people who are not the decision makers.
It's okay to talk to your outside therapists or parents about a student, but we don't wanna have conversations with a random person in the teacher's lounge about a specific student. That brings us to number three, make sure that you're not talking about students in front of their peers. It becomes really inappropriate when you have conversations about a student in front of their peers, because that student gets judged on the things that you've said. So if you need to have a conversation about a student, have it with the student in private.
And that brings us to number four. Please, if you're gonna have a conversation about a student and the student is present, acknowledge their presence, don't ever talk about a student like they're not there. It's just not kind. So remember, we wanna presume competence.
We wanna act with respect and we always wanna have a sense of decency. That's how we do it. That's how we maintain student confidentiality in an appropriate way. So there you have it.
Some tips and tricks on maintaining student confidentiality. This is Ayo reminding you to stay strong and teach on. (upbeat music)
