The Special Education Professional About two-thirds of the way through a particular kind of movie, there's a scene you can almost always count on. It's the scene where the whole movie comes to a head: Only the hero can save the situation, but because of some flaw in his character or some tragedy in his past, he is paralyzed, unable to act. At that point, one of the other characters grabs him by the shirt front and screams like, Brent! You've got to do something! My God, man, you're a (teacher, doctor, lawyer, priest)! The scene has become a cinematic cliche. But it gets our attention because it appeals to all of us understand very well: There are certain kinds of people from whom we expect certain kinds of behavior. We all them professionals, and by that we usually mean someone who is in a vocation requiring advanced education and training in some department of human learning or science, and who has undertaken to represent that knowledge and those skills to That, at least, is what's in the back of our minds, but I think there is to it than that. The something more has to do with two things: the professional's standards, and what the professional stands for. Standards. Whether they are bound by the Hippocratic Oath of the physician or defined by the West point code of Duty, Honor, Country, we see some callings as set apart. Professionals, we say are governed by a kind of law--not just the everyday rules and mores that shape normal human interaction, but a stringent ethic that transcends the mundane and demands that they hold themselves to rigorous standards. Within the domains they have chosen, such as health, law, or education, their work is not defined simply by the tasks and operations they perform. At some basic level, their work is also tied to our well-being. And because the circumstances of our lives sometimes require us to put ourselves in their hands, and to accord them a level of trust higher than the trust we give to others, professionals respond to that trust by holding themseles to an even higher standard. Stands For. The second part of what a professional is goes to a part of the dictionary definition of profession that is often overlooked. A professional is someone who professes something, that is, someone who makes an avowal before The professional essentially avows a way of life that might be summarized as like this: Who I am as a human being is intrinsically connected to what I do for my work. I don't just have certain skills and knowledge, I am those skills for In representign myself as a professional, I live out a promise: that I will exercise my skills to the fullest extent of my ability, be true to their highest meaning, and use them only for the good of others. I believe special educators should strive to be professionals in the truest sense of these two meanings of the word. Because our work is a matter of the utmost trust on the part of others, we should hold ourselves accountable to the highest possible standards. Special educators also stand for something--the use of their professional expertise to meet the full range of instructional and other needs of exceptional children and their families. The professional standards to which we special educators hold ourselves are derived from our commitment to the intrinsic dignity of human beings. That means we hold up to our children a mirror of their own humanity, where they can see themselves as fundamentally whole, and not broken. Our sense of our own integrity demands that we treat each child as having that same integrity, worthy of the uniqueness in curricula and instruction that their singularity demands. …